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Out of Left Field (really!) |
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Isaacstan Has a Dilemma |
 The Isaacstanian National Flag |
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of sheep into his remote country after making a pact with the U.S. |
of TheColumnists.com
LAST NIGHT I, Stan Isaacs,
had the strangest dream, a dream that followed a day of reading
about the happenings in Afghanistan, the intrigue in Pakistan,
the roles in the current war on terrorism of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan.
I dreamed that I was the premier of the recently discovered People’s
Republic of Isaacstan, a country that lay in a narrow corridor
between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan on the Afghanistan border.
Facts about Isaacstan came to me out of the ether. The capital
of Isaacstan is Stantinople. Its monetary unit is called the
brick. There are 100 million bricks to one U.S. dollar. The country
covers some 95,000 square miles, about the size of Oregon. It
has a population of some 480,000--about the same as Wyoming.
Its chief industries are yogurt processing, nail polish packaging,
the production of goatskin clothing and farming. It is rich in
livestock with 13 million goats, 10 million chickens, 209,000
pigs, but not many sheep.
Isaacstan is unique for being 33 per cent Muslim, 33 per cent
Catholic, 33 per cent Atheists-and it has some former Protestant
missionaries who were converted to Judaism in the city of Islamagood.
Until recently Isaacstan was regarded by the outside world as
a country with a severe topography not unlike Afghanistan. The
few visitors had to rough it in tented hotels on wind-blown plateaus.
The hotels did not accept credit cards.
This all changed when hot sulphur springs were discovered in
the valley of Posh. That inspired the erection of a modern spa
that attracted visitors from all over the globe. Alan Walendowski,
Mr. Fixit of my cabinet, was appointed Commissar of Tourism.
An airfield was built to accommodate the influx of vacationers,
and tourism became almost as significant an industry as yogurt
processing. Tourist attractions included the sampling of 37 different
kinds of yogurt, buying goatskinware on the cheap and attending
spirited games of thrashplotz-a game that is a cross between
soccer and rugby played in a sea of mud.
Isaacstan is at the present time an ally of the United States.
It wasn’t always that way. During the height of the cold
war, when Isaacstan was having economic difficulties, it cozied
up to the Soviets, shipping goatskin overcoats to the Kremlin.
This prompted the United States to put Isaacstan on its foreign
aid list and the economic crisis was averted. The American dollars
allowed for the upgrading of our education system, and now we
had 99 99/100s literacy; there was one old woman who refused
to learn how to read and write because she would not take any
time away from sewing goatskin overcoats.
I must confess this was an anxiety dream. As the premier of Isaacstan
a situation arose in which I was torn between choosing one of
two actions in the interests of what was right. My dilemma: to
act in behalf of humanity or to enrich my 480,000 countrymen
and women.
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bankers stand in front of the national treasury, which contains more than a million bricks. |
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Early on, when the United States declared war on terrorists, I told President Bush he could use our country as a base to send small units of soldiers and commandos into Afghanistan to try to gain intelligence about where the Taliban was, to infiltrate and wipe out the Taliban soldiers. But I also told him we would not allow bombers to use our airfield as a base because we feared they would kill innocent Afghans, what the American military calls “collateral damage.”
The bombers based elsewhere hit Red Cross hospitals and killed other civilians. It brought a backlash from Muslims all over the world. And it hasn’t dented the Taliban. We were sure, then, that our refusal to accommodate American bombers was correct.
But now we were having second thoughts. Now we hear that the U.S. is moving toward establishing bases in neighboring Tajikistan so that it can put its bombers in better postion to strike at the Taliban. And Tajikstan would receive millions of dollars for this. There were indications as well that the U.S. was planning to establish similar bases in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and award them millions of dollars, too.
This had me tossing and turning. Isaacstan could use those millions of dollars. We would like to buy more sheep. We needed computers in our schools. We had poverty, not as much as some of the slum sections of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, but more than we found acceptable. We could use that money to help eradicate poverty. Should we join the Stans?
I was so agitated about all this that I was jolted awake. I didn’t find out if I acted in behalf of the innocent Afghans who might be the subjects of more collateral damage or if I preferred to take the American money and allow those bombers to use the airfield of Isaacstan.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet said, “To sleep-perchance to dream: ay there’s the rub!”
Ah yes.
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs.
The illustrations are from IMSI's Master/Clips collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. The Stan Isaacs
caricature is © 2001
by Jim Hummel.
You
can comment on this column or contact Stan Isaacs with an email
to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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