The Second Plane by Martin Amis. (1/2)
Title: The Second Plane: September 11, Terror and Boredom.
Author: Martin Amis.
Genre: Non-fiction, fiction, essays, short stories, 9/11, politics.
Country: England.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2001-2007 (this collection 2008).
Summary: A collection of 12 essays and 2 short stories. (Essays 1-5 and 2 short stories in this post, refer to PART 2 for essays 8-14.) The Second Plane (2001) is an essay written right in the wake of 9/11, detailing the impact and proposing solutions for going forward. The Voice of the Lonely Crowd (2002) is an essay about creative writing after 9/11, as well as the author's views on religion and religious ideology. In The Wrong War (2003), an essay, Amis presents why he believes America is going to war with specifically Iraq, and America's problematic foreign policy in the Middle East. In the Palace of the End (2004) is a short story from the perspective of one of the doubles of the son of a fascist dictator in an unnamed Middle-Eastern country. Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind (2006) is an unsparing analysis if Islamic fundamentalism and the West's flummoxed response to it. The Last Days of Muhammad Atta (2006) is a short story that follows ring-leader Atta and his inner-thoughts as he prepares for flight the morning of September 11, 2001 and continues until seconds following him crashing American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Iran and the Lord of Time (2006) expounds on the role of Iran in the conflict, and looks into the ways of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ Terrorism is political communication by other means. The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. United Airlines Flight 175 was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, launched in Afghanistan, and aimed at her innocence. That innocence, it was here being claimed, was a luxurious and anachronistic delusion.
♥ The plan was to capture four airliners in the space of half an hour. All four would be bound for the west coast, to ensure maximum fuel load. The first would crash into the North Tower just as the working day hit full stride. Then a pause of fifteen minutes, to give the world time to gather round its TV sets. With that attention secured, the second plane would crash into the South Tower, and in that instant America's youth would turn into age.
♥ Now the second aircraft, and the terror revealed-the terror doubled, or squared. We speak of "plane rage," but it was the plane itself that was in frenzy, one felt, as it gunned and steadied and then smeared itself into the South Tower. Even the flames and smoke were openly evil, with their vampiric reds and blacks. Murder-suicide from without was now duplicated within to provide what was perhaps the day's most desolating spectacle. They flailed and kicked as they came down. As if you could fend off that abysmal drop. You too would flail and kick. You could no more help yourself than you could stop your teeth from chattering at a certain intensity of cold. It is a reflex. It is what human beings do when they fall.
♥ The bringers of Tuesday's terror were morally "barbaric," inexplicably so, but they brought a demented sophistication to their work. They took these great American artifacts and pestled them together. Nor is it at all helpful to describe the attacks as "cowardly." Terror always has its roots in hysteria and psychotic insecurity; still, we should know our enemy. The firefighters were nor afraid to die for an idea. But the suicide killers belong in a different psychic category, and their battle effectiveness has, on our side, no equivalency. Clearly, they have contempt for life. Equally clearly, they have contempt for death.
Their aim was to torture tens of thousands, and to terrify hundreds of millions. In this they have succeeded. The temperature of planetary fear has been lifted toward the feverish; "the world hum," in Don DeLillo's phrase, is now as audible as tinnitus. And yet the most durable legacy has to do with the more distant future, and the disappearance of an illusion about our loved ones, particularly our children. American parents will feel this most acutely, but we will also feel it. The illusion is this. Mothers and fathers need to feel that they can protect their children. They can't, of course, and never could, but they need to feel that they can. What once seemed more or less impossible, their protection, now seems obviously and palpably inconceivable. So from now on we will have to get by without that need to feel.
♥ It will also be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly. How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5 percent of the Iraqi population? How many of them then transfer that figure to America (and come up with fourteen million)? Various national characteristics-self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in Western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity-have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away. Most crucially, and again most painfully, being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree: Americans are good and right by virtue of being American. Saul Bellow's word for this habit is "angelization." On the U.S.-led side, then, we need not only a revolution in consciousness but an adaptation of national character: the work, perhaps, of a generation.
♥ What are you going to do? Violence must come; America must have catharsis. We would hope that the response will be, above all, non-escalatory. It should also mirror the original attack in that it should have the capacity to astonish. A utopian example: the crippled and benighted people of Afghanistan, hunkering down for a winter of famine, should not be bombarded with cruise missiles; they should be bombarded with consignments of food, firmly marked LEND-LEASE USA. More realistically, unless Pakistan can actually deliver bin Laden, the American retaliation is almost sure to become elephantine. Then terror from above will replenish the source of all terror from below: unhealed wounds. This is the familiar cycle so well caught by the matter, and the title, of V.S. Naipaul's story "Tell Me Who to Kill."
Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called "species consciousness," something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear.
~~The Second Plane.
♥ Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures, Man)
A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,
What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas'd to weare,
I'd be a Dog, a Monkey or a Bear
Or any thing but that vain Animal
Who is so proud of being rational.
These bitterly charged lines, from Lord Rochester's "Satyr Against Mankind," were written in 1675. They now seem somewhat premature, do they not?
♥ I thought: actually we can live with "bitter cold" and "searing heat" and the rest of them. We can live with cliché. What we have to do now, more testingly, is live with war.
