Why Osama is irrelevant

I just finished today’s post to the Blonde Sagacity (mobyrebuttal.blogspot.com) blog, which is the text of an open letter Osama Bin Laden wrote to America in November 2002.
You can go to Blonde Sagacity to read the text. Bin Laden explains why he hates us and wants to kill all of us unless we shape up, forget the Enlightenment ever happened and become his brand of medieval Muslim.
At the root of his complaint against us - not counting our support of Israel – is what he sees as the immoral corrupting influence of American culture.
Well, Osama, that’s precisely why you can’t win.
I call it my Doctrine of Stuff and I cognized this cosmic truth more than 40 years ago during the Vietnam war.
A basic fact of human nature is that people want Stuff.
We like our possessions and we always want more.
It occurred to me during Vietnam that we would be more successful against the Viet Cong and the North Vietnam Army if, instead of dropping expensive high explosives on them, we dropped planeloads of sneakers, transistor radios, bluejeans, and other consumer items.
At the very least it would confuse them. At best it would undercut their ability to stay pissed off at us. How can you be seriously angry with someone who flies over every day and drops a couple of tons of cool stuff on you?
And it would probably cost a lot less than the tons and tons of ordinance we expended in our unsuccessful effort to subdue them.
It was that realization that led me to predict the fall of Communism, something that caught the CIA completely by surprise.
Not me. I saw it coming 20 years earlier.
The seeds were sprouting in the ‘60s when Soviet youth got infected with rock and roll and other American cultural influences.
It was just a matter of time until the people of the Soviet Union and eastern Europe – bombarded for decades with images of western affluence and consumer-driven economies – decided they’d had enough of cardboard shoes and crappy cars and shoddy merchandise.
In the space of a few months, people all over the Soviet sphere of influence decided individually and collectively, “We’re done. We’re not doing this anymore. Fuck you and fuck your system. We want the same stuff people in the U.S. and Canada and West Germany and the rest of the civilized world have and anybody who tries to stop us does so at his own peril.”
The plain truth, which scares the bejeezus out of Osama and his crowd of stone-age control freaks, is that there is not a single religion, ideology or belief system known to man that cannot be co-opted, corrupted and rendered harmless by American consumer culture.
The culture is relentless in its ability to absorb and trivialize any threat. Remember how scared the Establishment was when the hippies showed up with their long hair and paisley? Within five years, Republican bankers were wearing bellbottom pants, hair over their collars and using words like “groovy” and “hip.”
The people’s desire for Stuff is morphing China into a consumer-driven state that none of the old Communist cadre can thwart.
At this moment, the mullahs in Iran have their hands full suppressing a youth movement driven by American music and style that will surely overwhelm them before the decade is out.
Cuba, the last Communist holdout, will be owned by Wall Street within five years of Castro’s death.
The best Osama and his band of psychotic idiots can hope for is to go down fighting.
He demands we renounce materialism and convert to Islam.
I demand he lose the Halloween costume, have a couple of beers and shut the fuck up.