Front Porch Raconteur

By WAYNE CHRISTESON

The ground war in Afghanistan heated up yesterday with the announcement that the Allies plan to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialists into the country to destroy the morale of al-Quaida. Elements of the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, known as “The Black Berets,” will be parachuted into the combat zone to spread doubt, despondency, and existential angst among the al-Quaida zealots. Their operational target will be to disprove the existence of Allah and the futility of religious practice.

Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of the Left Bank, the Brigade’s initial action will be to secure sidewalk cafes at strategic points along the front lines. Within these salients they will drink dark coffee and smoke Galuoise and speak animatedly about the absurd nature of life and of man’s lonely isolation in the universe. Thousands of copies of L’Etre et Le Neant will be airdropped into enemy positions.

The Existentialists will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will spread further dismay by periodically licking the the philosophers’ ears and remaining remote and unattainable to everyone else.

The Brigade’s commander, Colonel Marc-Ange Rien, speaking with “Le Monde,” declared his confidence in the success of the mission. Rien, an intense and unshaven man in a black turtleneck, gesticulated wildly and said, “Anyone at the Sorbonne can tell you that the al-Quaida are trapped in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous sort: there is no Allah, and I can prove it. Please take your tongue out of my ear, Juliette, I am talking.”

Wayne Christeson is a sometime writer and a longtime resident of Leiper’s Fork.