The Final Solution for the Taliban; or, The Great Satan and How to Cut It Off

 

 

Dealing with thugs like the Taliban is complicated by cries that to do so would be to impose Western cultural contexts on an alien society with an inherent right to self-determination. Cultural context does figure in the mix, but I think the issue in the minds of those who are as horrified as I, a lizard, am by the current situation is that these strictures are being enforced involuntarily (there's an understatement). Many Afghani women had been Westernized somewhat, or at least had lived in an Islamic society that wasn't so pathologically retrogressive (the Taliban has been condemned by Iran, after all). Isn't it one thing for a society to collectively endorse (and even adore) some behavior that may or may not be repellent to other societies-fellating elders (well, it would depend on the elder), sacrificing chickens (if Colonel Sanders can do it, why can't I?), and so on-and another for a splinter society to impose its endorsed behaviors on those who would not adopt them of their own free will? That would seem to be a no-no cutting across any cultural lines. All cultures impose behaviors; your burgeoning prison complex is testament to that. Such is the very principle of criminal punishment. So should Afghani ladies submit to a system of rules designed to efface them as individuals capable of self-expression and self-determination, something they were quite happy being previously? Should the founding fathers and mothers of your country have just told themselves that poor George III had syphilis and he couldn't help being crazy? The Taliban were and are a revolutionary movement; an estrogen-fueled counterrevolution would seem to be the answer.

If all those women got sufficiently pissed off--I'm sure that many of them still love their husbands even while the latter are treating them like dogs (remember what happened to Patty Hearst), but if enough of them remembered where the sharp knifes were, the kitchen being the woman's proper domain in that worldview, after all--a wave of castrations would probably affect the body politic (pun intended, given the phallocentric nature of Taliban society) as nothing else would, especially in light of the current lack of medical supplies in Afghanistan. Foucault and his buddies all say that political power is essentially material and corporeal because each human is the nodal point of a myriad of power gradients that quite tangibly intersect with your bodies. Fine and good . . . well, those women should grab all the power gradients they can and start chopping their way to freedom.

I apologize for the rather graphic and unsanitary nature of the preceding paragraph. Actually, I do think we should interfere with the Taliban on a much more hygienic level. You should sweep in quickly and kidnap all of the Taliban bigwigs you can grab without too much hassle. Then, rather than spending Pentagon money on bombs and more bombs and guns and more guns, whisk them off to hospitals where they can receive, at no cost, the finest in sex-change operations the money will buy. You can pump them full of estrogen, turn their proud Afghani penises into clitorises, give them breasts like honeydew melons, show them what makeup is for, and maybe even turn them on to some Susie Bright videos so they can learn to love their new bodies. After a while, once they have adjusted as much as they're going to, you can ship them back to Afghanistan dressed like Jezebel on a two-week bender . . . and then we can all have some real fun observing the clash of cultural contexts. Plus you could make sure not to depilate them so that within a month of finding themselves without hormones for their syringes, their beards and body hair would grow back, and they would look like female Yeti.

 

 

© 2000 Gregor Everitt