By Jim Hagarty
2006
Five years on, and Osama bin Laden is still runnin’ around the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan, successfully avoiding capture by the world’s superpowers who are using every very sophisticated tool they can to zero in on him and his band of merry asswipes.
Had anyone bothered to ask me, I think I could have made their job a lot easier and a lot more successful.
All Bush and Co. would have needed to have done is somehow to have gotten a bank debit card into the hands of the planet’s number one fugitive and then gone online and followed his tracks through the hills and valleys of those dusty lands.
This thought occurred to one night this week as I was pondering the repercussions of an incident that happened earlier in the day. On a day off with the kids, I headed out of town for a movie when about halfway there, I began suffering a terrible Mr. Big chocolate bar craving. (My doctor says I have a severe chocolate deficiency – worst he’s ever seen – and has prescribed one Mr. Big a day. I am following doctor’s orders to a T.) At a variety store I stopped at, I realized I was penniless once again and so whipped out my debit card to pay for my medication.
The young woman behind the counter informed me there would be a 25 cent debit charge, an announcement which did not deter me in the same way a $25 debit fee would not have dissuaded me from gobbling up my medicine in that critical situation.
Back in the van, nerves calmed, duly simmering, I turned back onto the road to continue on with our trip. We had a great afternoon.
But at suppertime (sorry folks, old farmer, evening meal is supper) my wife looked skeptically down the table and asked me what I had bought a few hours earlier for $1.50. I confessed to the chocolate bar and it gradually dawned on me how my every movements are now being monitored by someone who likes to check our bank accounts hourly on the Internet, in case, I suppose, someone accidentally deposits a million or two into those little, mostly empty equivalent of pots of copper.
In the old days – the good old ones, I am tempted to say – a man’s sins didn’t catch up with him that quickly. For one thing, we carried wads of cash, and no one could ever know what we spent it on. For another, there were no debit cards delivering instant confessions for us out over the Internet lines.
And evidence of any cheques that were written only showed up at the house once a month, long after the offending purchase had been made.
Some of those statements had a way of getting lost and once gone, the information on them, I think, was pretty much history as well. But once you’ve turned off the high road of cash and are hooked on that little magic card, your chances of going through an average day undetected are pretty slim.
You can be followed, minute by minute, like an inmate under heightened supervision in a maximum security prison.
So, I would stop fooling around with drone airplanes directed from warships hundreds of miles away, night-vision cameras and radar detectors from space and go get old Osama there his own debit card.
Then when he wanders into town for some tobacco, a few postcards and batteries for his GameBoy, I’d just look that up using Internet banking and swoop in for a little chat with our favourite holy warrior.
Who knows? We might even catch him scarfing down a Mr. Big or two.
Whether it’s chocolate or some other substance, he certainly does seem to be suffering from some sort of deficiency.
