Bill Maher, �When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden�
When I was taking classes and working for the magazine in England, I learned two inevitable truths. First, the English are a bunch of obnoxious fucks (but in a good way, like The Young Ones, not like the meatheads that shout �Whoo!� as a response for anything).
Second, if you started to get sick of these limey bastards, all you had to do was look up at the sky, peer into the distance and ask quizzically, �Is that a German bomber coming for us?� As long as they were older than 30 years-old, they would run like hell.
One of our field trips took us through The War Rooms, where Churchill and his henchmen cowered like pansies while the rest of London slept in the subways. What I liked about this particular tour was all the slides and posters of WWII propaganda; things that would show two cherubic smiling children in a large green field under a caption that read (and I�m not kidding here) �Your children are SAFER in the country. LEAVE THEM THERE!�
A slogan that is just as true today.
Some of these posters were fan-fucking-tastic in their cheesy presentation and blatant jingoism and fear mongering. Of course, these weren�t the ones they sold in the gift shop; otherwise my room would have a very different motif.
That�s the idea behind this book by Bill Maher. Maher was the host of Politically Incorrect for nine years until they canned his ass for saying something flippant after the two big towers went boom. Now he needs some money, and a book of essays about America dealing with terrorism, seemed like a good way to do it.
The essays are the point to this endeavor, but Maher knows that the average American who might actually be concerned over the (said ominously) �THREAT OF TERRORISM� can�t read. And so he updated the American propaganda posters from WWII, which are just as cheesy as the British�s, but don�t suggest dumping your kids off at the side of the hill, unfortunately.
In an essay about how diamonds, not oil, fuel more terroristic activity, he�s taken the old �We can do it!� girrrrrrl power picture and changed her to holding her hand away from somebody holding a diamond ring, and the caption now says �We can do without it.�
The best drawing by far shows a cop, a fireman, and a regular Army schmuck standing in front of adulating public. The words printed above the crowd reads, �We Say They�re Our Heroes� And at the bottom, it says, �But We Pay Them Like Chumps.�
Mahar is a smart guy and he�s pretty funny when he wants to be, but his best quality is his willingness to say something he knows people are going to flip out over. Hence, why he brings up his view that we should be conducting more in the way of racial profiling. He says it makes sense because the majority of people who hate America, and who conduct the most attacks, are Middle Eastern.
I say that�s a bunch of shit. 15 years ago, we were all freaking out about Latin American nefarious behavior. Before that, Cuba. Before that, Japan. The profiling of Arabic men that the country does right now follows the same old closing the barn door after the animals have already escaped, kicked your ass, and stole your liquor syndrome. They only remember the last cow that did the kicking, and we�ve forgotten every other animal.
And the fact that this guy is out of a job is probably why this fucking book costs so much.
