The Looming Tower

I've spent the last few weeks reading The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. I read it in the few spare moments I can catch, under the glow of the reading light hanging over my bed. Yesterday I fell asleep among the pages of Chapter 18.

I was once told that the best way to study is right before you go to sleep - it increases the chances of recall. Something about the sleep process that compacts the information and fits it tightly into the brain. Something like that...

The last few weeks I've had strange dreams. There's been sand. I've never dreamt of deserts before; I'm from the tropics, I dream of the ocean and palm trees and the gentle rocking of a wooden boat. Now I awake with hazy recollections of Afghanistan. In those quick seconds between the alarm waking me and my standing up to switch it off, my consciousness grasps all it can from the dreams. There are vague, dirty faces, conflict, devotion, pure madness.

Today I awoke with a start and whispered, AllahAkbar.
I was once religious.

It's crazy to think, and I never wanted to admit it, but for some of these boys out there in the training camps, out there on their scrawny own, conquering some measly monkey bars in an attempt to aggress against a world power, it's nothing but pure boredom motivating them to kill. All out murder.

It's the same reason Jackass existed - just a bunch of bored kids with too much energy and no other outlet. In Shiia, the strict religious laws of Islam, even pictures are forbidden. Nothing to masturbate to. No masturbating at all. A sick sexual and emotional repression mixed with a barren landscape leads to the same results.

It's the same reason right-wing Christian conservative Republican Senators leave dirty text messages on little boys' phones and have interracial affairs with transexual minors.

It's the same reason I sometimes dream of taking a machine gun and going wild in some mountainous jungle, in the name of Revolution or the CIA - really in an attempt to shake the routine and give some grander meaning to my boring and humble life. To perhaps be a footnote in the history books.

One scene from The Looming Tower sears itself on the mental flesh:
In the middle of the night, a US plane bombs the hell out of an early Al-Qaeda camp. Sand explodes high into the air, screams fill the night. And when the bombardment is finished, the US plane shines a bright light down. As the insurgents scrambled, the light illuminated the dismembered body parts of their friends and relatives. Gleaming red tissues and dirty bone, illuminated by some rich and powerful foreign entity, hovering above the graveyard. Illuminated by America, a 1984-like superpower, who's intelligence capabilities, according to one person's fearful quote in the book, could go so far as to tell the brand of underwear one wore.

In that moment I understood why - why these kids go out and kill instead of just going out to get molested in the halls of their representative government; or crash camels into each other. In that moment I thought of Orwell and knew why they do it. Living in the dirt there is no hope, living in the shadow of a super power there is only fear. There is no winning.

Might as well strap explosives to your belt before some American soldier straps car batteries to your balls.