Bill Maher - When You Ride Alone You Ride with Bin Laden: What the Government Should Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism

When you ride ALONE you ride with bin Laden

What the Government SHOULD Be Telling Us to Help Fight the War on Terrorism

BY BILL MAHER

NEW MILLENNIUM PRESS

Beverly Hills

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my partner in crime, Sheila Griffiths, and to my friends Michael Viner, Kim Dao and Billy Martin, who also contributed mightily to achieving my completely unreasonable demand toget the book idea I thought of in June out inNovember.
Also, I am forever in the debt of the talented artists who brought to life the images you see in these posters. As my agent never stopped telling me, a picture is worth a thousand dollars.

Acknowledgements

There are a few people Id like to acknowledge for making this book possible, and they are. George Washington; Abraham Lincoln; James Madison; Alexander Hamilton; John Adams; Benjamin Franklin; Thomas Jefferson; General Ulysses S. Grant and General Dwight D. Eisenhower. And everyone who worked so hard on this project of establishing a free nation and keeping it free. Without their hard work, dedication, brilliance of mind and most of all, couragea book like this simply wouldnt be possible.

Table of Contents

Introduction .

Make Them Fight All of Us ....

When Sacrifice Was Cool

The Kitchen is Closed

The Problem at the Airports

Ground Zero

A Small Pond

New Glory

Slaves to Our Freedom

Dope

Wheres the Outraged

The Solution at the Airports

The Silent Majority

Crazy Talk

The Man in the Sky

The Oxygen of Terrorism

AWOL

Neighbors Looking Out for Neighbors

Dark by Choice

The Empty Podium

When Your Only Right is to Remain Silent

2017

No Security

A Game of Inches

Volunteers

A Hill of Beans

If You Know the Enemy and Know Yourself .

The Lamp You Dont Turn Off

Eye on the Ball

Something and Nothing

To Die For

Nothing But Time

Watching What We Say

Not Just Different

Introduction

When the shock of September 11, 2001 wore off and Washington, D.C. went back to what it does bestpointing fingers and renaming thingsthe phrase we heard over and over with regard to our intelligence agencies was connecting the dots. The FBI and CIA failed to connect the dots, the strands of information that warned a real war was about to start with a sneak attack.

But plenty of dots arent being connected by the average citizen, either, and thats what this book is about: how we all can connect what we do on the home front to quicker victory here with fewer of our servicemen overseas.

Traveling the country, I find that people want to do more here at home, but are at a loss as to what. Even when the government issues a Terrorism Advisory, its maddeningly vagueTerrorist alert today! Code Burnt Orange!

And what? I always want to say, Bring a sweater?

Of course, there are reasons why the American government no longer helps us make war-related connections, mostly having to do with where those connections might lead us politically. Theres a World War II-era government poster that reads Should brave men die so you can drive?a question we might well ask ourselves today. But dont count on the government to ask it, not in an age when campaign contributions from oil companies are so important to getting elected.

And so were on our ownbut thats 0K. Because if the government wont tell you what time it is, I will. In the pages that follow are the posters I believe the United States government should be making and plastering everywhere, like they did in World War I, World War II and the Cold War. We see in posters from those eras a government unafraid to call upon its citizens to curb travel, save tin, buy bonds, plant a victory gardenwhatever it took to make those connections for people, so the average Joe knew what he or she could do to help the war effort.

Of course, this is a very different kind of war, and what we can do to win it is sometimes very different from how other generations pitched in. But the common thread from then to now is the idea that civilian support can be the deciding factor in a war, provided people know what to do. Loving my country as I do, it is my sincerest hope that this book will help.

Make Them Fight All of Us

If youve already given blood and sent a charitable donation directly to Julia Roberts so she can personally hand it over to a World Trade Center victim, and youve already made the tough personal sacrifices outlined by our president shop, travel, and go out to eatyou may now be asking yourself, What more can I do to help the war effort?

What we can all do is show a willingness to change. And Im not talking about simple, superficial change like putting a flag on our cars or refraining from criticizing the administration. The concept Im talking about is sacrifice. Some people do it for their families, some people do it to get rock-hard abs, but not many of us seem willing to do it for America.

Americans today confuse freedom with not being asked to sacrifice. The tact that you cant have everything YOU want exactly when you want it has somehow become un-American. Wed rather sacrifice virgins than our SUVs: Ill guzzle as much gas as I wantthis isnt Europe! Sure you can, Captain America, but just try to imagine a World War II-era American saying, Ill use as much damn gas and tin as I wantand while were at it, screw your victory garden! Theyd call you Axis Asshole. Somehow, America morphed from a nation that embraced rationing to one that practically impeached Jimmy Carter for having the nerve to suggest we turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater. Even in the wake of an event SO invasive and frightening as September 11, not one person in a leadership position in America asked anyone to really give up or rethink anything. Pandering to a spoiled citizenry had become so ingrained, it remained in place even as buildings and complacencies crumbled. Keep shopping! the president told us, letting the political chips fall where they may.

Shop till they drop!

Yes, we were asked to do very little, and we responded. Thats the bargain we tacitly make with our presidents: we wont ask too much of you, if you dont ask too much of us. Especially in these past two decades of unprecedented prosperity, we Americans have come to love win-win situations: risk-free investments, no-pain dentistry, the high-fat diet. Weve grown accustomed to success without effort. In operations

like the Gulf War, Somalia and Yugoslavia, we got the lowdown on our war from the nightly news while continuing to work, golf, build our stock portfolios and enjoy Frasier. Its not that we dont careits just that wed prefer flot to get involved. Were more supporters than doers, great at the symbolic stuff like flags, ribbons, and benefit concerts. (Sitting through Liza Minnelli is too a sacrifice!)

Nothing is really our problemespecially when youre talking about an outlay of time or money, or, God forbid, something that causes stress! By Thanksgiving 2001, we were right back to how to cope and things to make yourself feel better. After a hard day of stimulating the economy we congratulated ourselves for getting through this trauma without letting the bastards change the way we live!

You hear a lot of that: if we stop bowling or screwing or whatever it is we wanted to keep doing anyway, then they win! And we pretend were dumb enough to believe that this extends not just to our American virtues, but also to our flaws. We convince ourselves that even our shameless waste, our unchecked consumption and our appalling ignorance of anyplace in the world except our own little corner must continueor they win! No, when you become smarter and less gluttonous, you win. We all win!

And all of us can, if we want to, have a big hand in winning this war. In World War II, the axisthe original one, not the cover hand working todayhad to fight every American, and they knew it. Civilians, and the level of support they give their protectors, make the difference in war timea lesson we learned, or should have, in Vietnam. Wed bomb a bridge, and in hours the North Vietnamese townspeople had built a crude but usable replacement. It was sheer hell for our guys because they had to fight the whole country.

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