Greetings from the Ridge.

Rumor has it that we have terrorists in our government. In fact, it’s been loosely confirmed that the CIA hires employees whose only job is to think like terrorists ...saboteurs. … the bad guys.

These super-brains spend their entire day looking for ways to put our nation into a tangled mess or a heap of ashes. They meet, they plot, they plan, then they turn their findings over to the CIA problem-solvers to prepare for any eventuality. What a job! Your grandfather may have given his life to save the country while the grandson looks for ways to blow it up.

I guess that such a department is a good idea if you’re going to try to out-think the evil lords, but I wonder if these mock fanatics are overlooking the obvious.

Okay, I don’t spend large amounts of my Coonridge hours pondering my terrorist plots, but I do have a few ideas the CIA might want to consider. For example, if I were a terrorist intent on bringing our nation to its knees I’d ….well……
I’d destroy our batteries. Surely there’s a virus lurking around the bottom of some laboratory tube that when goosed and encouraged to multiply would eat up the nation’s supply of Ever Ready and Duracell’s. Communications? Dead. Lap tops, PDA’s, hearing aids, watches, smoke alarms, pace makers, emergency lighting devices, toothbrushes..all caput, and probably the Pentagon itself is somehow hooked to a battery somewhere. You destroy our batteries and our dingy’s dead in the water.
Another key item for any potential terrorists should be the nation’s supply of Ranch dressing. Oh, I know this sounds silly, but I swear the stuff has become as much a staple of the American diet as rice for the Chinese….as ubiquitous as ice water… the cell phone of the culinary industry. Dear Lord, Ranch dressing pops up everywhere!
Schools use it as a lubricant to get little packages of vegetables down the throats of children at lunchtime, passing out tiny cups of the gooey stuff with each raw carrot. (Apparently there’s something in the metabolism of a carrot that removes the calories from the ranch dressing.) Ranch will be the dressing tub at the salad bar that’s always down to just a spoonful. Just this week I ate in a restaurant where a squeeze tube of Ranch dressing was sitting there as a condiment, right alongside the ketchup and salt. I’d not seen this before and asked the waitress what it was used for. She said, “Oh, people put it on about everything. Mainly pizza.” If you can’t destroy our batteries, take away our Ranch dressing. We’ll starve.

And of course there’s the obvious terrorist target: our coffee. Shut off the java and our ship of state will begin leaking in mere moments. I recently had to take a fasting blood test where no coffee was allowed until my veins were drained. The first lab I visited didn’t take my brand of insurance; I had to wait until the doc’s office opened to get a new blood-letting prescription, I went to the hospital lab and the smiling triage officer gave me number 33 in the waiting line. By the time my blood started trickling into the vial it was boiling. I was ready to eat the poor lab assistant raw…without Ranch dressing. Okay, I’ll change my mind about the coffee…after two hours without my morning coffee I could have murdered Osama Bin Laden with my bare hands. I’ve read where members of the Taliban never touch caffeine. And you ask why they’re always blowing things up?
And although the males among us won’t understand this at all, any lady will tell you that the surest way to put our female population in a genuine state of orange alert is to take away the hairdressers. You think messing with the national power grid or attacking our nuclear facilities will cause havoc? Such inconveniences are small potatoes compared to the outrage and panic caused by the sudden disappearance of the country’s hair stylists. I know ladies who secretly live with the fear that their hairdressers will die before they do.
Those who know me well might expect me to list text messaging as a commodity so vital that if we’re deprived of it the U.S. will go bonkers. Nope. In fact, I hold with exactly the opposite viewpoint. I think the very introduction of texting to our society is a terrorist plot. Face it, the nation could blow up tomorrow and a great many of our fellow Americans would fail to notice. They’ll be busy texting.
You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.