From the controversial Salon piece, Forbidden thoughts about 9-11: Readers respond:
When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful. I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide — lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all.
– Name withheld
I played the part, of course; I expressed the mandatory shock, outrage and sadness while watching events unfold with co-workers. I was, in outward appearence, the very picture of solemnity and sympathy. Inside, though, I was excited. I got the same weird sense of roller-coaster joy I do when a hurricane comes up the coast or a blizzard shuts down the city. In the chaos of the initial reports, I found myself disappointed to find out that some of the early reports of additional targets being hit were erroneous.
As the second tower collapsed, I found myself with a terrible sense of satisfaction. It was almost like, somewhere deep in the parts of my soul that don’t see the sun, I was rooting for the event to be even bigger — for it to cut so deeply through the banality of daily life, that things would never be the same. I suspect I am not alone. Whether it’s shark attacks, wars, school shootings or child abductions, something in human nature gives people a sick thrill in such horrific voyeurism. That’s what drives the infotainment industry we like to call the nightly news. In the Civil War, spectators went out to watch the battle.
Until fairly recently, watching public executions was regular entertainment for the masses. Few have the guts to admit it publicly, but we’re all monsters.
— Michael Middleton
For nearly every single day since Sept. 11, 2001, I’ve been saying, “When’s the other shoe going to drop?” The dirty secret that I’ve never revealed to anyone is that there’s a part of me that actually wants it to drop. Rationally, not really — I’ve got family and friends who would be in serious danger if something happened in our major cities.
But the little devil on my shoulder keeps saying, “Come on already, let’s get this fucking apocalypse OVER WITH.” I mean, there are times when I’d almost feel relieved if something happened — it would be better than this awful waiting accompanied by an overwhelming sense of looming doom.
— Female writer, living in Texas…emphasis added
So what do you think the odds are that this yearning to break through the banality has anything to do with the Romantic urge for the ultimate self-affirming, all-consuming moment? That orgasmic instant of annihilation when the will to power overcomes the humble stones of the world around us? And if you lived in squalor, felt oppressed, were told every day that the hated oppressor was the reason for your misery, would this underlying repugnance of the world as it is be a fertile medium of the kind of memes that make strapping on a Semtex belt seem like the absolutely right thing to do?
Im suddenly finding myself becoming a fan of banality.
Date: 09/15/2002 00:00:00 AM
It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent-Don DeLillo, Underworld
Date: 09/12/2002 00:00:00 AM
Just further proof that there is a kind of nihilistic urge in some kinds of people. That everything that exists deserves to be desroyed.When most of us saw the towers collapse, we were thinking about the people inside them. It wasn’t thrilling. But, yah, some people are different. It’s interesting that Salon would publish this stuff, and that these are among their readership. But on the other hand I’m not going to join the critics, because, well – just like it’s important to know what our enemies in the War actually think, in all its ugliness, so we don’t get confused by disinformation and pablum, we need to come face to face with this aspect of some of the people we live among.Lest someone who knows my political bent think I’m making a partisan point with this, I’m not. I think the things these people are expressing are beyond – beneth – politics as we commonly think of it. What lever these people pull on election day is irrelivant. But now we can’t pretend people like this aren’t out there, pretend that we all had the same reaction to the sight of people – not buildings – being burned and crushed, pulverized into dust. Most of us did. But some of us are different.Next time someone adopts an adolecent pose to the effect that nihilism is somehow cool, well, think of this article.
Date: 09/13/2002 00:00:00 AM
I’m a big fan of meaningless fluff myself. I’m also a big fan of comfortabl, banal people doing comfortable, banal things (I pull over my car to watch Little League soccer and baseball; I always stop for lemonade stands). I don’t know what the “American lifestyle” is if not the right to live a peaceful existence without anyone messing with you. I know that’s why so many people want to come here. They don’t want to be millionaires or be on TV. They want to live banal, comfortable lives without having to worry about starvation, or ethnic cleansing, or riots.All the interesting stuff on CNN and in action movies is interesting because it’s happening to other people. When it happens to you, it’s not interesting so much as terrifying and seriously fucked up. America is the worldwide paragon of banality, and I like it that way. But I don’t think people realize how banal Canada is.I can’t imagine an entire life of drudgery with no hope of escapeIf hope of a peaceful, prosperous existence was permanently closed off as an option, then I could see wanting to go out in a blaze of glory.
Date: 09/13/2002 00:00:00 AM
I love this part:I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with.”It’s not my fault! It’s this damn continent!”Get real. If you think life is banal then you’re not trying hard enough.
Date: 09/12/2002 00:00:00 AM
its stolen form a bad pop song, but these people “need to bleed to know you’re alive”.I hate that attitude. It is commonly held by people who have never expirieced real hardship, and have too little empathy
Date: 09/12/2002 00:00:00 AM
“Uncompromising men are easy to admire.”
Date: 09/12/2002 00:00:00 AM
The Chinese, apparently, had a curse: “May you live in interesting times.”
“So what do you think the odds are that this yearning … has anything to do with the Romantic urge for the ultimate self-affirming, all-consuming moment? … would this … be a fertile medium of the kind of memes that make strapping on a Semtex belt seem like the absolutely right thing to do?
