Once, while scraping a mouse on the bare wood of my desk in the Microsoft silver light of about 2001, I read a story about how a group of celebrants came streaming out of their house in a remote area of Afghanistan.  The CPU sitting next to my chair was clicking away as news of another happy wedding was streamed through the fiber optic cables connecting me to the pith and meat of the world.  A group of Afghani citizens were whooping it up in the Afghan equivalent of rice throwing after a wedding, sending another newly-bonded couple off into the desert to dodge poppy flower regulators, and avoid Americans with night scope goggles on, until "death do them part." But then one nondescript entity, face blurred by lack of information in the report, performed what would later be deemed more than just a faux-pas.  The entity took out a rifle and shot it into the air.  In the customary way to mark the occasion of marriage in that part of Afghanistan, the rifle sent a ball of lead spinning up into the atmosphere.  The ball of lead went up, then silently fell into the sand of the desert with a plop, and a thud.  This would have been all well and good just a few weeks before, but the US army had mandated all Afghans "to hand in their guns" days earlier.  (Think George W. Bush standing in the doorway of a saloon, addressing a room full of sheiks as they make poppy flower bouquets and complain about deflation in the oil market).  But however we imagine the event going down, the sheiks and the warlords ended up not getting the memo.  So a US Drone flew over the wedding party and dropped a metal cylinder out of its mouth onto the heads of the wedding revelers.

Everyone died, and I read about it in my pajamas in the Microsoft silver light.   

 

NEWSFLASH

Planes that fly unmanned, high up in the stratosphere, are called drones.  Cell phones and tablets are called droids. 

 

 

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The straining of lungs and the contorting of diaphragms is carpeted by metallic grumbling.  The tightening of the throat, the scraping of metal against metal, bone on metal, bone on bone.  None of this is passed on to posterity.  What is passed on usually goes something like this.  "Last night, drone strikes hit military installations in Iraq.  The strikes were precise, and effective.  No signs of collateral damage."

No signs of collateral damage.

And really, what do we care about collateral damage?  The truth is that sometimes bad things have to happen because we naturally protect ourselves against evil.  Evil tends to manifest itself in chemical weapons, and as men with box cutters that crash planes into big buildings.  And the truth is that Saddam Hussein had a hang glider buried in the sand of the desert.  He was going to deliver chemical weapons onto the conditioned hair of Americans with his hang glider. 

Saddam also tried to buy yellow cake uranium in Africa.  They think he was going to put it in his urinal to help with the bad odor.

Droids are things like a Google Nexus or R2d2.  They do so many things for us.  Droids find the places we want to go and tell us how to get there.  They are expert trackers, and we don´t need to know what goes on inside them.  Could one a look "under the hood," if one wanted to? 

Where´s the memory?  And what about the networks that tell us where the closest restaurant is?  How do I unplug the tubes?  These questions are obsolete.  We don’t want to know the answers because they wouldn´t be of any practical use to us. 

 

What would we do with this kind of knowledge?

R2d2 would probably do something surprisingly heroic with it.  His little round body would bleep and splurt its way to the mainframe of The Millennium Falcon and manage to thwart the defenses of Vader´s fleet.  Vader would never become aware that it had been R2.

 

NEWSFLASH

Harrison Ford, 71, broke his leg while doing his own stunts on the set of the next Star Wars movie, which was scheduled to come out in a few months.  Filming has been halted to allow time for Ford´s convalescence.

 

 

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One day recently, I looked at the front page of the economics section of the newspaper.  It´s not important which newspaper.  What was important were the cylinders with pointed tops: tin shells all pointy and crammed into a warehouse room where bodies lacking color seemed to be counting them for inventory purposes.

The warehouse was in Britain during world war two, and the cylinders would soon be falling onto the helmeted heads of Germans.  The crackle and thunder of sonic boom, and a trail of dust and cinder concentrations forming across German territory on a paper map. 

The workers in Britain were counting them, so the number could be passed down to posterity.

The number of bombs was impressive.

 

NEWSFLASH

Planes that fly unmanned, high up in the stratosphere, are called drones.  Cell phones, tablets and R2d2 are droids.

The filming of Stars Wars should recommence shortly. 

Stay tuned for details.  

 

 

by David Venezia

HS English Teacher