Your Shoe's Untied
Consider not taking notes from people that want you dead.
You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Osama bin Laden.
Let’s say you’re in a fistfight, and the other guy points down at your shoe. He tells you it’s untied. Now, your shoe may actually be untied. If it is, you should fix that at some point. Probably it would have been ideal if you had fixed it before you got into this fistfight. How did you get into this fistfight, anyway? You know what, doesn’t matter. It’s in the past. In the present, the one thing you must absolutely not do, under any circumstances, is bend down to tie your shoe.
The reason why is obvious. Even if it’s true that your shoe’s untied, and even if it’s true that you ought to fix the problem, your assailant is only telling you about it so you’ll drop your guard and he can clobber you. The result of listening to him is not going to be two tied shoes; it’s going to be a dislocated jaw.
This is an instructive object lesson to keep in mind as once again the anguished babbling of confused souls comes drifting over the gates from TikTok to alarm us olds on Twitter/X. The kids, as we know, are not alright. In large part this is because we have failed to educate them, which means they are just now learning that the guy who engineered 9/11 has criticisms of America. And hey, you know what? They have criticisms of America, too!
There are two letters attributed to bin Laden drifting around the internet. I won’t link to them; you can find the later one, from the Obama years, pretty easily on Google. The other one, the “Letter to America,” used to be available on The Guardian’s website, but it was deleted after the trend got going (TikTok also says it will ban the videos).
The letters call upon Americans to wake up and recognize “the devastating Jewish control of capital” which has led to “the blood pouring out of Palestine.” Since many TikTok users are already enthralled by the thoughtful arguments of their friendly neighborhood baby-killers, Osama’s venomous tirade strikes them as “so well-written and so reasonably structured.”
This is deranged, of course, but not totally surprising. Bin Laden knew what he was doing. Comb through the letters and you too will probably find one or two points that seem fair, if you squint. For me it’s the part that reads, “the way for change and freeing yourselves from the pressure of lobbyists is not through the Republican or the Democratic parties, but through undertaking a great revolution for freedom.” If I had never read, well, anything else ever, I can imagine nodding along and thinking “ayo he just like me fr fr.”
Except that obviously he is not just like me, on God, no cap. I would like us to transcend our two decrepit parties by bringing together a broad new coalition of normal people who love America and know there are two sexes; Osama would have liked us to transcend them by staging mass pogroms and throwing gay people off of roofs (or was that one ISIS? Honestly these mass murder types are all the same to me).
Anyway: shoelaces, fistfight. Whatever legitimate issues the enemies of America may point out, they are not trying to work collaboratively with us on improvement. They are trying to get us to drop our guard so they can uppercut us in the teeth. It was true when bin Laden deplored the corporatist mono-party. It’s true when Vladimir Putin accuses us of exporting cultural Marxism. It’s even true, I’d reckon, when rioters and agitators point out real pain in our racial past and present, with the intent not of relieving it but of melting down what’s left of our Constitution and our way of life.
If in listening to any one of these nudniks you find yourself thinking “show me the lie,” just remember you can tie your shoe later. People who hate you will think up everything ugly they can possibly say about you; some of it will probably be vaguely true. That is, and I cannot stress this enough, supremely not the point. I rather doubt that the airheads on TikTok will like the results of a searching moral inventory if it’s presided over by the spirit of a man who wanted us all “to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s and trading with interest [sic.]”
I get that these kids feel like they were sold a bill of goods, like history’s not the perfect morality tale it was made out to be. We all have to figure that out at some point, and it’s jarring. But it’s interesting to me that for all their eagerness to uncover a vast misinformation conspiracy, they never stop to ask who started passing those letters around the socials in the first place, and why now, and for whose benefit.
The tragedy isn’t that our adversaries have nasty things to say about us. The tragedy is that we hand them ammunition by doing our best to be just as gullible, decadent, and corrupt as they say we are. We’ve got problems, sure enough. But nobody, and I mean nobody, would be happy with Osama’s proposed solutions. The guy brandishing the tire iron doesn’t get to tell us how to tie our shoes.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer