Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
You know what they oughta do?
It seems like our government is reactive and not proactive with respect to terrorism. Some guy hides explosives in his shoes and now we all have to take off our damned shoes at the airport. This most recent guy hides explosives in his underwear and now they’re strip-searching folks in Nigeria. And boy are the Nigerians pissed about it.
Remember Robert Redford’s job in Three Days of the Condor? He was a reader. His task was to skim through all manner of thrillers and determine if there were any ideas or themes that might be of interest to his CIA handlers. This seems rather inefficient, though, because you’re wading through a sea of published novels to find the occasional interesting tidbit . . . and the fact that they are PUBLISHED novels strikes me as an unwanted filter, such that you will only find plots that have some commercial appeal (at least in the mind of one publisher).
A book proposal featuring an earnest young man strapping explosives to his nut sack would not, IMHO, go far. And yet it happened.
So here’s my idea: our government should hire writers of marginal talent to serve as professional brainstormers. What they would do all day long is generate ideas for terrorist schemes against the United States. They would have to be marginally talented writers because those professional authors are too used to thinking, “Gee, will this sell?” to come up with any really rotten ideas. But take some guy who has published a couple of short stories in some lesser known zines but can’t manage to land an agent, let alone get his book published, and he’d be a wellspring for the half-baked ideas of which these terrorists seem so fond.
I’m not talking about me, mind you. I’m happy with my job. But I suspect there are a lot of writers like me who actually need the work.
There would doubtless be some unintended consequences. I hate to think what DHS would do with a plot about female suicide bombers hiding plastique in their breast implants.
D.
Why not combine universal health care with security and just give everyone full body MRIs before boarding with a doc there to read the results?
The government has been doing what you’re suggesting w/ writers (though not so much the ‘marginal talent’ part) for years now. Not as permanent employees, but as occasional consultants.
(And embedding a bomb inside yourself isn’t very effective – an Al Qaeda operative in Saudi (I think) with a bomb stuffed up his ass was standing right next to his target, a high-level counter-terrorism or intelligence officer of some kind. The AQ agent was pretty much vaporized – but his target was unharmed.)
Protected static beat me to it.
I remember that, after September 11, they were seeking out writers and such to get ideas for what terrorists might do.
Pretty unimaginative writers if they couldn’t manage to anticipate the Scrotal Bomber.
Oh…I would love that job. A dream job. Bad writing. Bad plots. No need to succeed.
The gov’t was consulting SF writers long before 9/11. I seem to remember an article I read in Omni about this very thing, and that would have been in the mid-80s. See also SIGMA, founded in 1992.
And, well… maybe they didn’t anticipate the Nutsack Bomber because it isn’t a terribly effective way to blow up a plane, just an efficient (if overly energetic) method of castration. 🙂
The problem could be that they got more ideas than they could handle. I mean, normally when you write a story, you’re facing it from the perspective of how does the hero/villain blow up the whatever and still make it out alive. And, that’s generally the same perspective most people have in real life. And, that’s kind of limiting. But, when you look at it from the point of view where it’s okay if the character blows himself up trying to destroy whatever, then you have a much wider field of possibilities, which could have led to information overload.
I wonder if there are any explosives powerful enough that you could hide a sufficiently destructive charge in, say, your nasal cavity. Then you could blow your nose and everyone else’s, too!
I think the answer is “yes.” They did some things with explosives on an episode of Mythbusters and some of the things they would not name and, if I recall, there was something that produced a big explosion with a small quantity.