Souped-Up Honda Civics

Of all the ridiculous things Ahmad Rahami could get obsessed with, he found souped-up Honda Civics. Until he grew up, that is, and got serious, and thought he’d try his hand at terrorist bombing.

“His other known obsession was souped-up Honda Civics that he liked to race.”

Shortly after I woke up yesterday, like many people in the New York area, I got an eerie, Orwellian feeling from the screeching alarm sound coming from my iPhone to warn me that Rahami the bombing suspect was on the loose, and presumed armed. It offered a link to a photo.

Since Rahami was already identified, I assume that N.R. Kleinfeld, the The New York Times writer, spent the morning in Elizabeth, New Jersey, asking Rahami’s neighbors around his family’s First American Fried Chicken restaurant about him, because the Times had a profile up within minutes of his being arrested, it seemed.

Friends quickly posted it on Facebook, some with dubious, “Look how clueless the Times is as usual” kind of comments, objecting to what they saw as a rush to tell a too-obvious story of radicalization caused by his going home and seeing Afghanistan for the first time. (It seemed like it had a li’l something to do with it to me.) Others, such as a Muslim friend of mine, seemed to like the story though. Since yesterday it routed  over 5,000 people to see the First American Fried Chicken Rap that some of Rahami’s customers made for him a few years ago.

The sad truth is, it’s a lot easier to make a homemade bomb than it is to pimp out a Honda Civic, or run a chicken joint profitably, or get a B.A., or immigrate illegally through the Arizona desert, or to do lots of other things. Nothing is really stopping any religious fanatic or white supremacist or anti-government conspiracy theorist from making one at any time. Nothing, except the fact that so unbelievably few of them are actually that hateful. We are closer than we think.