“Blow yourself up in the name of Allah, kill infidels, and Allah will reward you with 72 virgins in Paradise.”
That’s certainly a good recruiting line – especially when the targets being recruited are men who’ve been banging goats all their lives.
But another reason it works is that terrorists are math-challenged and I can prove it.
(In the first place, virgins are scarce. On any given day, it’s almost as easy to find a unicorn. In the second place, virgins are overrated. If you want a job done right, you assign it to the person with the most experience, not to some beginner who is certain to make mistakes, dislocate a hip, and then sue you for Worker’s Comp.)
And now we’ll do the math.
The average age of a virgin is under sixteen, sad but true. Fun for some, I suppose, but if we grab seventy-two virgins at random and send them to Paradise, sixty are likely to be under age, two will be in the 18-20 year bracket, eight will be very old spinsters, and the other two will be lesbians.
Even in the best of circumstances, assuming your virgins are all over the age of consent and under the age of menopause, you’re still in trouble. If you divide 72 by 28 you come up with a figure of 2.57. This means that, on any given day, 2.57 of your virgins will have PMS.
When we consider personalities, the numbers are even worse. Ten will be whiners, always complaining of the terrible day they had herding the goats; ten will be out shopping; ten will be combative, fighting with the neighbors; twenty will have a headache; another twenty will have bigger cojones than you, and the other two will kick you out of bed. (Those lesbians again.)
Nor should we assume all virgins are attractive. In a random group of seventy-two women, at least a few are going to be coyote ugly; some will be too fat; some too thin, others too tall or too short; and every damn one of them will want to talk about their feelings.
But here is the real math problem: ONLY SEVENTY-TWO? To last a man for eternity? Listen; unless the laws of physics are vastly different in Paradise, virginity is not renewable. A virgin is only a virgin until… well, you know.
Cripes! I have friends on Viagra (and a few on Coor’s Light) who could deflower their entire stable (minus the lesbians) in two months.
And once the virgins are used up, then what? Back to the goats?
If the terrorists read this, once they do the math, the War on Terror will end.
Erv Bobo is a novelist who thinks he’s a humorist. His latest excursion into satire is THE CHEYENNE BRAND, available at Lulu.com
