Minefield of symbols.

• Author: Galeano, Eduardo
• Position: The Upside-Down World - War on terrorism, Unitad States - Brief Article

"This will be a long war," the President of the planet announced. Bad news for the civilians who are dying or will be killed, but excellent news for the arms manufacturers.

With war, it doesn't matter if it's efficient. What matters is that it is profitable. Since September 11, the stocks of General Dynamics, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and other engines of the war machine skyrocketed on Wall Street.

As was the case during the bombardment of Iraq and Yugoslavia, television rarely shows the victims. It is too busy showing the runway of new models of weapons. In the age of the market, war is not a tragedy but a vast international trade show. Arms manufacturers need wars like umbrella makers need rain.

Here's a guide for the new war.

HOLLYWOOD. Reality imitates the movies: Everything blows up. Children get missiles from the film Atlantis in the McDonald's Happy Meal. It's getting harder and harder to tell ketchup from blood.

And now the Pentagon has hired screenwriters and special-effects experts to help predict what the next terrorist targets will be and even think up ways to defend them. According to Variety, one was the writer of Die Hard.

WARDROBE. In one of the most widely diffused images, die-hard Osama bin Laden sports a turban but wears a U.S. Army jacket and a Timex watch, made in the USA.

He, too, is made in the USA, like the other Islamic fundamentalists whom the CIA recruited from forty countries and armed against atheistic communism in Afghanistan. When the U.S. celebrated victory in that war, then-president of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto warned Bush Senior, in vain: "You have created a monster, a Frankenstein."

Once again, history has shown that a dog will bite the hand that feeds it. Yet the feeding continues. Now the fanatics provide the United States with a perfect excuse to declare war on anyone anywhere to consolidate its universal dominion. During the month of September, U.S. companies laid off more than 200,000 workers. "Call them bin Laden's numbers," declared Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.

A few weeks before the Twin Towers collapsed, the world economy was collapsing. The Economist advised its readers: "Get a parachute." After what has happened, if you can't get a parachute you can at least find a made-to-order culprit.

PANIC. All humanity is coming down with the symptoms of anthrax: shivers, headaches, bruise-like spots on the skin.... We are all afraid to open letters now, though not because of the old fear of an...