Yes We Can!

Hell’s Bells For Afghanistan

Satan looked at his assembled Tuesday Group, so called because the senior fiends met with him every Tuesday to make their reports. Chaos was there, of course, barely contained in his boardroom chair, while another regular, Regret, moped expertly near his spot, hanging on to the back of the chair without ever quite sitting in it.

Anger, as always, tensed in his seat like a spring and seethed at the delay, while Defeat was unusually chipper, as though looking at good bad prospects.

“Ahem!” Satan cleared his throat. He was roundly ignored, each fiend trying to snatch advantage from another. “AHEM!” he tried again – same result.

“ATTENTION!” he roared and an eight-foot wall of flame swept across the conference room, charring whiskers here, setting ear-hair alight there, but absolutely focusing every participant on the chair.

“Thank you,” Satan said. “We are met today to talk about Afghanistan and American involvement there – unless anyone has other business?”

His lieutenants, still licking their burn wounds, had no other business.

“Good, very good,” Satan purred. “Let me set the stage. For years, the American department of Hell triumphed when a line of presidents committed American troops to intervene in a Vietnamese civil war on the wrong side. Americans backed various groups of corrupt thugs and fought against a group with popular backing, although they happened to be Communist. ‘Raggedy-Ass Bastards in Black Pajamas’ the U.S. called them – until the Raggedy-Ass Bastards kicked the United States the Hell and gone out of a united Vietnam.”

“Yes!” chorused the Tuesday group.

“It was a good time,” Satan reminisced. “Many needless deaths, much needless suffering, many opportunities for massacre and atrocities, and all in the service of an idea doomed at birth.”

“A good time!” the Tuesday group echoed.

“Now the good times are back!” Satan howled and accidentally incinerated a personal assistant. “All Heed My Fiendish Plan!”

“Heed!” said the Tuesday Group. “Heed!”

“First, is the regime,” Satan said. “It must be completely corrupt, absolutely lack popular support and be incapable of self-defense that doesn’t shed American blood. Do we have that in Karzai and Company?”

“Yes!” howled the Tuesday Group.

Satan glowed in the fake approval, the kind he loved most. “And then there’s the opposition!” he yelled. “They must be True Believers – Communist, Republicans, Extreme Islam, folks who follow Lou Dobbs – it doesn’t matter which, but we must have True Believers. And the True Believers in Afghanistan are?”

“The Taliban!” roared the Tuesday Group. “The Taliban!”

“Yes! The Taliban!” Satan snarled. “But even more important than a corrupt regime and an opposition of True Believers is. . .

“Is?” Satan prompted, annoyed.

“IS?” he snapped, wrath kindling.

The fiends were silent, each pretending to wait upon the other to answer an “obvious” question from Satan, except it wasn’t really obvious to any of them and all just hoped to escape punishment, except the newest fiend, Texting, so new he didn’t know enough to keep his fangs shut, said, in a tiny voice “An administration dumb enough to fall into the trap and stay there?”

Aghast at Texting’s audacity, the Tuesday group buzzed with self-serving comments until Satan bellowed “SAY WHUT?”

The other fiends snickered, but Texting was emboldened by even negative notice, so he repeated himself, this time in underlined bold: “An administration dumb enough to fall into the trap and stay there?”

“Yes!” Satan said in glee. “That’s it! Oh, Well Done, Texting, Well Done!” He beamed at Texting then turned his attention to the rest of the fiends. “As for those of you who didn’t get it, well done to you, too,” Satan smirked as howls and the smell of burning flesh rose until all the other fiends were indeed well done, not a medium-rare in the lot.

“I just love the smell of grilling,” Satan smiled, then asked the still-smoldering fiends, “So, gentlemen, we have a Corrupt Regime, opposed by True Believers and an American administration dumb enough to fall into the trap and stay there.

“Gentlemen,” Satan bellowed, “I ask you for all of Hell! Can we create another Vietnam?”

“Yes We Can!” the fiends howled as one. “Yes We Can! Yes We Can!

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