Read a Novel : Stop a Terrorist

* Sure, you *claim* to be a democrat interested in national security issues, but unless you're reading Schneier, Kingdaddy, and Sigger at least once a week, you're objectively pro-idiot.

BitchPhD harangues that those of us who are not yet consistently reading these blogs are "pro-idiot." Feeling piqued, I linked to them. She's right, so I relaxed. Can't be pro-idiot without a choice to be. Given what I gleaned reading these blogs, from the sheer rightness of these writers, I have a suggestion for the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, DOD, DOJ, and you too: ...

Hire some novelists!

Remember how the "President" told us that "no one could imagine using a plane as a bomb to bring down a building"??? And no one could imagine that an American would bomb a federal building : remember, we ALL thought that was a foreigner. And wingers are getting Muslims, Arabs, and terrorists all muddled up in their already addled minds. Lack of clear thinking, morally repugnant Failures of Imagination.

Which, is what even your medicore novelist has in abundance: imagination.

Carl Hiassen imagines a trustfund baby cum ecoterrorist in Sick Puppy (which is screamingly funny, btw.) Three Days of the Condor imagines a CIA analysit, and former Lit Major, coopted into a plot he barely intuited from a novel. Spy novels, travel novels, mystery novels, and as we remember wincing at the line: 9/11 looked "like movie."

Novelists are people who imagine in this way : If I were this characer (say, a terrorist), what would I think, what would I want to know, how would I find out, what would my plan be? And so forth. And then, they "realize" that imagination in the form of literary entertainment.

We need novelists working to stop terrorism. NOT for the national defense, For Everyone's Defense.

Why? Simple: terrorists don't repeat themselves. As Bitch's bloggers rightly point out, cells don't plan or execute the same attack patterns twice. (OK, except for car bombings and whatnot I'm sure they think of as Operation Stinging Mosquito.) The big operations all have different targets and methods of execution.

And we, we, oh we keep looking backwards, like Dante's Diviners, Magicians, and Astrologers who have their heads cranked around backwards in the Fourth Circle, and walking backwards like them as well.

I would now add Forensics Types to that circle. Forensics looks at what has happened, backwards. Like the other condemned in the 4th Circle, they are looking at the wrong thing, for the wrong thing, in the wrong way. Terrorists, for all their nihilism, are very forward looking types.

There won't be another shoe bomb, or hair gel bomb. They know we're looking for that. And looking quite so hard is a silly use of our time and money and patience.

We need to be looking for what might be IMAGINED by the terrorists NEXT. To get that, you need someone with an imagination, and as much of an imagination as a terrorist has. You need novelists. --- Heck, I'm just a poet, and I can, and have, dreamed up a number of possible terrorist-style plots just in the last month. Just idlely sitting around, chewing the cud, wondering in the fog. I would never act on them, of course. But for me, that 's a game like the one my brother and I used to play called Million Dollar Idea. And those, those imaginings, I should have acted on.

So, um, fund the NEA. ;-)

We all should be remembering that these people, terrorists, are nihilists in the extreme. Once they're done hating the US, they'll turn their hate somewhere else, at someone else, because hate must have somewhere to go and it must act. Hate does not care where it turns, on whom it acts, it only cares that it keep going.

While I'm at it : please remember that you, you there Citizen, you have a better chance of being killed by lightening than by a terrorist attack ... at least while you're in the US. If I'm the first person to suggest the novelists be brought to the aid of the World in this way, then more's the pity. We all know how behind the curve I tend to be.