Seeing Through a Glass Darkly "It's all about oil," the young man said, as I was about to leave his apartment on New York's Upper West Side. We had just agreed to a bargain, in which I was to buy from him a pair of top-quality clarinets. My hope was to revive a long-standing love affair I have had with the instrument since I took my first lesson at the age of eight. This transaction took place only a few weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, and memories of that day's vivid horrors were but lately seared into our minds. Naturally, our conversation had quickly turned towards the topic of 9/11, as nearly all conversations did at the time, and this was his closing statement on the matter. I felt baffled, but being reluctant to get into political discourse with a stranger, I made no remark. It was left to my friend, a professional clarinetist who had come with me that day to evaluate the instruments in question, to agree with his assertion. But I still didn't understand why. What had the terrorism of 9/11 got to do with oil? Now at last, I have begun to perceive dimly, through the ministries of time, experience, and revelation, what this young man had seen by instinct two years ago -- that Sept. 11, 2001 was indeed all about oil, that the catastrophe was embraced, if not engineered, by the Bush/Cheney Administration, and that its purpose was to unleash long-cherished military objectives shared with other U.S. oil executives. This discovery serves not only as a humbling lesson in the perils of spiritual blindness, but as an indictment of the appalling ignorance to which we are condemned by an indolent, subservient, and unimaginative Media. Well, my clarinet skills are no better than they were two years ago, and my treasured purchases of that day remain virtually untouched in their dusty cases. But I count myself wiser now, and ready to congratulate the young man on his prescient observation. September 2003   The poems on this website are protected by U.S. copyright law and registered with the U.S. Library of Congress. Please direct any requests for publication, in whatever form or medium, to the author, Ian Reed, at tango_poet@hotmail.com (212) 841-0341.