Dear members of the Bush administration,

Yesterday I read an article about the possibility that terrorists could use games like ‘World of Warcraft’ to communicate with each other and spread hidden messages about plans and attacks. This theory was vented by one Dr. Dwight Toavs of the ‘Defense University’ on a conference in Washington Tuesday. I was in shock after I read the article. It suddenly dawned upon me that Dr. Dwight Toavs was not only absolutely right: but that this was just the tip of the iceberg, and that, far-fetched as his theory seems, he has overlooked the most obvious communication avenue for terrorists: poetry.

As you might know a ‘poem’ is a piece of coded text in which the writers uses so-called ‘metaphors’ to hide the real message of the poem. That already makes it a very useful medium for terrorists, as they, using poetry, can conceal their true message by pretending the text is about something else. A terrorist might write a line like ‘Oh wavering flowers of the city, where it that the bees could honk and loom’ and what he would be really saying to his fellow jihadists is ‘Guys, go take a cap and bomb those buildings flat’.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Arabic poetry has seen a suspicious rise in recent years. But please, let’s not forget that these terrorists could use any sort of poetry to communicate their message: what about avant-garde, Flarf, language poetry? They are all suspect. Dr. Dwight Toavs is right and wrong: writing poetry is dirt cheap while playing WOW costs 14 bucks a month, let’s not forget that’s a months salary in Afghanistan! So we can safely conclude that poetry is the tool par excellence for terrorists to communicate their hidden messages.

And it doesn’t stop with contemporary poetry, oh no. Who says these terrorists aren’t secretly reading Shakespeare to each other in those caves in Tora Bora? What did the Lithuanian poet Henrikas Nagys really mean when he wrote ‘I was awakened by the whistling sound of pigeons wings and the flood of sunshine rising in my eyes’? Is there really any end to the vile possibilities of misuse one can imagine such tools to have? Clearly, any society that is serious about combatting terrorism must do something about poetry.

What can we do? It’s clear that we have to scan the entire literary opus of humanity for hidden terrorist messages. But only experts can do that: a regular CIA trainee will have no idea what these poems mean. Therefore I must propose that the US government employs all currently known poets, domestic or foreign, to scan contemporary and past poetry for messages that seem, well, suspect. It’s a gigantic operation but it’s for the sake of World Security. While Dr. Dwight Toavs from the ‘Defense University’ has a minor point I would want to suggest he stops wasting tax payers money playing World of Warcraft and instead focus on the real dangers, the world of poetry.

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