It is a rainy, gross day in Manhattan, but the city still has a certain buzz to it. President Obama is visiting the World Trade Center tomorrow and the papers are splashed with catchy headlines about Osama Bin Laden. I sort of loved the last few lines from this New York Times piece about his clandestine complex of evil*:When children playing in the fields let a ball fly into the compound by mistake, the owners never let them retrieve it but gave them 50 rupees to buy a new one, said one of the neighbors, a woman with a small boy on her hip who gave her name only as Bibi. When the children began to throw balls into the compound on purpose to get more money, the owners kept paying, she said, laughing.Not only was he the face of terrorism, OBL was apparently like Mr. Mertle from “The Sandlot,” the mean old neighbor played by James Earl Jones. Instead of a 300-pound English Mastiff called Hercules to protect him, he just employed armed couriers ready to kill on command. And in this narrative, Obama is obviously Benny with his speedy PF Flyers, "shoes guaranteed to make a President run faster and jump higher.”
*When President Bush rambled on about an Axis of Evil, he was just confused; he actually meant "complex of evil" all along.
