Saturday, March 29, 2014

Two Muhammads




Do you know the saying: “No matter where you go, there you are.” If you tend to think too much, like I do from time to time, it’s not a good saying. I realize that it’s a matter of choice. One of the glass-half-empty or glass-half-full variety. To some it is a simple matter of geography: you are where you are. These are the people who sleep well at night who are not often thought of by other people during the night. 

I believe that you are free to think of the world in any way you like, to the extent which your cultural and economic biases and subjective emotional responses to objective truths confine your ability to choose anything at all. After all, it’s a free country.


The world used to be big enough that you could find a place where what you wanted to do was acceptable. You want to maybe marry a 12 year old? You go to a place where it’s not only legal, but, in our sense of the word, correct. You want to watch 14 year old boys swallow semen? Sure thing. Go to Kunar province in Afghanistan and have a ball, guilt free.


It’s the Kunar-style bar mitzvah! Every burgeoning man imbibes that which ensures the continued existence of humanity. For that we go to doctors who give us medicine, but no matter. It is to live. To pass on virility. It may be hard to accept, but it’s not intrinsically wrong. Like debased currency and so many other things that are not wrong if enough people buy in.


So we have Muhammad in two places at the same time. A headline from the Kunar Gazette: "Muhammad passes into adulthood." And one from Township Times (Saginaw, MI) "Sexual Abuse Under Taliban Described as 'Institutionalized.'"


In the United States, Muhammad develops emotional problems. He struggles to achieve intimacy. His psychologist says its because he feels like people are taking advantage of him, but is reassured that these are only the ghosts in his head. He never has a wife or a child and he dies alone in Saginaw, Michigan. A lifetime gas station attendant.


Meanwhile, back in Kunar, Muhammad marries a first cousin, builds a home, and lives to have three children. The two sons are blown apart by a hellfire missile fired from a $14,000,000 dollar helicopter after being paid $5 each to drop a mortar into a tube. There is still the daughter. Prayer beads. Life is strange and Muhammad lives to see some unexpected things.


For instance, the Americans dig a well next to his home. It affords him hours and hours of time previously spent climbing up and down the ridge to the river. He lives to see his childhood home, where his uncle now lives, support goats. A dry, unforgiving slope turned green. His daughter marries an elder’s son. Then, while he is pumping clean, drinkable water from the American-dug well, he sees his wife, his uncle, his two cousins, his daughter’s new husband, the in-laws, and his daughter swept forever from the earth as a $27,000 laser-guided Mark 82 General Purpose Bomb falls through the roof of the home and detonates. Unexpected, like a handful of flour tossed into the wind. Poof.


As compensation for the error the Americans send a U.S. Army grief counselor with $10,000 in crisp, freshly printed bills and a letter of condolence from the president of the United States.


The grief counselor is from Saginaw, MI. His name is Dick. Dick asks Muhammad, through an interpreter, if he is an elder. The man with no family says no. Dick asks if he ever performed oral sex on an elder. "No!" the man says and looks in outrage at the translator, who is about the age his youngest son would be and indeed looks like him in the eyes. His son then utters the Pashto word for the male rite of passage and the man with no family says, “Yes, I am a man, but now that your mother and sister are gone I have nothing to show for it."


Dick hands the translator a canteen and directs him to the well. “Give us a minute,” he says. Dick doesn’t speak Pashto. Stands there. The translator returns to report that there is no water. Dick frowns, supposing habits of a thousand years are tough to break. But why let a well go dry? All it requires is a few pumps a day. Dick takes his canteen off his hip and hands it to the weeping man. “There you are."


Muhammad holds his hand in front of him after the canteen has fallen, reaching for something. The slopes turning brown. He sees the faces of his sons. The water dividing into tiny rivers in the ground between his feet.

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