♥ We recall that Ronald Reagan habitually anathematized the Soviet Union as "godless" (meaning, presumably, that its government was secular). This epithet could hardly be unleashed on Osama bin Laden. So Bush, who is religious, and Blair, who is religious, offered the patent falsehood that the war on terrorism was "not about religion." Iraq is godless too, but this fact is unlikely to be parlayed, just now, into another good reason for invading it.
The twentieth century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows little sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basin in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward-and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.
♥ At Cambridgeshire High School for Boys I gave a speech in which I rejected all faith as an affront to common sense. I was an atheist, and I was twelve: it seemed open-and-shut. I had not yet pondered Kant's rather lenient remark about the crooked timber of humanity, out of which nothing straight is ever built. Nor was I aware that the soul had legitimate needs.
Much more recently I reclassified myself as an agnostic, or left-agnostic or weak-agnostic; in any event, not quite an atheist. Because atheism, it turns out, isn't strictly rational either. The sketchiest acquaintance with cosmology will tell you that the universe is not, or is not yet, decipherable by human beings; we are ten or twelve Einsteins away from understanding it. Cosmology will also tell you that the universe is far more bizarre, prodigious, and chillingly grand than any doctrine, and that spiritual needs can be met by its contemplation. Belief is otiose; reality is sufficiently awesome as it stands. Indeed, our isolation in its cold immensity seems to demand a humanistic counterweight-an assertion of human pride. One contemporary manifestation of this need can be seen in our intensified reverence for the planet (James Lovelock's Gaia and other benign animisms). A strategy with a rather longer history centers on an intensified reverence for art-or, in Matthew Arnold's formula, for "the best which has been thought and said."
Literature-the aggregate of written works-has always been the most persistent candidate for cultification, partly because it nonchalantly includes the Bible and all other holy texts. It also has an advantage over conventional faiths in that there is, after all, something tangible to venerate-something boundless, beautiful, and divinely bright. But of course there is an excellent reason why the unacknowledged legislators of mankind are going to remain just that: unacknowledged and unfollowed. Literature forms a single body of thought, yet its voices are intransigently and unenlargeably individual. And the voice of religion, to reposition a phrase often used by that great critic, the Reverend Northrop Frye, is "the voice of the lonely crowd." It is a monologue that seeks the validation of a chorus.
♥ We recognize this mental atmosphere, and its name is anti-intellectualism. Noticeable, too, is the re-emergence of sentiment as the prince of the critical utensils. Commentators respond, not to the novel, but to its personnel, whom they want to "care about," in whom they want to "believe." Such remarks as "I didn't like the characters" are now thought capable of settling the hash of a work of fiction. This critical approach will eventually elicit what it fully deserves-a literature of ingratiation. And we will then have reached the destiny that Alexis de Tocqueville predicted for American democracy: a flabby stupor of mutual reassurance. The simultaneous consolidation of "dumbing down" is not an accident. PC is low, low church, like the Church of England; it is the lowest common denomination.
♥ The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists-haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of clichés, of inherited and unexamined formulations. This is the thrust of one of the greatest novels ever written, Ulysses, in which Joyce identifies Roman Catholicism, and anti-Semitism, as fossilizations of dead prose and dead thought.
♥ "Desolate," as it happens, provides the dictionary with one of its most elaborate poeticisms. "Desolate: giving an impression of bleak and dismal weariness... utterly wretched... from L. desolat-, desolare 'abandon,' from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone.'"
~~The Voice of the Lonely Crowd.
♥ In addition, like all "acts of terrorism"-easily and unsubjectively defined as organized violence that targets civilians-September 11 was an attack on morality: we felt a general deficit. Who, on September 10, was expecting by Christmastime to be reading unscandalized editorials in the Herald Tribune about the pros and cons of using torture on "enemy combatants"? Who expected Britain to renounce the doctrine of nuclear no-first-use? Terrorism undermines morality. Then, too, it undermines reason.
♥ The notion of the "axis of evil" has an interesting provenance. In early drafts of the President's State of the Union speech the "axis of evil" was the "axis of hatred," "axis" having been settled on for its associations with the enemy in the Second World War. The "axis of hatred" at this point consisted of only two countries, Iran and Iraq, whereas of course the original axis consisted of three (Germany, Italy, Japan). It was additionally realized that Iran and Iraq, while not both Arab, were both Muslim. So they brought in North Korea.
We may notice, in this embarrass of the inapposite, that the Axis was an alliance, whereas Iran and Iraq are blood-bespattered enemies, and the zombie nation of North Korea is, in truth, so mortally ashamed of itself that it can hardly bear to show its face, and is not a part of anything. Still, "axis of hatred" it was going to be, until mature consideration turned the tide toward "axis of evil." "Axis of evil" echoed Reagan's "evil empire." It was more alliterative. It was also, according to President Bush, "more theological."
