I've been trying to stay out of the political sphere as it is making me increasingly cynical, and that is not a good perspective on the world when one is plunging into one's senior years. It turns one into a crank more concerned with the neighborhood simpletons is in his yard. But this whole mail bomb deal is starting to crack me up.
I don't want to sound like most of my colleagues do whenever something happens in the news and they suddenly become experts on weather, climate, international relations, socialist ideology, or firearms. My colleagues mean well, and certainly see themselves as laborers for salvation, but most of them don't carry a deep education in anything practical and are woefully inexperienced outside of what's now called "The Blue Bubble".
However, I'm not a whitey from the East, and I wasn't always a holy boy. I once told a bishop that I had been a member of the NRA [the only real source of training and safety; the best insurance for one's firearms] and I watched her face freeze, then blanch, as she took on the general verbal hesitation of a GPS when it's "re-calculating".
You see, when you have an Ivy League education, appear East Coast white, wear Oliver Peoples eyeglass frames, and have passed through the ordination maw of The Episcopal Church, it is assumed that you are just another clergy NPC. It literally renders colleagues speechless whenever I deviate from the narrative.
But, I digress.
The thing is, I know how to build a bomb; what's nowadays called an "improvised explosive device". I was taught by the best people in world at this [not the Weather Underground; the Defense Department]. They taught me a lot of other things that I rarely use, such as firearms maintenance and repair, conversational Arabic, a surprising number of ways to kill someone with one's bare hands, and the manual of arms.
If the bomb shown on CNN that was received at their studio is representative of the mail bombs sent to various public loudmouths, then these weren't bombs. For one, the advantage of a pipe bomb is that all of its parts, the detonator, the timer, the wiring, the shrapnel, the powder, etc., are contained within the device. Real pipe bombs more or less look like...pipes.
Also, the clock attached by wires to the "bomb" doesn't have a timer. So, it's just a clock, rather like the one that strange kid in Texas made for his school project a few years ago that looked like a bomb. It may have gotten the attention of the then-President, but it wasn't even a functional clock. The CNN "bomb" at least can tell time. Given that there is no apparent detonator, it can't blow up.
So, it isn't a bomb. It cannot explode. It was made not to maim or kill, but to scare. That explains why it had to look so obviously like one of those bombs that Wile E. Coyote would make out of parts from Acme. Even to a piker, it had to look like a bomb.
But here's the part that sends me to Cynicville: Someone at CNN, probably a mailroom employee, dumped what looked like a bomb onto a table or desk in what appears to be a break room and took photos of it. Then they told law enforcement about it. That's not what people do when they receive a bomb, or even a "bomb", in the mail.
Given that within minutes similarly worded reactions appeared across social media, and a fully formed op-ed piece was posted in proper news outlets, my inner cynic is getting restless.