Heaven’s Gate
94 Not Quite Human
We returned to our normal broadcast schedule on Monday the twenty-fourth. Our schedules for guests had been completely turned upside down and we’d canceled and refunded audience tickets for two weeks. Reese had her casa hearthmates on the show to get through Monday morning. They talked about being normal and what a normal meal was for them at Casa de Audacia. It was good. It was lowkey. The recipes were great. I was going to bring all the kids from the bakery in on Tuesday for her to entertain for breakfast. Cassie had agreed to a school field trip.
Elaine chose to ignore direct reference to the Trade Center attack. Her monologue was about pimples. If you sat and thought about it long enough, you’d see that it wasn’t as irrelevant as it sounded.
What surprised me was that Lee asked me to come back and do the opening monologue on XX/XY. I spent most of the weekend in the library, thankful that a university library is open seven days a week. I didn’t know if I could do this.
ME: I want you all to know that the fact we are on the air doesn’t mean we’ve recovered. The fact that Lee invited me back to do a monologue should be evidence of that. How do we even begin to have an intelligent discussion when our hearts are broken? How can I possibly tell you what I’m going to and not be as hated as our enemies?
I hate them, too. I hate that somebody—anybody—thinks it is okay to just kill a bunch of random people to make a political or religious statement or because they were underprivileged or weren’t breastfed, or had a bad fucking day. Fuck you! It’s not okay. It’s never been okay.
I’ve heard a lot of people tossing around the blame for this terrible thing to have happened. Believe me, it’s going to touch everyone. Everyone is going to be tarred for letting this attack on America happen. The President. The Mayor of New York. The CIA. The FBI. The Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Secretary of State. And let us not forget, it will tar American allies in the Middle East. It will tar American enemies in the Middle East. Remember, we fought a war there just a decade ago. For all I know, China and North Korea are going to get blamed for it, too. We’re standing on the brink of World Fucking War III because some assholes learned how to fly airplanes. But not to land them.
I hung out in some of the popular cafés and bars in Indy and Bloomington this week, just listening to what was being said. Everything has been said. ‘Nuke Saddam Hussein.’ ‘It’s the damned Jews.’ ‘It’s a communist conspiracy.’ ‘It’s Muslims. We should get rid of all of them.’ And most of all, ‘It didn’t used to be like this. Our nation has turned away from God. If we had prayer in the schools, we’d be stronger.’ What a load of bullshit. We had twenty-three assholes who decided they could set the world on fire by flying planes into buildings, and already, we’re out trying to prove them right.
How stupid can we get?
This isn’t new, people. It’s as old as it gets. It’s been going on since before the Israelites wiped out the Midianites. They wiped them out. We don’t know exactly how big the Midianite kingdom was. We know—if we believe any of the historical details of the Bible—that there were thirty or forty thousand women and girls who had never lain with a man that were all that was left. It’s the way of the world. We disagree with your politics or your religion or your ethnicity and so we’ll kill you.
Between 1492 and 1900, we of European descent killed off 48,000,000 indigenous people in the Americas. Because we wanted their land. Their gold. We wanted a place where WE could be free! Most of them were killed because one of the great gifts we brought with us was smallpox. And flu. And syphilis.
Lacking a native population to enslave and force to do our work, we imported 700,000 slaves from Africa. No, that’s not all the slaves that were brought to the Western Hemisphere. There were 12 million of those. That 700,000 only accounts for the ones brought to the United States. By the time of the Civil War we’d expanded that number through our breeding programs to four million. Grow your own.
We fought a war over it. Over 600,000 men died in battle in the Civil War to prove that we now have the longest undefended border between two countries in the world running right through the middle of the United States. No one won that war. We’re still two countries that have one government.
Australians don’t get off free. They knocked off 700,000 Aborigines between 1800 and 1900. Not just disease, but programmed removal of children from families in a concentrated attempt to destroy the indigenous population.
Between 1915 and 1923, the Ottoman Empire annihilated the Armenians. 1.5 million people dead. Because they were Christian.
But it doesn’t make a difference what the religions are. In Bangladesh in 1971, the year I was born, three million people died at the hands of Pakistani soldiers and another 400,000 women and girls were raped.
Here’s a good one for you. In the early 70s, Francisco Nguema in Equatorial Guinea engineered the killing of 80,000 people. Why? Because they wore glasses. Just a few years ago, tens of thousands of Hutus were killed in Rwanda by Tutsis. Just because they were rivals. The Serbs turned around the next year and killed 8,000 Bozniaks in Srebrenica because they were the wrong kind of Muslims.
We sent 58,000 men and women to die in Vietnam. Another 153,000 wounded and 1,600 missing in action. 444,000 North Viet Army and Viet Cong were killed. Another 550,000 Viet civilians. And there isn’t anybody in this country today who has any fucking idea why we were there in the first place. We won every battle. And we lost!
Losing 3,000 people to a terrorist act two weeks ago was terrible. It hit us all hard and we want to go out and kill someone. In fact, if history is any indication, we’ll send three times that number of soldiers somewhere to die for revenge. They’ll kill a hundred times that number of ill-defined enemies who think they are protecting themselves and their country. And we’ll come home. We won’t have won anything. We won’t be any safer. We won’t be satisfied.
Welcome to the real world, America. 3,000 people dead is a terrible thing. When it’s stacked up against 6,000,000 Jews exterminated in Hitler’s concentration camps… When it’s compared to 250,000 Japanese killed by American atomic bombs… Even when we put it against the 50,000 killed in our own revolution… We got off easy.
I learned something a few years ago. I learned that I could lash out with the power of the universe at my fingertips. Like you—maybe like all Americans—I want to do that now. I want to teach them a lesson not to fuck with the USA. That’s the animal side of me. The part that is controlled by the power I wield. Culturally, nationally, politically, religiously we haven’t learned to overcome our basest animal nature. The only way we know to respond is to strike back. We haven’t actually learned how to be human beings.
Extremist terrorists, no matter what religion you are… Whether you are Muslims declaring jihad, Buddhist extremists killing Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar, Christian Fundamentalists fire-bombing abortion clinics, Nationalist Indonesians purging leftists, black versus white, Catholic versus Protestant… No matter your ideology or political leanings, you are terrorists. And by definition, that makes you not quite human.
And Mr. President, Members of the House and Senate, Generals of the Armed Forces… If the only way you can respond is to bomb the shit out of our perceived enemies and waste American lives for vengeance, you aren’t quite human either.
I was going to have to apologize to Lee for the condition the audience was in when he started the discussion with his guests.
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