..When the somnambulistic figure of Kim Jong-Il subsequently threw down his nuclear gauntlet, the "axis of evil" catchphrase or notion or policy seemed in ruins, because North Korea turned out to be much nearer to acquiring the definitive WMDs, deliverable nuclear devices, than Iraq (and the same is true of Iran). So why single out Saddam? It was explained that the North Korean matter was a diplomatic inconvenience, while Iraq's non-disarmament remained a "crisis." The reason was strategic: even without WMDs, North Korea could inflict a million casualties on its southern neighbor by flattening Seoul. Iraq couldn't manage anything on this scale, so you could attack it. North Korea could, so you couldn't. The imponderables of the proliferation age were becoming ponderable. Once a nation has done the risky and nauseous work of acquisition, it becomes unattackable. A single untested nuclear weapon may be a liability. But five or six constitute a deterrent.
♥ One of the exhibits at the Umm al-Maarik Mosque in central Baghdad is a copy of the Koran written in Saddam Hussein's blood (he donated twenty-four liters over three years).
♥ The present Administration's embrace of the religious right also leads, by a bizarre route, to the further strengthening of the tie with Israel. Unbelievably, born-again doctrine insists that Israel must be blindly supported, not because it is the only semi-democracy in that crescent, but because it is due to host the Second Coming. Armageddon is scheduled to take place near the hill of Megiddo (where, in recent months, an Israeli bus was suicide-bombed by another kind of believer). The Rapture, the Tribulation, the Binding of the Antichrist: it isn't altogether clear how much of this rubbish Bush swallows (though Reagan swallowed it whole). V.S. Naipaul has described the religious impulse as the inability "to contemplate man as man," responsible to himself and uncosseted by a higher power. We may consider this a weakness; Bush, dangerously, considers it a strength.
~~The Wrong War.
♥ For a double, this interlude in the doubles' commissary can be a slightly depersonalizing experience. We all measure six feet one, and we all weight 257 pounds. We all have the same glistening black quiff, the same protuberant, blood-flecked brown eyes, the same slablike front teeth (with the same missing canine), the same patch over the same eye. We wear an eyepatch because Nadir wears an eyepatch; and Nadir wears an eyepatch because he was shot in the face, by a bodyguard, seventeen months ago. And here I touch on one of the more somber duties of a presidential double. All the injuries picked up by Nadir, during the course of the increasingly frequent and desperate attempts on his life, must naturally be duplicated in his surrogates. For the blast to the left eye, we were, in turn, strapped and clamped into position with an automatic pistol poised on a tripod at a distance of eighteen inches; many doubles were lost in the initial efforts (despite numerous experiments on an assortment of suspects), and many more were decommissioned, and quietly executed, when their wounds failed to heal in the proper way. Similarly, every double lacks a right kneecap, a left heel, a left shoulder blade, and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand. We have all spent time in wheelchairs, on crutches, in neck braces, in traction. We are additionally subject to periodic poisonings. More recently, we all had our hair scorched off (after a flame-thrower attack on the son of the dictator), and for a while a team of barbers and surgeons appeared every day to regulate the condition of our fuzz and blisters.
Entering the doubles' commissary is, as I say, a depersonalizing experience. It is to enter a hall of mirrors. Who is that man by the window with his back turned to the room? He slowly swivels. Again, yes: it is I...
♥ Where there is no settled truth, rumor stops feeling like rumor: briefly but palpably, it feels far more convincing than any mere fact...
♥ But I am not the Next. I am only his double. And my share of it reads like this. When you have been hurt yourself, there awakens a part of you that doesn't want to hurt anyone. When you love something as intimately fragile as your own body, you don't want to hurt anyone. That's what I'm sating to myself, now, in the changing room. Please let me not have to hurt anyone.
~~In the Palace of the End.
♥ There was perhaps a consciousness, too, that the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, over the past month, had reversed years of policy and decided to sacrifice the lives of its Muslim clients and brainchildren and brother Pathans, over the border, in return for American cash. So when the crowd scowled out its question, the answer needed to be a good one.
"Why you want these? You like Osama?"
I can almost hear the tone of the reply I would have given-reedy, wavering, wholly defeatist. As for the substance, it would have been the reply of the cornered trimmer, and intended, really, just to give myself time to seek the fetal position and fold my hands over my face. Something like: "Well, I quite like him, but I think he rather overdid it in New York." No, that would not have served. What was needed was boldness and brilliance. The exchange continued:
"You like Osama?"
"Of course. He is my brother."
"He is your brother?"
"All men are my brothers."
♥ Shifts in the paradigm like the attack of September 11, 2001. Paradigm-shifts open a window; and, once opened, the window will close. Ayed observes that September 11 was instantly unrepeatable; indeed, the tactic was obsolete by 10 a.m. the same morning. Its efficacy lasted for seventy-one minutes, from 8:46, when America 11 hit the North Tower, to 9:57, and the start of the rebellion on United 93. On United 93, the passengers were told about the new reality by their mobile phones, and they didn't linger long in the old paradigm-the four-day siege on the equatorial tarmac, the diminishing supplies of food and water, the festering toilets, the conditions and demands, the phased release of the children and the women; then the surrender, or the clambering commandos. No, they knew that they weren't on a commercial aircraft, not any longer; they were on a missile. So they rose up. And at 10:03 United 93 came down on its back at 580 mph, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, twenty minutes from the Capitol.
