Hide The Bomb and Bring Out The Beast, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #398 | @MDWorld

September 21, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 1 Comment

Let’s say you’ve got a 14-year old kid in school. It’s show-and-tell day, and your child’s classmate brings a device to class purporting to be a home-made clock. It doesn’t look like your typical Apple Watch, it’s got circuit boards and wires and stuff. More important, this device was made by another 14-year old, who, coincidentally, just happens to be Muslim. Worst still, he is a Muslim named “Ahmed Mohamed.”

Damn. You don’t get more Muslim than that unless your name is “Yasser Arafat” or “Mohammad Ali.”

So, as the parent of this li’l terrorist’s schoolmate, what would you like the school to do first? Do you want them to call the cops? Good for you. In the Irvine Texas classroom were Ahmed Mohamed brought his homemade “clock” to class, that’s exactly what the school did. It took a while and a couple of other teachers first thought the “clock” was actually a clock, but eventually the police were called. This is good.

Then, as that same parent, what would you want to happen next, even before the police arrive? Well, if you liked your kid, you’d want the school to be evacuated – immediately and in an orderly fashion. That did not happen. This is bad. What if those who erred on the side of paranoia were right? Your kid would be in a million pieces and you’d be out shopping for black.

When the police arrived they put both Ahmed and his “clock” into the back seat of a police car and drove them both to the hoosegow. What? Come again? They didn’t call the bomb squad, they didn’t leave the “clock” alone or cover it with their bodies the way cops do in the movies. They jeopardized the lives of the police in the car, they jeopardized the life of the 14-year old who was not charged with anything, and even if he was Ahmed didn’t deserve summery execution, and they jeopardized the lives of those people on the road in the path between the school and the police station.

What does this leave a reasonable person to believe? There are two plausible explanations. 1) The police and school authorities are complete morons. 2) They actually thought the kid’s “clock” was, in reality, a clock.

This isn’t a story about reasonable paranoia, of erring on the side of safety. Safety had absolutely nothing to do with what happened in Texas. These authorities had to believe the kid brought in a clock. If not, they should be fired for incompetence.

Lots of right-wing Republican nincompoops said everybody acted reasonably. The cops even said, “we didn’t charge him with anything.” This is true, but if I were Ahmed’s parents I’d be happier that the police did not simply shoot their brown-skinned child. That, after all, is quite the fashion these days… “these days” being 150 years, the sesquicentennial anniversary of the end of America’s first civil war. Also known as “the day Jim Crow flew into town.”

After that, the Republican presidential campaign became even more anti-Muslim. Donald Trump did not even try to rise to the occasion of John McCain by telling his supporter that Barack Obama was not a Muslim. Or foreign born. Nor did he whip out the alleged reports from his private investigators that detail how Obama is, indeed, a foreign-born Muslim. And brain doctor Ben Carson, also running for president, said a Muslim should not be president, that such a prospect violates all basic American principles.

You know, basic American principles like “freedom of religion.” That troublesome Constitution that states, in Article VI, ““No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

Did I mention Ben Carson’s next book, due out in a couple weeks, is titled A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties. Ben, here’s a good place to start: Read the damn Constitution before you bitch about Muslim presidents. If this book is the result of your learning about the Constitution, then I sure as shit do not want to you to operate on any brains… except your own.

I do know one thing. Those bright shiny white costumes such made the Ku Klux Klan stand out. You could see them coming from a mile away.

Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on the iNetRadio app, www.iNetRadio.com, as part of “Hit Oldies” channel even though his show is way too ass-kicking to be thought of as either “hit” or “oldies.” Weird Sounds first airs Sundays at 7:00 PM Eastern and is rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. Gold is also a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com, joining MDW’s Martha Thomases and sometimes even Michael Davis himself there they, and others, incessantly pontificate upon matters of four-color.