If I live to be 100, I’ll never forget that London cabbie, that summer asphalt cruise through Hyde Park, not long after 9-11. “Me son and me, he’s a cabbie too, sir, yes he is, well we pulled up window to window and we cried, we did, when The Mother Queen’s band itself struck up ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ mate, yes, me and me son we cried that day.”

And but for the England’s recent stellar anti-terrorist bust at the last minute, there would have been a 9-11 II. Ten planes bounding over The Pond were to blow, and the body parts of innocents, many likely devout Muslims, would’ve purportedly scattered the Atlantic like fall leaves on a windy day.

A much more likely scenario, in my own damn opinion, runs down like this: The United Flight to be booked later, after the “trial run,” had destinations and flights to New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle. It seems that “blowing up over the Atlantic” noise is a cover-up. It stands to reason that Islamic fascists would only want to raise the body count to the max, not to mention pull off mass murder that would dwarf 9-11. Why incinerate a few hundred people over a huge body of water when you can kill tens of thousands in seven cities?

As though to pile lie upon lie, our vaunted Homeland Security secretary said, “Currently, we do not have evidence that there was, as part of this plot, any plan to initiate activity inside the United States or that the plotting was done in the United States.”

That rather raises the question.
Hundreds of F.B.I. agents checked possible leads, and one honest one, on condition of anonymity, revealed that some of those leads were calls placed by the British suspects to various American cities.
So, thank God for the plucky, always dependable-like-bulldogs Brits and their vaunted Scotland Yard. They averted, I suspect,  a rain of hellfire, death from above, incinerating Americans in seven cities.
So what is to be done to end this War on Terror (our words), this Islamic Jihad, this War against Zionist Israel and America, the Great Satan (their words)?

How do you fight an enemy who wears no uniform, who cuts off the heads of white people, who rushes toward death and martyrdom with a sincere smile, heart near-bursting with orgasmic ecstasy as he or she smashes that button that lights the sky, the subway, The Towers?

Do we do it by foolishly misdirecting our troops to a doomed occupation in Iraq when the real enemy has always been Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, not Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people?

It is almost beyond moral certainty that bin Laden (recent rumors of his death notwithstanding) resides in Pakistan. Let’s see, instead of putting 100,000 soldiers in Iraq, we take those same 100,000 soldiers and let them march in lockstep north and south, east and west —  even hold hands or long lengths of chains — AND SCOUR PAKISTAN FOR OSAMA.
WAKE UP, AMERICA!

This is a real war, this War on Terrorism. It’s all well and good to sit around some Highlands’ coffee house and talk about multinationals, 9-11 conspiracy theories and how stupid George Bush is (mainly ’cause he don’t talk so good). But let that United Airlines dive bomber kamikaze into Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May (or this Friday) and perhaps only then will there be a wake-up call even the deaf can hear.

We are at war, though you’d never know it with people gawking at TV screens four hours a day, and many watching monitor screens at work for another eight.

We are at war, though you’d never know it with people near-married to LOUISVILLE MOJO.COM and the equally insidious MTV,  people who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing, people who worship youth and yearn to be rich, famous and beloved by those so much shallower than even themselves. My thoughts drift back to that London cabbie and his tears. The darkest days lie yet ahead. We are at war. Do you remember how to cry?

But anyway, I’m Carl Brown, Louisville’s Plain Brown Rapper, and that’s just my own damn opinion. If you don’t like it, sue me. Just prepare with prayer this war without end.

Contact the writer at [email protected] And you can watch “Carl Brown’s Reality” on WYCS (Insight channels 24 and 138) on Saturday morning as 11 a.m., Sundays at 6:30 p.m. and Mondays at 8 p.m.