♥ For it was in Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, that Islamism, as we now know it, was decisively shaped. The story is grotesque and incredible-but then so are its consequences. And let us keep on telling ourselves how grotesque and incredible it is, our current reality, so unforeseeable, so altogether unknowable, even from the vantage of the late 1990s. In the late 1990s, if you recall, America had so much leisure on its hands, politically and culturally, that it could dedicate an entire year to Monica Lewinsky. Even Monica, it now seems, even Bill, were living in innocent times.
Since then the world has undergone a moral crash-the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of thew 1930s. On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantánamo, Abu Graib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies.
All this should of course be soberly compared to the fears of the opposed ideology, an ideology which, in its most millennial form, conjures up the image of an abattoir within a madhouse. I will spell this out, because it has not been broadly assimilated. The most extreme Sunni Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Sunni Islamists; but every rank-and-file jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution. And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria) or on something resembling a nation state (Sudan). In the first case, the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead; in the second, following the Islamist coup in 1989, the result has been a kind of rolling genocide, and the figure is perhaps two million. And it all goes back to Greeley, Colorado, and to Sayyid Qutb.
Things started to go wrong for Sayyid during the Atlantic crossing from Alexandria, when, allegedly, "a drunken, semi-naked woman" tried to storm his cabin. But before we come to that, some background. Sayyid Qutb, in 1949, had just turned forty-three. His childhood was provincial and devout. When, as a young man, he went to study in Cairo, his leanings became literary and Europhone and even mildly cosmopolitan. Despite an early-and routinely baffling-admiration for naturism, he was already finding Cairene women "dishonorable," and confessed to unhappiness about "their current level of freedom." A short story recorded his first disappointment in matters of the heart; its title, plangently, was "Thorns." Well, we've all had that; and most of us then adhere to the arc described in Peter Porter's poem "Once Bitten, Twice Bitten." But Sayyid didn't need much discouragement. Promptly giving up all hope of coming across a woman of "sufficient" cleanliness, he resolved to stick to the devil he knew: virginity.
Established in a modest way as a writer, Sayyid took a job at the Ministry of Education. This radicalized him. He felt oppressed by the vestiges of the British protectorate in Egypt, and was alarmist about the growing weight of the Jewish presence in Palestine-another British crime, in Sayyid's view. He became an activist, and ran some risk of imprisonment (at the hands of the saturnalian King Farouk), before the ministry packed him off to America to do a couple of years of educational research. Prison, by the way, would claim him soon after his return. He was one of the dozens of Muslim Brothers jailed (and tortured) after the failed attempt on the life of the modernizer and secularist Nasser in October 1954. There was a short reprieve in 1964, but Sayyid was soon rearrested-and retortured. Steelily dismissing a clemency deal brokered by none other than the young Anwar Sadat, he was hanged in August 1966; and this was a strategic martyrdom that now lies deep in the Islamist soul. His most influential book, like the book with which it is often compared, was written behind bars. Milestones is known as the Mein Kampf of Islamism.
Sayyid was presumably still shaken by the birth of Israel (after the defeat of Egypt and five other Islamic armies), but at first, on the ocean crossing, he felt a spiritual expansion. His encyclopedic commentary, In the Shade of the Koran, would fondly and ramblingly recall the renewal of his sense of purpose and destiny. Early on, he got into a minor sectarian battle with a proselytizing Christian; Sayyid retaliated by doing a bit of proselytizing himself, and made some progress with a contingent of Nubian sailors. Then came the traumatic incident with the drunken, semi-naked woman. Sayyid thought she was an American agent hired to seduce him, or so he later told his biographer, who wrote that "the encounter successfully tested his resolve to resist experiences damaging to his identity as an Egyptian and a Muslim." God knows what the episode actually amounted to. It seems probably that the liquored-up Mata Hari, the dipsomaniacal nudist, was simply a woman in a cocktail dress who, perhaps, had recently had a cocktail. Still, we can continue to imagine Sayyid barricading himself into his cabin while, beyond the door, the siren sings her song.
He didn't like New York: materialistic, mechanistic, trivial, idolatrous, wanton, depraved, and so on and so forth. Washington was a little better. But here, sickly Sayyid (lungs) was hospitalized, introducing him to another dire hazard that he wouldn't have faced at home: female nurses. One of them, tricked out with "thirsty lips, bulging breasts, smooth legs" and a coquettish manner ("the calling eye, the provocative laugh"), regaled him with her wish-list of endowments for the ideal lover. But the father of Islamism, as he is often called, remained calm, later developing the incident into a diatribe against Arab men who succumb to the allure of American women. In an extraordinary burst of mendacity or delusion, Sayyid claimed that the medical staff heartlessly exulted at the news of the assassination, back in Egypt, of Hasan al-Banna. We may wonder how likely it is that any American would have heard of the Hitler-fancying al-Banna, or indeed of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he founded. When Sayyid was discharged from George Washington University Hospital, he probably thought the worst was behind him. But now he proceeded to the cauldron-to the pullulating hellhouse-of Greeley, Colorado.
