In the minds of the fully whacked

By Ralph R. Reiland Monday, October 14, 2002

It was a funny week for readers' feedback. The best came from one of my friends who sort of runs large parts of Pittsburgh for Mayor Tom Murphy. "You're blaming Bill Clinton," he asked, incredulously, "for your dog's bad behavior?"

He was referring to my column last Monday about Clancy, our unruly and spirited Irish setter, who thought nothing of breaking through the glass of our second-floor window, sliding down the porch roof and running off to terrorize the women behind the counter of a nearby deli.

Here's the key part of last week's column, some Psychology 101, and what I thought was the obvious link to Bill Clinton and the Arabs, not Bill Clinton and Clancy:

"Clancy had followed his nose into the nearby Kroger supermarket, swaggered behind the deli counter where he was terrifying the help. To pacify him, amid shrieks of laughter and fright, the deli girls threw him some lunch meat. Anyone who knows dogs knows that was all a huge mistake. You don't have to be B. F. Skinner to know that Clancy's bad behavior had been reinforced."

And, as I said, it was the same the night the Bethel cops phoned to say they had Clancy over at the police station. When I got there, it was all happy cops and a wagging tail. "He's a great dog," said the arresting officer. "He seemed to like the ride. He rode in the front seat." No punishment, in short, for running wild, just a nice ride around the borough in the front seat with a new friend.

The article ended with this: "And the lesson? Bill Clinton tossed too much baloney at the enemy."

At school, one of my professor colleagues, saying he loved dogs and got a real kick out of reading about Clancy, asked if my editor at the Trib had cut something. Why, he asked, that ending about Clinton, just sort of hanging there?

Well, no, I explained, nothing was cut. And so, it seems, it was my fault, not Colin McNickle's, that these two smart guys didn't get it, didn't get the connection between Clinton and the deli girls.

Here, then, is the point: Clancy was bad and got to play catch with some nice but slightly jumpy lady who had an endless supply of meat. It's not unlike the Middle East in the 1990s. Be bad, blow up a school bus and Bill Clinton offers you half of Jerusalem. Be bad, send some dynamite kid to blow himself up in a pizza shop and Hillary flies over and plants a big kiss on Arafat's wife.

FREE BOOKS

The next-best reader's response came in the mail, free copies, again, for the second time, of the Quran and "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam."

Right off, of course, I didn't like the one title, "The Compete Idiot's Guide," not after 9-11. And yes, I know, there's an entire idiot's series, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Building Decks," etc. But after watching Islam's holy warriors smash two passenger planes into Manhattan, I don't have much patience with foreign condescension, with that Third-World style of anti-Americanism that generally consists of a triple overdose of jealousy, arrogance and intense stupidity.

In any case, I have read a few sections of my free books. From Surah 5 in the Quran, there's this gem: "the punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger" — like us, I suppose, for keeping the Israelis from being exterminated — is "execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land."

Ah, yes, the holy way of handling things. You offend Allah, or wage war against Allah — and that can mean, in the minds of the fully whacked, no more than flashing a bit of a lower arm, uncovered — and it's off with the feet and hands, from opposite sides. Get on the wrong side of a nutty mullah, in short, and it's death by stoning, or, with some luck, one might get to crawl out of this hellhole on stumps, into exile.

And, again from the Quran, some divine words to get Mohamed Atta's juices flowing in the airport last September: "Slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Seize them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them."

And there's this, from "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam," about women: "The real story of women in Islam is one of progressive liberation and elevation of status." Sounds like Greenwich Village. There's nothing, naturally, about how the religious police prevented young Muslim girls from running out of their burning school because they didn't have their headgear all intact. Better a cooked fifth-grader than one who makes it to safety with her hair uncovered.

And this, on Jews: "Islam does not teach its followers to be anti-Semitic." Of course, and all those front page stories this year in the Muslim press about Jews making holiday cookies out of Arab children were just sneaked onto the pages by some vegetarian in Norway.

Next time, guys, send something that's not so damn wacky.

Ralph R. Reiland, the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University, is a local restaurateur. E-mail him at rrreiland@aol.com.

-- Anonymous, October 16, 2002