Friday, April 19, 2013

"THE MAN IN THE WHITE HAT"

Now, wait a minute.  Wasn't the "man in the white hat" the cowboy hero of lore?  Isn't the "man in the white hat" supposed to be a John Wayne type, the uber-stalwart American?  The "good" guy?  The grizzled ruggedly handsome get-it-done-er who takes on the guys in the black hats and saves the day in the nick of time, riding in on his steed Silver, guns a-blazin', rescuing chillun and elderly women and sweeping the blonde-haired beauty with heaving bosoms into his arms as he rides off into the sunset, another good deed done, another day saved?

Fiction, of course.  Pot-boilers.  Spaghetti Westerns.  Real life, of course, doesn't work that way.  Real life is ironic as hell, sometimes.

There is a gargantuan manhunt underway for the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, an attack which left scores injured (many "traumatic amputations"--that makes me wince to even type those words) and a few dead.  Boston-area police and SWAT teams and the FIB have already taken out one suspect, and now they are searching for another, the dude in the much-viewed pictures that have circulated on the Internet and have been shared copiously on social media (by the way, when did "social media" become a part of the lexion? seems recent)...the "man in the white hat".

I wonder...I wonder that if this is indeed a terrorist attack, which it assuredly seems to be, and if this youngish guy is part of the Martyr's Brigade or Al-Quyeesha or Muslims for Jihad or whatever the fuck they want to call themselves...I wonder if maybe he chose to wear a white hat on purpose?  I wonder if the white hat has a relevance in and of itself.  Maybe it's a matter of perspective.  Maybe he sees himself as a John Wayne-type.  Maybe he sees himself as a freedom fighter.  Maybe he views us Americans as infidels that must be terrorized and crushed like las cucarachas that we are.  Maybe he wore the white hat as a statement.  Not to get all Project Runway, here, but maybe he accessorized whilst he terrorized....

But, with all that said, if he truly is part of the team that detonated the bomb and maimed innocent people and killed a few, too, and brought us all smackdabback to 9/11?  All that said?  He'd be better off dead.

A flowering red bullet hole, stark contrast to the new white of the hat, would be a nice accessory, too.