During his six months at the Colorado State College of Education (and thereafter in California), Sayyid's hungry disapproval found a variety of targets. American lawns (a distressing example of selfishness and atomism), American conversation ("money, movie stars and models of cars"), American jazz ("a type of music invented by Blacks to please their primitive tendencies-their desire for noise and their appetite for sexual arousal"), and, of course, American women: here another one pops up, telling Sayyid that sex is merely a physical function, untrammeled by morality. American places of worship he also detests (they are like cinemas or amusement arcades), but by now he is pining for Cairo, and for company, and he does something rash. Qutb joins a club-where an epiphany awaits him. "The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone," he wrote; "the dance hall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust." You'd think that the father of Islamism had exposed himself to an early version of Studio 54 or even Plato's Retreat. But no: the club he joined was run by the church, and what he is describing, here, is a chapel hop in Greeley, Colorado. And Greeley, Colorado, in 1949, was dry.
..The emptiness, the mere iteration, at the heart of his philosophy is steadily colonized by a vast entanglement of bitternesses; and here, too, we detect the presence of that peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified by Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred-the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the thirteenth (when the "last" Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the twentieth. And most astounding of all, in Qutb, is the level of self-awareness, which is less than zero. It is as if the very act of self-examination were something unmanly or profane: something unrighteous, in a word.
Still, one way or the other, Qutb is the father of Islamism. Here are the chief tenets he inspired: that America, and its clients, are jahiliyyah (the word classically applied to pre-Muhammadan Arabia-barbarous and benighted); that America is controlled by Jews; that Americans are infidels, that they are animals and, worse, arrogant animals, and are unworthy of life; that America promotes pride and promiscuity in the service of human degradation; that America seeks to "exterminate" Islam-and that it will accomplish this not by conquest, not by colonial annexation, but by example.
..The theme of the "tempter" can be taken a little further, in the case of Qutb. When the temper is a temptress, and really wants you to sin, she needs to be both available and willing. And it is almost inconceivable that poor Sayyid, the frail, humorless civil servant, and turgid anti-Semite (salting his talk with quotes from that long-exploded fabrication The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), ever encountered anything that resembled an offer. It is more pitiful than that. Seduction did not come his way, but it was coming the way of others, he sensed, and a part of him wanted it too. That desire made him very afraid, and also shamed him and dishonored him, and turned his thoughts to murder. Then the thinkers of Islam took his books and did what they did to them; and Sayyid Qutb is now a part of our daily reality. We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.
♥ Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact, that Western opinion has been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A rational response would be something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous disgust. But we haven't managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is a murmur of dissonant evasion. Paul Berman's best chapter in Terror and Liberalism is mildly entitled "Wishful Thinking"-and Berman is in general a mild-mannered man. But this is a very tough and persistent analysis of our extraordinary uncertainty. It is impossible to read it without cold fascination and a consciousness of disgrace. I felt disgrace, during its early pages, because I had done it too, and in print, early on. Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, "What are the reasons for this?" And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.
♥ There will be much stopping and starting to do. It is painful to stop believing in the purity, and the sanity, of the underdog. It is painful to start believing in a cult of death, and in an enemy that wants its war to last forever.
♥ Osama bin Laden's table talk, at Tarnak Farms in Afghanistan, where he trained his operatives before September 2001, must have included many rolling paragraphs on Western vitiation, corruption, perversion, prostitution, and all the rest. And in 1998, as season after season unfolded around the President's weakness for fellatio, he seemed to have good grounds for his most serious miscalculation: the belief that America was a softer antagonist than the U.S.S.R. (in whose defeat, incidentally, the "Arab Afghans" played a negligible part).
♥ "Martyr" means witness. The suicide-mass murderer witnesses nothing-and sacrifices nothing. He dies for vulgar and delusive gain.
♥ Our ideology, which is sometimes called Westernism, weakens us in two ways. It weakens our powers of perception and judgement, and it weakens our moral unity and will. As Harris puts it:
Sayyid Qutb, Osama bin Laden's favorite philosopher, felt that pragmatism would spell the death of American civilization... Pragmatism, when civilizations come clashing, does not appear likely to be very pragmatic. To lose the conviction that you can actually be right-about anything-seems a recipe for the End of Days chaos envisioned by Yeats: when "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
♥ To feel that you are a geo-historical player is a tremendous lure to those condemned, as they see it, to exclusion and anonymity. In its quieter way, this was perhaps the key component of the attraction of Western intellectuals to Soviet Communism: "join" and you are suddenly a contributor to planetary events. As Muhammad Atta steered the 767 toward its destination, he was confident, at least, that his fellow town-planners in Aleppo would remember his name, along with everybody else on earth. Similarly, the ghost of Shehzad Tanweer, as it watched the salvage teams scraping up human remains in the rat-infested crucible beneath the streets of London, could be sure that he had decisively outsoared the fish-and-chips shop back in Leeds. And that other great nothingness, Osama bin Laden-he is ever-living.
♥ One way of ending the war on terror would be to capitulate and convert. The transitional period would be a humorless one, no doubt, with stern work to be completed in the city squares, the town centers, and on the village greens. Nevertheless, as the Caliphate is restored in Baghdad, to much joy, the surviving neophytes would soon get used to the voluminous penal code enforced by the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice. It would be a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom, and of nothing else-a world with no games, no arts, and no women, a world where the sole entertainment is the public execution. My middle daughter, now aged nine, still believes in imaginary beings (in her case Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy); so she would have that in common, at least, with her new husband.
