LUDIC LOG

It seems like not too long ago that the invincibly ignorant Ronald Reagan damned his party's reviled opponent of the moment (at that time, Michael Dukakis, but does it really matter who the enemy was? Does it ever?) in the following way: "If I listened to him long enough, I would be convinced that we're in an economic downturn, and that people are homeless, and people are going without food and medical attention, and that we've got to do something about the unemployed. In the 1984 campaign, the current president's father, then the vice-president under Reagan, likewise used 'we see the silver lining, they see the big black cloud' rhetoric to describe the democratic opposition. The Democrats were the party of ugly reality, and the Republicans that of shiny perfect fantasy. How much has changed, in less than 20 years! In GOP America, circa 2002, the worst that can happen is always just around the corner and bearing down like a swarthy, radioactive freight train. The Secretary of Defense daily issues dire warnings about the inevitability of massive death at the hands of marauding Saracens and their yellow-peril abbetors. Not only are further attacks a certainty, says Donald Rumsfeld, it is only a matter of time before the terroristic they put their hands to nuclear weapons and, lacking the moral refinement of a George Bush or a John Ashcroft, use them as quickly and as often as they possibly can.

This is an interesting development, I think. Not for the motivation behind it -- like almost everything else in politics, it's a public relations exercise. If further attacks do take place, the administration can sidestep criticism such as they're facing now, that they had information about terrorism and didn't do enough to warn people; if no attacks take place, they can trot out Rumsfeld again to say that our mighty military and intelligence foiled them. What's interesting to me is that for the first time, our leaders are openly admitting that terrorist attacks are, more or less, inevitable and for the most part unstoppable.

The rider "or the terrorists win" has been so bandied about since September 11 of last year that it's become an easy punchline. But really, the terrorists already won. They won a long time ago. Their goal, first and foremost, is to create terror, and that they did. Their secondary goal is to create conditions of terror even when no acts of terror are taking place; mission, once again, accomplished. Even the most jaded of us is shaken to the core at daily reports of the imminence of suicide bombings, the inevitability of nuclear terror; just like in the bad old days of the cold war, it makes nullities of us all, invoking a sort of existential dread at the knowledge that at any given moment the lives, the aspirations, the meanings of anyone we love can cease to exist because of the actions of a small group of people who take their beliefs far too seriously. The terrorists have won; they've won simply by existing. It is a kind of pathetic rationalization that denies them victory on the grounds that they haven't acheived some arbitrary goal or another, like the liberation of Palestine or the Islamification of America. Those goals are ours, that we extrapolate or invent and stick onto the terrorist to make him comprehensible; their goal is singular, simple to accomplish, and contained entirely in their name.

So, what does this new development portend? Nothing good, I'm afraid. The admission that terror is here to stay is a small admission of defeat, but it still maintains the possibility of ultimate victory, and therein lies the problem. Both parties who dance the terrorist tango see themselves as sole possessors of an ultimate truth, an absolute morality, against which the opposition cannot stand. For their own ideology to exist, that of the other must be destroyed. There must be victory, and there must be defeat. One side must win, and another must lose; there must be actors who stand in opposition. And herein lies the problem. We're admitting that there can be defeats on either side, but we're still insisting on sides; we're saying the game is going to be a lot tougher than we had anticipated, and we might give up a lot of runs before the day is out, but we can't stop thinking of it as a game with a winner and a loser. We're telling ourselves that war has changed; we aren't ready to think about the idea that it's changed into something that isn't even war.

What am I suggesting? Nothing, really. I haven't got any idea how all this horrible mess could be put right. I'm certainly not suggesting that the sort of postmodernist paradigm-tinkering I hint at above would be seriously contemplated for even a moment by either side; Ernest Gellner was wrong. Postmodernism isn't the other extreme of fundamentalism; liberalism is. It's not those without values who are the light against which the shadow of Islamism contends; it's those with good, decent, humanitarian democratic values. The guys in the al-Q'aeda jerseys want to beat the other team, and maybe take out a few people in the stands, not the guys who are sitting at home doing math problems. But this is, in its most absolute form, intellectual jerking off. I have no solutions. I have nothing of value to add to the whole discussion. I'm sad that my country has spent the last 50 years shitting on the rest of the world; I'm sadder still that some people in the rest of the world might kill me or my friends because of that fact, or for no good reason at all. Why do I lament the inability of both the major actors to move outside the straitjacket of absolutism, of morality, of hitting and hitting harder? Why does it frustrate me so that there are mullahs and mujaheds who will never be satisfied with anything less than fire and death and meaningless empty public suicide, that there are presidents and senators who will likewise insist that if the world is to survive, it must be with America on top -- even if it's on top of a pile of corpses? Because all that's left for me, in a daily barrage of nuclear inevitablity, of akh'bari Shaitan, is lamentation, worry, and frustration. Because my ideas are weaker than a thousand fighter-bombers, weaker than a dozen men in a hijacked jet, weaker than anything in the world. Because the terrorists have already won.