Wickedness Is Its Own Language

So this is the face of atrocity ... and please pass the tea.

The barbarian speaks ... he had done the calculations, you see.

The clan gathers for the Ramadan holiday ... there is so much to be thankful for.

Nothing like a home movie, is there?

All the fellows gather ‘round to chew the fat with Mr. Big from the construction office. “Due to my experience in the field,” he says, “I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all we had hoped for.”

You don’t say, melt just a few floors? More tea?

“They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building, so I said to them: ‘Be patient’. “

Close your eyes. Change a few words. This is what men might do after a day of shrewd trading in pork bellies. They sit back and congratulate themselves on slaughtering the markets.

More sugar with your tea?

It turns out this is also what “the brothers” do after they fling a few martyrs and jet planes into office buildings for a real slaughter. They gather in a naked room, sitting on pillows on a blue floor. They talk about their press coverage. And engineering calculations. The need-to-know assignments. And, of course, all those strange premonitions the neighbors were having.

“I was worried that maybe the secret would be revealed if everyone starts seeing it in their dreams. So I closed the subject.”

The Tape, the Tape. We’ve been hearing about it for a couple of days now. I don’t think we expected it to hit with quite this wallop.

Through the eye of a camera, we peer into a brightly lighted room. It is the darkest place we’ve ever seen.

My phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Neighbors have a dazed look. A colleague is fighting tears. George W. Bush is correct. This is evil incarnate.

How did it happen that this damning tape was left so conveniently for us to find? I don’t know.

Why couldn’t we quite hear the voices along with reading the written translation? I don’t know.

How could a man mouth the words “peace” and “blessings” and “praise be” and then say all those other words too? I don’t think I’ll ever know.

One friend, an expert in international press relations, says we should be ready for foes of the U.S. to call this video a fabrication, a fake performed by Hollywood actors. Perhaps some will regard it so. Seeing isn’t always believing. And didn’t the president’s men just ask for Hollywood’s help?

But could Hollywood have imagined this, really?

Actual human beings discussing buildings melting down around other human beings in an inferno of jet fuel as dispassionately as they might recall last night’s moonlight marshmallow roast?

Is this how it went down in Hitler’s bunker? Did Pol Pot sit there one day with his Khmer Rouge and remark, offhandedly, “We calculated in advance the number of casualties. ... I was the most optimistic of all.”

The words are spoken calmly. You want to scream. Wickedness is its own language.

Back and forth, the TV screens flip from the pastel of that pillowed room to the white-on-green flashes of bombs falling on Tora Bora. A month ago is juxtaposed to the present. I couldn’t suppress the feeling. I couldn’t sit as serenely as those men in that barren room.

The words scroll up the screen: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”

Heaven help me, I urged those bombs on.

Then his poem: “And over weeping sounds now/We hear the beats of drums and rhythm.”

No longer, you murderer. Now it’s the beat of a “daisy cutter.”

More poem: “They are storming his forts/And shouting, ‘We will not stop our raids’.”

Precisely.