♥ The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the last eleven hundred years. And the medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until they started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. Use of the wheel ceased soon after the emergence of Islam, perhaps as a way of protecting a transport economy based on the camel. I have seen other explanations. The wheel, as we are aware, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.
♥ And one hardly needs to labor the similarities between Islamism and the totalitarian cults of the last century. Anti-Semitic, anti-liberal, anti-individualist, anti-democratic, and, most crucially, anti-rational, they too were cults of death, death-driven and death-fueled. The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, yet death was still death (as it was for the self-detonating but godless Tamil Tigers). For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning.
♥ Second, Iraq is not a real country. Cobbled together, by Winston Churchill, in the early 1920s, it consists of three separate (Ottoman) provinces: Sunni, Shia, Kurd-a disposition which looks set to resume. Among the words not listened to by the U.S. Administration, we can include those of Saddam Hussein. Even with an apparatus of terror as savage as any in history, even with chemical weapons, helicopter gunships, and mass killings, even with a proven readiness to cleanse, to displace, and to destroy whole ecosystems, Hussein modestly conceded that he found Iraq a difficult country to keep together. As a Sunni military man put it, Iraqis "hate" Iraq-or "Iraq," a concept that has brought them nothing but suffering. There is no nationalist instinct; the instinct is for atomization.
♥ It may be that the Coalition has given the enemy a casus belli that will burn for a generation-or for longer, forever, in the dependent mind, which is a mind indifferent to time.
♥ All the same, we should not delude ourselves that the underlying motives were wholly dishonorable. This is a more complicated, and more familiar, kind of tragedy. The Iraq War represents a gigantic contract, not just for Halliburton, but also for the paving company called Good Intentions. A dramatic (and largely benign) expansion of American power seems to have been the general goal; a dramatic reduction of American power seems to be the general outcome. Iraq was a divagation in what is ominously being called the Long War. To our largely futile losses in blood, treasure, and moral prestige, we can add the loss in time; and time, too, is blood.
♥ Islam, as I said, is a total system, and like all such systems it is eerily amenable to satire. But with Islamism, with total malignancy, with total terror and total boredom, irony, even militant irony (which is what satire is), merely shrivels and dies.
♥ The connection between manifest failure and the suppression of women unignorable. And you sometimes feel that the current crux, with its welter of insecurities and nostalgias, is little more than a pre-emptive rage-to ward off the evacuation of the last sanctum of male power. What would happen if we spent some of the next three-hundred billion dollars (this is Liz Cheney's thrust) on the raising of consciousness in the Islamic world? The effect would be inherently explosive, because the dominion of the male is Koranic-the unfalsifiable word of God, as dictated to the Prophet:
Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme (4:34).
Can we imagine seeing men on the march in defense of their right to beat their wives? And if we do see it, then what? Would that win hearts and minds? The martyrs of the required revolution would be sustained by two obvious truths: the binding authority of scripture, all over the world, is very seriously questioned; and women, by definition, are not a minority. They would know, too, that their struggle is a heroic assault on the weight of the past-the weight of fourteen centuries.
♥ I knew then that the phrase "deeply religious" was a grave abuse of that adverb. Something isn't deep just because it's all that is there; it is more like a varnish on a vacuum. Millennial Islamism is an ideology superimposed upon a religion-illusion upon illusion. It is not merely violent in tendency. Violence is all that is there.
~~Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind.
♥ On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m., in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta's last day began.
♥ His insides were seized, but his face was somehow incontinent, or so Muhammad Atta felt. The detestation, the detestation of everything, was being sculpted on it, from within. He was amazed that he was still allowed to walk the streets, let alone enter a building or board a plane. Another day, one more day, and they wouldn't let him. Why didn't everybody point, why didn't they cringe, why didn't they run? And yet this face, by now almost comically malevolent, would soon be smiled at, and perfunctorily fussed over (his ticket was business class), by the doomed stewardess.
A hypothesis. If he stood down from the Planes Operation, and it went ahead without him (or if he somehow survived it), he would never be able to travel by air in the United States or anywhere else-not by air, not by train, not by boat, not by bus. The profiling wouldn't need to be racial; it would be facial, merely. No sane man or woman would ever agree to be confined in his vicinity. With that face, growing more gangrenous by the day. And that name, the name he journeyed through life under, itself like a promise of vengeance: Muhammad Atta.
♥ But Muhammad Atta's mind and his body were not separable: this was the difficulty; this was the mind-body problem-in his case fantastically acute. Muhammad Atta wasn't like the others, because he was doing what he was doing for the core reason. The others were doing what they were doing for other core reason too, but they had achieved sublimation, by means of jihadi ardor; and their bodies had been convinced by this arrangement and had gone along with it. They ate, drank, smoked, smiled, snored; they took the stairs two at a time. Muhammad Atta's body had not gone along with it. He was doing what he was doing for the core reason and for the core reason only.
.."The thing which is called World." That, too, spoke to him. World had always felt like an illusion-an unreal mockery.
