For Your Approval: Lighten up, Al Qaeda!

Sometimes I try to be funny, but my wife Kate Zimmerman is a humour columnist, and actually is funny.

This is one of her latest pieces, which appear every Sunday in the North Shore News. It's about internal communication so I thought it would be of interest to readers of For Your Approval.

For more of Kate's work, visit her Web site or check out her blog, Kate of Late.

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SUBMISSION TO: Terror Times, the internal online Al Qaeda henchmen newsletter

FROM: Lexi Donnelly, Employee Number 6009

DATE: Spring, 2007

TOPIC: Introductory column from our new party planner

Lighten up!

with Lexi Donnelly

Hola!

Allow me to introduce myself: I am Mr. bin Laden’s new party planner, Lexi! He has brought me in to raise Al Qaeda henchmen spirits and help you connect with each other. I’ll do that through festive gatherings I’ll be organizing at secret locations all over the world and announcing in this newsletter. As Mr. bin Laden says, “Above all, terrorism should be fun!”

To get that fun going, Mr. bin Laden asks that, in your future correspondence with him, you dot the “i” in “bin” with a happy face. “For what is a smile but a frown turned upside down?” he sagely asked me the other week, and I’d never heard it put quite so perfectly. No wonder you all revere him and do his bidding, no matter how nefarious. Ha ha!

Anyhoo, I’m old pals with Osama, as I call him when we’re face-to-veil. We met at Jeddah University, where I first noticed him through binoculars at a frosh week sock hop, leading the all-male conga line. He was a party animal back then -- he took charge of recruitment for one of the harder-to-fill fraternities and did a fabulous job. At graduation, he was headed into his family’s construction business and I was just taking on the role of comptroller at Enron; we joked at the time, from opposite ends of an enormous room, that someday our paths might cross again.

Flash forward to early 2007. I had found myself ready for a career switch after my decade of keeping Hollinger International on the straight and narrow when I saw Osama’s ad online, on Craigslist.

I thought you’d get a kick out of hearing about my first encounter with our mutual boss last week. We met poolside at the Dubai Hilton. He wore sunglasses and a ballcap reading “Death to Whoever” over his turban to ensure that he would not be recognized. As you know, he is one of the world’s most wanted men, and not in the George Clooney way. (I wore a floor-length black sheath with my eyes showing, but you probably guessed that already! Ha!)

Osama began our conversation by saying that morale at Al Qaeda was at an all-time low. “I tell my henchmen they will receive their rewards in paradise, but this is not enough for some of them, especially the Gen-Xers,” he told me morosely over a cup of tea. “They complain of the dangers in the work and say their lunch and coffee breaks are ‘abbreviated.’”

“Osama, baby, look at yourself!” I advised him. “Seriously. Why the long face? How do you expect to lighten things up around here when everything with you is doom, gloom, and paradise later? Why no paradise now?”

“That’s not how we operate,” he said sternly.

So I pushed him in the water, and we were off to the races! He started to guffaw, the ball cap floated away, and he could barely hoist himself out of the pool with the weight of his sodden robe. “Ah! Zany hijinks! I had forgotten they still existed in this world gone mad,” he said, climbing up the ladder, wheezing with laughter.

“You know, if you weren’t so uptight, you could have pulled me into the pool with you,” I told him a bit flirtatiously, though I knew he had multiple wives. For half a second, I thought he’d do it. But then he remembered the same water would have touched both our flesh, or something like that, and politely excused himself to change robes. Half an hour and many solo cups of tea later, he reemerged with several grim-looking bodyguards who now stood between him and the pool.

“Where were we?” he asked pleasantly. “Oh, yes, how to inflame the spirits of my people so they will re-dedicate themselves to my mighty works.”

“What about a good old-fashioned hootenanny?” I asked. I never really run out of ideas.

“Men and women singing together?” he asked, his brow furrowing. One of the bodyguards began ostentatiously polishing a machete.

“No? How ’bout a rodeo?” I offered, picturing the men on one side and the women on the other side of an arena.

“Men interacting with cloven-hoofed animals?” Osama asked, his brow furrowing even deeper. I worried for him -- wrinkles were clearly in his future.

“What would you say to a Mexican fiesta, with piñatas resembling hated world leaders?” I proposed.

“Now you’re talking,” said Osama. “For party favours, automatic weapons that the guests can use to open the piñatas!”

In my experience, weapons and morale-boosting parties don’t mix, as I remember telling Lady Barbara Amiel Black when she showed up in a dangerously pointy bustier for one Hollinger shindig. So I offered an alternative.

“I was thinking of something more cheerful and upbeat -- a little dancing, a little spicy food, sombreros, a mariachi band. Kids running around stoning chickens, cackling maniacally. Maybe we could even have a contest to see who has the best maniacal cackle!”

“I like it,” said Osama, trying out his own madman’s chuckle, which needed work.

So that’s what we’ve come up with -- the first of many prospective company parties. Keep watching this space for more!

Here are the gory -- or should I say glory? Ha ha! -- details.

You and your family (females and infidels excepted) are commanded to congregate in Cave 2060, You-Know-Where, on Sunday, April 1 at 11:30 a.m. for a Mexican fiesta, Al Qaeda style. Expect fiery tacos, soothing guacamole and displays of machismo such as eating the tequila worm without, of course, touching any tequila. Bring a change of robe as we’ll be importing a small ocean and you could get wet.
No need to reply. We know you’ll show. Of course I will not be there, but rest assured, a good time will be had by Al … Qaeda! Ha!