No, It Wasn’t In 1881 Although It Could Have Been

It was actually during the reign of Old Rummy Reagan, in 1981, when the supply-side plantation owners tried to downplay the threat while also trying to shame the bombers by demanding the mainstream media refer to these highly effective human weapons delivery systems as “homicide bombers.”

I remember because at the time I was still writing poetry, despite acknowledging it makes nothing happen, in the most unironic of ways, and I recall much vitriol from editors of numerous small-minded magazines over a poem called “Arabs and Jews,” which was published by a small letter press magazine called The Archer, while the Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge & Laundromat was still located in a small trailer on Mt. Gilead Rd in Pittsboro, N.C.

None of this is true, of course, because nothing can be independently verified. Everything we rely on is passed down from sources of questionable intent through dead gatekeepers of freedumbocracy and passed over the heads of your family and friends until it arrived in one of your spam folders, where all of our so-called reality is relegated by the Great Algorithm of technocracy.

But one thing I am sure of was that our government and our free press was terrified of suicide bombers, while I was curiously impressed by their commitment to doing the right thing but unconvinced that their motivation was pure enough of heart so as not to attract too many werewolves.

To be fair, these early “brand new developments in terrorist weaponry” weren’t really impacting Americans very much, considering their own problems with gun violence, corporate posioning of the air and water, and rampant corruption.

But what I saw in those Palestinian suicide bombers was not a coordinated effort by an alternative political force who hoped to affect change through the ballot box. What I saw, what I still see, are hundreds of thousands of people who have exhausted every legitimate means of obtaining a redress of grievances.

Individual points of light, as George H. W. Bush might have described them, who no longer find life worth living but are not willing to go gently into that good night without taking as many of the rest of us along with them as humanly possible.

There is no single ideology shared by these bright flames. Many of them will eventually provoke neighbors to claim they were the nicest guys you’d ever want to meet.

So it goes.