"The time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short." Ah yes, the virgins: six dozen of them-half a gross. Muhammad Atta, with his two degrees in architecture, his excellent English, his excellent German: Muhammad Atta did not believe in the virgins, did not believe in the Garden. How could he believe in such an implausibly, and dauntingly, priapic paradise? He was an apostate: that's what he was. He didn't expect paradise. What he expected was oblivion. And, strange to say, he would find neither.
♥ In its descent the elevator, with a succession of long-suffering sighs and flabby, shuddering curses, stopped at the twelfth, the eleventh, the tenth, the ninth, the eighth, the seventh, the sixth, the fifth, the fourth, the third, and the second floors. Old people, their faces flickering with distrust, inched in and out; while they did so, one of their number would press the open-doors button with a defiant, Marfanic thumb. And at this hour too: it was barely light. Muhammad Atta briefly horrified himself with the notion that they were all lovers, returning early to their beds. But no: it must be the sleeplessness, the insomnia of age-the dawn vigils of age. Their efforts to stay alive, in any case, struck him as essentially ignoble. He had felt the same way in the hospital the night before, when he went to see the imam... Consulting his watch every ten or fifteen seconds, he decided that this downward journey was dead time, as dead as time could be, like queuing, or an interminable red light, or staring stupidly at the baggage on an airport carousel. He stood there, hemmed in by pallor and decay, and martyred by compound revulsions.
♥ Ramzi called him back and said,
"To be clear. The eleventh of the ninth?"
"Yes," confirmed Muhammad Atta. And he was the first person on earth to say it-to say in that way: "Nine eleven. September the eleventh."
♥ "Did you pack these bags yourself?"
Muhammad Atta's hand crept toward his brow. "Yes," he said.
"Have they been with you at all times?"
"Yes."
"Did anyone ask you to carry anything for them?"
"No. Is the flight on time?"
"You should make your connection."
"And the bags will go straight through."
"No, sir. You'll need to recheck them at Logan."
"You mean I'll have to go through all this again?"
Whatever else terrorism had achieved in the past few decades, it had certainly brought about a net increase in world boredom. It didn't take very long to ask and answer those three questions-about fifteen seconds. But those dead-time questions and answers were repeated, without any variation whatever, hundreds of thousands of times a day. If the Planes Operation went ahead as planned, Muhammad Atta would bequeath more, perhaps much more, dead time,l planet-wide. It was appropriate, perhaps, and not paradoxical, that terror should also sharply promote its most obvious opposite. Boredom.
♥ The hospital, where he lay dying, was a blistered medium-rise downtown: one more business among all the other businesses. Inside, too, Muhammad Atta had no sense of entering an atmosphere of vocational care-just the American matter-of-factness, with no softening of the voice, the tread, no softening of the receptionists' minimal smiles...
♥ "His hopes of victory depend," said Muhammad Atta, "on the active participation of the superpower."
"What superpower?"
"God. Hence the present crisis."
"meaning?"
"It comes from religious hurt, don't you think? For centuries God has forsaken the believers, and rewarded the infidels. How do you explain his indifference?"
Or his enmity, he thought, as he left the bedside and the ward. He considered, too, that it could go like this, subconsciously, of course: if prayer and piety had failed, had so clearly failed, then it might seem time to change allegiance, and summon up the other powers.
♥ No. He believed that he could safely rely, at this point, on the fierce physics of the peer group.
A peer group joyously competitive about suicide, he had concluded, was a very powerful thing, and the West had no equivalent to it. A peer group for whom death was not death-and life was not life, either. Yet an inversion so extreme, he thought, would quickly become decadent: synagogues, nightclubs, nurseries, sunset homes. Transgression, by its nature, was helter-skelter: it had no choice but to escalate. And the thing would start to be over in a generation, as everyone slowly and incredulously intuited it: the core reason.
Perhaps the closest equivalent, or analogy, the West could field was the firefighters. Muhammad Atta had studied architecture and engineering. The fire that would be created by 20,000 gallons of jet fuel, he knew, could not be fought: the steel frame of the tower would buckle; the walls, which were not intended to be weight-bearing, would collapse, one onto the other; and down it would all come. The fire could not be fought, but there would be firefighters. They were called the "bravest," accurately, in his view; and, as the bravest, they took on a certain responsibility. The firefighters were saying, every day: "Who's going to do it, if we don't? If the bravest don't, who else is going to risk death to save the lives of strangers?"
♥ As he returned to 8D he saw that Abdulaziz was looking at him, not with commiseration, now, but with puzzled disappointment, even turning in his seat to exchange a responsible frown with Satam.
Strapped in, Muhammad Atta managed the following series of thoughts. You needed the belief system, the ideology, the ardor. You had to have it. The core reason was good enough for the mind. But it couldn't carry the body.
To the others, he realized, he was giving a detailed impersonation of a man who had lost his nerve. And he had not lost his nerve. Even before the plane gave its preliminary jolt (like a polite cough of introduction), he felt the pull of it, with relief, with recognition: the necessary speed, the escape velocity he needed to deliver him to his journey's end.
♥ So far, he thought, this is the worst day of my life-provably the worst day. In his head the weary fight between the vermin was finished; one was dying, and was now being disgustingly eaten by the other. And his loins, between them, were contriving for him something very close to the sensations of anal rape. So far, this was the worst day of his life. But then every day was the worst day, because every day was the most recent day, and the most developed, the most advanced (with all those other days behind it) toward the pan-anathema.
