The Great American Dream Plan.

Watching TV, I never thought I would be allowed such a new insight into the world Americans live in - advanced, yet worried. Intensely planned, brilliantly executed, and yet brittle and no more resilient than less touted ways of life.

You see, it is all about "the plan". Americans have a plan for everything. When that new airport design works brilliantly, it should surprise nobody, for they really thought about it. God bless the geniuses this country produces. The creative juices that flow into the cleverness of all the little things that work well are a joy to behold, unlike for instance, our Indian bank tellers who are much slower after they got computers and money counting machines!

Americans are excellent when it comes to embracing something new, and hence their engineering codes and standards are updated once every six months, whereas ours in India haven't been updated even once since independence. When this something new works neatly into the overall "plan" of things, Americans are happy, like with the fabulous iPhone, but if this something new is not part of a plan, they are completely messed up, like with Sept 11th and now, this financial crisis.

It isn't so much the matter how good this plan is, as long as there is a plan! What a strangely conditioned bunch of people! Now it makes some sense to me how they can be so overwhelmed by this phenomenon new to them called "terrorism". It isn't as if they have anything to be mortally afraid of Osama Bin Laden. But there is something inherently fluid about the man and his methods that Americans are really scared of.

That's why they went to war against Iraq - to let off some steam, but in a war they could "plan" for. You can't feel very good trying your high tech weapons against the ideology of your enemy, against his nebulous network of arms suppliers, against the prowess of his religious calling - all that is too complex and takes too much time. Americans needed some immediate action, and for that you need to knock out buildings, set fire to a few targets from far away, and move ships and troops. Afghanistan and its border with Pakistan are notoriously difficult areas to put up this kind of a show. Even the fake WMD claims were nicely accommodated into this planning mentality, which wouldn't have worked very well in rag tag mountain and cave territory where embedded reporters would have been ill at ease showing the American army as a chaotic bunch. That is the last thing Americans would want to see - their fine men and women of the armed forces in a clueless situation.

Iraq also turned out to be a clueless situation, but at every step of getting there, there was a plan. There were presidential speeches, there was media coverage, there was a clarion call for action! Then there were constant updates, up until the infamous era of beheadings. That was a clever one by the Al Sadr gang. Those rascals knew exactly what kind of below the belt blow the Americans couldn't take. They knew what truth Americans would be most uncomfortable with, and sure enough, once the heads started rolling, white people's sense of the value of a human life came sharply into focus, even though they hardly cared when thousands died in cluster bombs they dropped from far away.

See, a cluster bomb is an evil thing, but there is something fully planned about its design, the way a plane carries it, instructions are given by seemingly respectable people in military uniforms, and promises a sterile and sometimes even spectacular display as it completes its evil duty. But it doesn't look evil! It looks like a nicely planned scientific journey gone horribly right! But a beheading, even though done one at a time, is gruesome to the white American culture. It makes them sick, and they are repulsed by the sight of a human head separated from the rest of the body. All of a sudden, Moqtada Al Sadr and his men are a bunch of "savages", while the son of a bitch who dropped the cluster bomb that killed thousands more of unconnected civilians probably got a medal for his meritorious effort of pushing a button from the safety of his plane flying thousands of feet above the ground. But if it took so much effort to make a random killing machine so antiseptic in its presentation, it must be a "good" thing, that can defend our freedoms and values and our way of life.

American weapons seem to be particularly good at defending American freedoms and American values and the American way of life. I wonder if cluster bombing Wall Street will fix the financial crisis right now and do something to restore faith in the American way of life. In the least, the illicit narcotics trade seems to be the safest investment anywhere in the world, but the Americans are spending millions to stop this and have caused the creation of several druglord billions! Is it hard to get your hands on any banned substance in any part of America? Not at all! Go figure!

For a while now, I have wondered how you can be the most powerful nation on the planet and the most scared, ill informed bunch of sore, loser idiots at the same time. It is because they have been brought up on this diet of result-is-proportional-to-effort. The American Dream is itself quite a well defined three bedroom house, father, mother, two children, two cars and a dog! Is this a dream? Come on! And there are fools who believe people go to America to have just this? What is so great about it? Ah, now! See, this is something you can plan for! Your daughter snorting coke at fourteen, your son shooting his classmates, and you being sued by your neighbour for being bitten by your dog - these are not part of anybody's dream, but in reality should be part of some parents' planning!

Osama Bin Laden represents such an enormous threat to this way of life, not because he wants to rape American women and kill their dogs and feed dope to their children, but because in his world nobody is really bothered by day to day chaos. His world doesn't depend on that pin point control of events and there is no particular end result without which his tribe won't go to sleep peacefully.

That's why Islamic terrorism doesn't do anything more than irritate Indians. Radical Islam trying to inject chaos into an Indian's life is the joke of the century. Indians already have enough chaos and not only do they ignore it, they revel in it. They have partnered it, danced with it, and go to bed with it all the bloody time! This pesky business of being hit by bombs and bloodshed is rather annoying, but India is not likely to be threatened by anything being thrown out of gear.

Even in American storytelling, even in crime, planning is everything, all the way from The Day of the Jackal to Oceans Thirteen, it is all about the precision of the attack. If someone is two seconds off, it is too dangerous! I wonder how many assassins can really pull the trigger under that kind of pressure and still hit the right target. It isn't as if the madman strapped with explosive running into a bunch of people is any less effective, but to Americans, the act of killing through precision and science is always more fascinating and respectable. Islamic terrorism flies in the face of this fascination, and that's the real reason Americans hate this new adversary!

For some strange reason, Americans thought there was going to be another attack on Sept 11th, 2002! There was no intelligence, just millions poured into being "safe" on that particular day. This to me is the retarded blind belief in the spectacle of precision and the blinder belief that their enemy was likely to be like them! Osama Bin Laden really doesn't have to have the resources to call upon this kind of precision in his warfare. He has to plan to carry out something that will not be easy to detect, and that's pretty much it. If one day doesn't work out, his men will simply do it the next time they see an opportunity. If they can't do it, they will do something else. Usually their plans work because there aren't too many geniuses involved and split second precision is not needed even when displayed in a series of bombs going off in a city.

Americans on the other hand, plan so far ahead, that their banks lent fifty times their worth, believing the housing bubble would keep on expanding, and all the financial geniuses who were brought up on that diet constantly fed into that myth in a methodical frenzy that ate up all logic, and sure enough all the planning went to the toilet as soon as reality showed up.

As funny as it may seem, Islamic banking is completely insulated from the kind of mess that Wall Street finds itself in!