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Friday, August 11, 2006

My Shampoo is Dy-no-mite!


A Comedy Routine:

If your car is stolen in the hood, you know it's a brother.

If you're shot at in Arkansas, you know it's a redneck.

If your plane is hijacked or blown up, you know it's an A-rab.

In the world of law enforcement, when a crime is committed, you round up the usual suspects, which normally don't include every air breathing mammal within eyeshot. The usual suspects are those folks who are most likely to share motives that the culprit might possess. Thus, as the above example attests, for the above crimes you respectively round up blacks, rednecks, or a-rabs. Of course, there are a lot of human rights issues involved when you search for the usual suspects. But 'rounding up' a subject is different from 'inconveniencing' a subject. Thus, you can question a lot of folks who may have a motive, but questioning of course is an inconvenience, not a deprivation of rights.

Which brings us of course to those pesky a-rabs, who are a bit different than those pesky blacks, rednecks, Republicans, or what have you, in so far as they can pose a real threat to life as we know it. But we are somewhat embarrassed by our suspicions, so we share the pain and the inconvenience with everyone. And so we have mutually shared inconvenience by broadening the profile of the usual suspects to include those folks who have an infinitesimal chance of being terrorists. And so we all are frisked, scanned, interrogated, and de-shampooed at the boarding line, which as trends suggest will soon broaden from planes to trains and automobiles. We will all be inconvienced of course, but no one can accuse us except in our most private moments as pre-judging, no matter what the statistics say.