Mind Scalpel

Apparently the threat of terrorism is like cumin, or chili powder: sprinkle it on an epic screw-up and it makes everything taste a lot better.

Witness what happened recently in Florida, which was plunged briefly back into the Stone Age by rolling power outages. In practically every article about that event, there was a statement that the blackouts did not appear to be caused by terrorism.

Wow! That makes me feel so much better! It’s very comforting to know that, through no intentional act, an entire slice of United States civilization was taken off-line, just by completely random events. We can all rest much easier now.

One gets the feeling that we’ll start seeing news squibs like the following:

Florida Power Outages

As Harvey Rosenblatt used a seven-iron to beat back the dozen or so rampaging alligators that had emerged from the canal near his home as soon as his lights went out and his electric fence lost power, he expressed enormous relief that the power plants hadn’t been shut down by Al Qaeda.

“Not terrorism?” he said, gasping for air during a lull in the running alligator fight. “Oh, thank God. I’m hoping that it’s the typical blatant incompetence or shoddy maintenance that did it. That will make me feel a whole lot better about this.” Rosenblatt was interrupted by the sight of a twelve-foot ‘gator skittering back toward the water with his two-year-old Shih Tzu protruding from its mouth.

“Hey! Come back here with Hillary!” Rosenblatt yelled. “Joanna, get me my Big Bertha! A seven-iron’s not going to do it for this one!”

Texas Oil Refinery Explosion

“Not terror?” said Sam Eggleston of Big Spring, Texas, picking his way through the rubble of his house, which was demolished in the explosion of a nearby refinery. “Well, shoot, then, this don’t bother me none at all. As long as those little desert fellers ain’t involved in this, then I don’t mind a little blast wave or two.”

The operator of the oil refinery, when asked what caused the explosion, simply shrugged and said “Eh. Who knows? If you were in the oil business, you’d know that these things just kinda ‘let go’ every once in a while. Things’ll be purring along slick as a pig in grease and then KABOOM!!! — everything in a one-mile radius just gets disintegrated. The important thing is, it’s not terrorism.”

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

After exhaustively reviewing all the evidence relating to the sudden collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis, the NTSB triumphantly announced that the culprit behind the bridge collapse was not terrorism, as had been feared, but rather an inherently flawed design.

“We’re happy to report that this bridge was a death trap from Day One,” said an NTSB spokeswoman. “Al Qaeda had nothing to do with this. Anyone traveling on this bridge was unknowingly playing Russian Roulette simply because we have bad civil engineers. So you can feel good about that as you drive over all our other bridges!”

Diseased Cow Meat Packaged in School Lunches

After videotapes surfaced of slaughterhouse workers tossing cows that were so sick they couldn’t stand on their own into food distribution channels, which then brought the suspect meat to thousands of public school children, concerned parents everywhere had one immediate question:

“Are these slaughterhouse workers really terrorists?” Anne O’Connell asked, whose three school-aged children received lunches containing meat from the diseased cattle, after she watched a video of a sick cow being rammed by a forklift. Informed that the workers in the video were not terrorists, but were merely uncaring dolts acting with a callous disregard for the health and safety of their company’s ultimate consumers, O’Connell relaxed. “Well, that’s okay, then. But if these had been fundamentalist jihadis poisoning my kids, I’d be seriously outraged.”

So the next time you do something — or fail to do something — and catastrophe results, just remind the people whose lives you’ve affected: it was not terrorism.

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