An epistle to Uncle Sam
Gulberg III, A-E 28-29
Lahore
21st April 2018
Dear Uncle,
Greetings,
My dear Uncle I don’t know (m)any things about English, but I know enough to write to you. Although my schedule is very busy, I decided to take time out to write you as soon as I caught the hang of the way your shamelessly gainful success prevailed and is still prevailing in Syria, which is still resonating your selflessness all over the world. I must appreciate the way you have outstandingly manipulated the use of technology to curb war through “perfectly executed” strikes and chemical weapons. Your strategy to reconstruct or reestablish Syria, I agree, could not be fulfilled without destroying the country itself.
Great way to start and continue!
I appreciate the magnanimity of your kindness to Syria. Your efforts and toils, without which the Syrians are unlikely to be able to move on to peaceful living, will certainly peel off the ‘bad’ image of their country. You are, I suppose, undeniably best known as a peace-maintainer who does ‘good’ from evil and vice versa, and eminent scholars sipping their intelligence out of coffee cups and trying hard to push water uphill with the rake of debates and arguments might never wonder what has become of this title of yours in the context of Syria these days. I ardently believe, dear uncle, applying your geomantic techniques to the debris in Syria and fumbling oil sources out of the bowels of its earth, you will easily measure with your incalculable insight if there is any chances to win or not against the war on terror through just terror. You have proven, after all, that the impressively dumb response and frivolous intelligence of yours can’t go wholly unused, you will not take very short time to do it.
Keep this great project on its way! It will mark a major shift in history suggesting how you have brought war in mainstream politics with a single stick of ‘order’. And don’t worry, deception-driven media is already playing a potential role in singing your Odyssean experiments to eradicate terrorism. Selling the idea based on ‘the superior virtue of being oppressed’, the meetings for peace will attempt to redress, through ‘plans’ and ‘plains’, the worst the war has caused and is causing to further pave the way for future-projects of your unquestionable generosity.
League of Nations, International Peace Bureau, World Peace Council and World Peace Foundation are celebrating, at this holy occasion, the ritual of silence, which itself speaks of their resting in ‘peace’.
May their worship take more power!
There is no need for such pray as it is already taking strength out of the superbly intelligent technological strategies you have graciously built. All over the world your main-stay, nuclear power, is raising glamourous terror which docks at the harbours of ‘peace’ at the end.
Last week, I was quite happy at how you send to our country extraordinarily well-mannered diplomats who set a precedent for others to follow. Particularly in Pakistan and generally in other countries, the democratic pouches you launch devotedly collect blood-stains of the citizens and leave after they are endowed with scared ‘immunity’ in view of their diplomatic dutifulness. The only problem out of the many they have is, they are too ‘social’ and because of it don’t contain their wildly shaped bearings to their houses after they have drunk. “What happens afterwards?” an analyst argues, “All such their acts signal a ‘bad’ image of uncle’s ethical standards”. Since your honour is very endearing to me, I immediately replied; “What does my uncle has to do with such images by the way? He makes his own mirror to see how he looks, should look and the world should be”.
Please respond to a question he further asked and left me baffled; “If the task of your uncle and his allies (all of them obscure before the people the real objective in the act of ‘stacking’ on the country ‘perfect’ weapons) is to smooth the troubled passage of ‘peace’ in Syria, to alleviate terror-triggered violence so that its economic and social stability may easily get on a track, how is it to avoid posing all of their own unpopular interests between war and oil?”
I heard that last year you did not catch up a single wink of sleep, I’m quite sure that from now on, you will cherish sound rest as the cries and protest against your holy acts of managing peace through war are running into your ears like the sing-song of triumph. Making Syria a sepulchral mound, you sagacity at controlling ‘voices’ will send across the globe, positive rays of democracy. It will, I imagine, ground your influence whose splendidly rapacious claw has spread its hold around the land to control sources.
Since you are exceptionally well at waving the magical wand of maintaining stability, the people especially in Syria, I was told, get allured by your babbling which is both; creepily tailored for returns and tucked with ‘peace’ or ‘prosperity’. Every-day, before their hunger-striven eyes, forced to sit in camps like refugees in their own country, appear in newspapers the images of pleasantly lugubrious faces in stiffen attire, with the gestures of reciting scripts and slogans in meetings and greetings, the kind of people who seem to be transported from another world of fantasy.
A few days back, having listened to oracular visions and fate of their country, remarkably silly and superfluously contextual though they may be, the wonder decking at their minds magically turned into a trauma to cope with deaths in the operation executed by your dexterous military.
Since that day, I’m haunted with the dream which has no picture but a voice, as if the visual screen suddenly has turned black or I have got blind;
Long live democracy under whose shade peace-settlement organization sleep quietly!
Long live democracy where business and politics join hands and the rapacity of both knows no boundaries!
Long live democracy whose only and holy agenda is its own survival at the expense of the death of human beings!
Long live democracy which establishes a ‘super-order’ through disorder!
Long live democracy which fabricates the ideals of ‘prosperity’ and ‘peace’ and sells them through media spins!
Long live democracy for which the preciousness of human life is lighter than its own genuinely fiendish interests!
Long live democracy for which ‘justice’ is just another term whose even superficial application is suspended before the privileges figged in “immunity”!
I hope these haunting voices will never follow you because it is one thing to craft the need about peace settlement just to cater economic needs, and another thing to attempt to maintain peace after creating chaos with the mission to mark an end on terror, and you are trying, by all means, to make both ends meet. Endure my bitter words (if you find any) not coated appropriately, because there is still a shortage of sugar due to the investigation cases filed on the sugar mills in Pakistan.
Your niece!
Sumera Saleem
a resident of Pakistan