Sorry, I don’t think this is much to the point. That these statements, by people who are no chance of ever being suicide bombers, might be taken to have something, anything to do with some kind of romantic urge that relates to annihilation, violence and so on is too thin a link to serve any useful purpose that I can see.
I think you’re looking under the lamp-post for your lost keys, because it’s well-lit there. These are people speaking in you own language and your own culture, and you can easily understand what they’re saying and tease out the implications. But the fat guy screaming “Allah! Allah!” as he prepares to kill a score of innocent civilians and injure a hundred more isn’t in the brightly lit area, he’s in deep darkness.
Suicide bombers are a class of weapon that goes among the enemy, like trash-quality terminators. They are, in their estimation and mine, of value as mechanisms that kill and injure others. The rest of what could have been their lives, they throw away. Of course, I think of the death and injury for others that constitutes all that they wish to become in this world as a negative value, whereas they think of it as a great positive value. But focusing on practicality, not values, what you have here are walking nail bombs, nothing else.
The answer is to destroy the factories they come out of, and those who operate those factories, and to kill the would-be “martyrs” before they explode some place they shouldn’t, and to punish those who gave tacit consent to the religious fanatics that arrange this. Analyze the way kids are bred and cultivated for this, the way miseducation and propaganda systematically support it, how likely candidates are selected and further indoctrinated/trained, the way families are turned into support systems, in effect taking cash rewards for the lives of those who were once human but are instead to be one-shot atrocity machines, and so on. Then destroy every part and functionary of the machinery, down to the street signs named after “martyrs”. If it’s part of the system, it goes. Then punish, not the suicide bombers (do you try to punish hand grenades?) but those, especially those with state power or the equivalent, who gave even tacit support to the makers and operators of these social death factories.
This is all quite practical, and has nothing whatever to the ill-chosen words of bored Westerners. It’s more like a higher level of demolitions disposal, or counter-battery fire if you don’t control the areas where the suicide-bombers are made and you just have to blast away at those in charge of the factories as best you can at range.
If you want to understand the motivations of the suicide bombers, examine their personal information formation systems. Look specifically at the propaganda they are taking in, in their language. My best guess is you should look primarily at their religion, and scapegoating, and plain old hate. That is not very interesting, not very philosophical. But it does seem to be the reality. You have hot-house products from an extremely violent and aggressive religion, you have a highly cultivated habit of blaming demonized infidels for your personal and collective failures, and lots of plain, hum-drum familiar hate. You select your bomb carriers carefully, and you get a yearly crop of candidates. Then you point them at a bus full of kids, or an embassy or whatever, and BANG! That’s all.
PS: Some implications of my view that suicide bombers are essentially weapons systems, and the context in which I see this.
(1) You must destroy (the weapons and) the factories that produce them.
(2) To do so humanely (by police work rather than bombing), you must be the governing power, which requires conquest, or you must make the governing power agree with you, which requires that the rulers fear ending up like Saddam more than they fear ending up like Sadat.
(3) The policy of George W. Bush, shown in the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq, is correct enough, given the balance of forces and the limits on what we can do. Details may be wrong, often must be wrong, because you cannot make war without making many mistakes, but broadly this is what we have to do. I’m very glad that George W. Bush, rather than someone with a whole different philosophy, is leading the coalition in this war.
Unlike Armed Liberal, I do not believe we are fighting states using terror groups as proxies. I think we are fighting first a culture informed and molded by an innately inimical religion, and then the punitive/coercive forces produced by that culture today. In other words, we are fighting the (very, very rough) equivalent of militant Christianity, crusading fanatics and the Knights Templar, not the king of France, the king of England etc..
However, since the terrorists do need state resources, and the king of France can (and did) hereticate and destroy the Knights Templar, the state is where we insert the crowbar to start wrecking the terror machine, and the practical difference between my recommendations and Armed Liberal’s would be non-fundamental and maybe small. We might recommend that counties be conquered or coerced in different orders and in different ways, but with a similar overall historical medium term aim in mind.
In the long run, if we cannot supplant Islam, I think jihad will ever and again be directed at us, because jihad is essential to Islam. Christians gotta spread the Word, Moslems gotta attack unbelievers, enforce dhimmitude on them and so on: it’s the nature of the beast.
But what we can do is break up the terror machines, so that the current method of insane terror is abandoned, and eventually replaced by some other hostile method or mix of methods.
My guess is that the long-term future of Islam might be like Pakistan writ large: in the long run Muslim states will be territorially agressive even against stronger states, but using a sensible mix of conventional military force, nuclear brinkmanship, controlled and directed (not self-directing) terrorism, ethnic cleansing and so on, rather than wallowing in this one-sided policy of terrorism with no respect for the balance of forces, which is what we are fighting.
Also, from what I said above (about religion, scapegoating and hate) USS Clueless makes a valid point about the key role that scapegoating plays in turbo-charging the war we are in. I think a successful Muslim world would be more deliberate, more careful.
In sum, assuming Islam is too strong for us to take on, and this is the sober judgment of our leaders, this war can be won if we define it as a medium-term war on a method, terrorism, but not if we define it as a war on the opponent that is using the method against us.
So I like the label “War on Terrorism” just fine. I think it’s accurate. And I think we can and should win this war.