♥ It was 8:24. He laughed for the first time since childhood: he was in the Atlantic of the sky, at the controls of the largest weapon in history.
♥ The core reason was of course all the killing-all the putting to death. Not the crew, not the passengers, not the office workers in the Twin Towers, not the cleaners and the caterers, not the men of the NYPD and the FDNY. He was thinking of the war, the wars, the war-cycles that would flow from this day. He didn't believe in the Devil, as an active force, but he did believe in death. Death, at certain times, stopped moving at its even pace and broke into a hungry, limbering run. Here was the primordial secret. No longer closely guarded-no longer well kept. Killing was divine delight. And your suicide was just a part of the contribution you made-the massive contribution to death. All your frigidities and futilities were rewritten, becoming swollen with meaning. This was what was possible when you turned the tides of life around, when you ran with the beasts, when you flew with the flies.
♥ When he came clattering in over the struts and slats of Manhattan, there it was ahead of him and below him-the thing which is called World. Cross streets, blocks, districts, shot out from underneath the speedlines of the plane. He was glad that he wouldn't have to plow down into the city, and he even felt love for it, all its strivings and couplings and sunderings. And he felt no impulse to increase power or to bank or to strike even lower. It was reeling him in. Now even the need to shit felt right and good as his destination surged toward him.
♥ There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. "The passengers died instantly." Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was thirty-three. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporization; perhaps this was true even for the wall shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood.
American 11 struck at 8:46:40. Muhammad Atta's body was beyond all healing by 8:46:41; but his mind, his presence, needed time to shut itself down. The physical torment-a panic attack in every nerve, a riot of the atoms-merely italicized the last shinings of his brain. They weren't thoughts; they were more like a series of unignorable conclusions, imposed from without. Here was the hereafter, after all; and here was the reckoning. His mind groaned and fumbled with an irreconcilability, a defeat, a self-cancellation. Could he assemble the argument? It follows-by definition-if and only if...
And then the argument assemble all by itself. The joy of killing was proportional to the value of what was destroyed. But that value was something a killer could never see and never gauge. And where was the joy he thought he had felt-where was that joy, that itch, that paltry tingle? Yes, how gravely he had underestimated it. How very gravely he had underestimated life. His own he had hated, and had wished away; but see how long it was taking to absent itself-and with what helpless grief was he watching it go, imperturbable in its beauty and its power. Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.
~~The Last Days of Muhammad Atta.
♥ The American politician whom Mahmoud Ahmadinejad most closely resembles-in one crucial respect-is Ronald Reagan. General similarities, I agree, are hard to spot. Ahmadinejad doesn't live on a ranch with a former starlet. As a young Republican, Reagan wasn't involved in the murder of prominent Democrats. Ahmadinejad doesn't use Grecian 2000. Reagan didn't have a degree in traffic control. And so on. But what they have in common is this: both men are denizens of that stormlit plain where end-time theology meets nuclear weapons.
Now we can return, for a while, to dissimilarities. Ahmadinejad is not checks and balanced by democratic institutions. Reagan did not actually spend public money on civic preparations for the Second Coming. Ahmadinejad does not have a temperament in which "simple-minded idealism" (this is Eric Hobsbawn's account of the breakthrough with Gorbachev in Reykjavik) might break through the dense screen of "careerists, desperadoes and professional warriors around him" and recognize "the sinister absurdity" of the arms race. Reagan was not the product of a culture saturated in dreams of morbid torment, self-mutilation, and mass martyrdom. Finally, whereas Reagan had enough firepower to kill everybody on earth at least once over, Ahmadinejad does not yet have his bomb.
Jesus Christ, according to both men, is due very shortly, but in Ahmadinejad's vision Christ will merely be part of the entourage of a much grander personage-the Hidden Imam. Who is the Hidden Imam? In the year 873, the bloodline of the Prophet came to an end when Hasan al-Askari (in Shiism the eleventh legitimate imam) died without an heir. At that point, among the believers, a classic circularity took hold. It was assumed that Hasan must have an heir; there was no record of his existence, they reasoned, because extraordinary efforts had been made to conceal it; and extraordinary efforts had been made because this son was an extraordinary imam-the Mahdi, in fact, or the Lord of Time.
In Shia eschatology the Mahdi returns during a period of great tribulation (during a nuclear war, for instance), delivers the faithful from injustice and oppression, and supervises the Day of Judgement. When that happens, the Muslims have won: the Shia have won.
♥ A better analogy would be with Bolshevism in its strictly Leninist phase: ideology is placed over nation. Iranians call the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) "the Imposed War." In fact it was the Provoked War, which then became the Self-Perpetuating War, because Khomeini made it a test of Islam, with pan-Shiism as the stated goal. And it was for this that the little martyrs filed through the minefields and then sprinted into the machine-gun fire. In the West, we're all supposed to feel terrible about having supported Saddam (allowing him to avoid outright defeat). But the far greater danger was an expansionist and triumphalist Khomeini.
~~Iran and the Lord of Time.