09 May 2007

Formats

I feel like Jimmy Carter must have felt back in the day, when he announced that there was a malaise hanging over the land, and the American People, suspicious of the French language, promptly elected the amiable Ronald Reagan.

It was about the format of the message. Mr. Reagan conveyed a titanic struggle with global Communism in a charming scrawl across the morning. It is the same sort of message, and really a matter of format.

I feel like I have written myself into a corner, format-wise. I am out of time this morning, for openers, fussing with the format of picture files. People send me things to put in the periodical I edit, and once each three months I approach despair at trying to de-code them into something legible.

Some amiable loons are in contact, too. They get the mailing address from the magazine, and there is a little stack of DVD's and letters from people with some severe fixations. One is apparently a victim of temporal dysphasia, being quite hysterical about finding a missing aviator who was lost over Ia-jima in 1945. Another wants to slay the current Hydra of Terror via compact disc, the letters writ childishly large with a laundry marker on the suilvery surface.

I am avoiding that one. They are both harmless, I think, but I do not have the time to carefully review the material. If I did, and found something ominous, I might have to alert someone.

Once done de-coding for the morning, I sigh at the larger landscape. There are only so many ways to describe the debris field of a car bombing, or the prospect that we have jihadis among us. The little band that was nailed in the final planning of an offensive operation at Fort Dix is just the tip of the iceberg.

We will have more clever ones, by and by, since the bacillus that Britain nurtured in the Northern industrial towns and bombed the Tube is incubating here, too. Once the genie is out of the bottle, like nuclear technology, there is no putting it back.

The ringleader, or the master targeteer, in the Fort Dix plot is a pizza delivery driver. The troops must have their cheese pies, after all, anywhere on base, and they must be piping hot. The driver knew every quick path through the installation, and where the hungry all-night workers labored.

I am pleased the FBI was able to infiltrate the group, though they seem a bit ridiculous, like the Militia members of a decade ago. They ran around in the woods with paint-ball guns, shouting “God is Great!” They say there were ten of them. Only six were arrested, which means almost half are still on the loose, or were working for the FBI.

We are all media-stars these days, using the World Wide Web to spread our individual fames, or incendiary propaganda.

A clerk at a photo shop tipped off the authorities when the erst-while martyrs brought in their video tapes to be converted to DVD for more efficient viewing. It was the format of the message that tripped them up.

If they had been a little more technically proficient, they possibly might have gotten right to the gate at Fort Dix or further.

It is a comfort that the last few groups of home-grown terrorists have been nabbed. The Lackawanna Six attended real al Qaida camps, but there is still debate about how dangerous they were. It says a lot about the nature of the people who come here, good and bad, just as the chaotic history of all the others who have come before.

I'm sure we will work this out, over time, but I am equally certain that there are people out there who are technically competent to manufacture their own DVD's, and hence less susceptible to detection. I'm sure they are looking for interesting ways to make an artistic statement about the glory of their god.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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