Bombs or Redbuds?

I won’t do it, of course, tempting as it might be. But I do have to wonder—is it advisable for the New York Times to tell everybody that the al Qaeda magazine Inspire has an article titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom?”

What I won’t do is check that out—do I need Homeland Security knocking at my door? And what would I do with the information, anyway? Besides, the NYT has given me all the rudiments of the recipe: place small nails, ball bearings, or metal shards in a six liter pressure cooker, reads the opening sentence of the recipe. Presumably, we top with melted cheese (gruyere if fancy, Velveeta otherwise).

News flash—and remember you read it here first—we’re never gonna know who made the bombs, put them in the garbage cans, and left the scene, after having set the kitchen timer on each of the bombs. All we’ll know—I’m guessing or perhaps extrapolating here—is that it took ten seconds for him (sorry, guys, but I think it’s one of our own….) to set the timer of the first bomb and then walk to the next garbage can, where he set the second.

Garbage cans, as you will know if you’ve been to London recently, are very lethal affairs, as deadly as pressure cookers. Unbelievably, unimaginably, the Boston Police Department (BPD) is unaware of this simple fact, a datum a 3-year old child could easily grasp and expound upon.

Yes, the danger is everywhere—kitchen timers, pressure cookers, garbage cans. And now, with the Internet, it’s easy to slip into the kitchen, get down to work, and cook up a little bomb or two. And in the case of the Boston Marathon, you can run out and get the ingredients months in advance. The brads that tore through so much flesh may have been bought in December, during the Christmas rush.

“We can never be safe again,” is the take away (nod to my corporate past) from one writer, a man generally wise and perceptive (read—I usually agree with him….).

Well, yes and no. Susan said it best in her comment about yesterday’s post. Remember that line in the Bible about living by the sword? Well, we’ve been doing that for too many years now, and we’ve pissed off too many people. Now, of course, we don’t like it when the “terrorist” walks into the kitchen to conjure up a bomb, not mac and cheese.

Which leads me to ask—what did you make in your kitchen two days ago? What would it have taken to impel you to take the pressure cooker, put the brads, BBs and metal shards into the pot, to glue it, to fix the timer, to put it into the back pack, and then to repeat the whole process? Because there’s an extra though vital ingredient to that recipe for a bomb, something besides the brads and metal shards—rage, hate, vengeance.

OK—kookiness. Somebody, breaking news on Yahoo informs me, sent a letter with suspicious white powder to Obama. Somebody also sent a letter with ricin to a senator from Mississippi. All the nuts, apparently, are stepping up to the plate and pitching right in.

In the days after September 11, 2001, I used to amuse myself with all the ways you could create disaster. Well, everybody was doing it—imagining subway gassings, warning us never to eat at salad bars, giving gloves and masks to the receptionist, as she opened the morning mail. And since the entire United States was filled with terrorists, just itching to bring down the God-fearing US of A, and since they were willing to give their lives to do it, I conceived a very simple way to create mass mayhem.

No, I won’t tell you. I love my country—as batty as it is; as paranoid as it is; as horribly as it acts, on occasion. We’ll struggle on. And no, I don’t think it’s impossible ever to be safe. I think if we could ever start acting well, if we stopped torturing people and bombing civilians in illegal and immoral wars, the rest of the world might be better off. Oh, and they might stop hating us, or at least not hate us as much.

More breaking news—the Senate, which is supposed to be thinking about gun control today, was locked down briefly when someone without clearance was found delivering packages. Oh, and Obama is speaking live right now about the suspicious letters.

Lastly, I leave you with the image that somehow encapsulates this whole ridiculous and tragic affair. Yes, I acknowledge the menacing Haz Mat truck, the police cars, the men ducking into the secured building, the whole scene one of response to menace and peril. I prefer to look, however, at the lovely redbud tree, in glorious and full flower, serenely sure that there is no, no danger.