The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump

by Martin Amis

  The Bolsheviks were, as Lenin said, “a party of a new type.” Steinberg writes as if he honestly didn’t know anything about the great census-slashing deformity that was about to unfold. His tone, indeed, would be appropriate to an account of a complicated reshuffle in a provincial guildhall. In this historiographical world, with its apparent dread of controversy, nobody is to blame for anything. Nor does Mark Steinberg seem aware that his “voices” have one overriding poignancy, in that they were all of them destined for silence.

  The Times Literary Supplement 2002

  Is Terrorism “About Religion”?

  History is accelerating; and so with every passing day the future becomes more and more unknowable. Among our foremost thinkers, we find only one presentiment that is universally shared. This turns out to be a sinister variation on the idea of “convergence.” Not the convergence of nations and polities, whereby the world’s autocratic regimes would gradually align themselves with the democratic and contentedly globalized mainstream. This particular expectation, even neoconservatives now concede, was a triumphalist fantasy of the 1990s—that curious holiday from what Philip Roth has called “the remorseless unforeseen.”

  The convergence we have now come to anticipate is the convergence of international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction—of IT and WMD. Even strictly parallel lines, I was taught, meet and cross in infinity. And the paths of IT and WMD are visibly inclined, like the sides of a tapering spire. Their eventual convergence is guaranteed by the simplest of market forces. Marginal costs will fall; and demand will climb.

  It has not been widely realized, even now, that America has already suffered a terrorist deployment of WMD—as we have just been reminded by the one-man suicide mission of the troubled germ scientist Bruce E. Ivins, in Frederick, Maryland (July 29, 2008). The WMD attack began on September 18, 2001. The cost in blood was five dead and seventeen seriously infected. The cost in treasure was over a billion dollars (the cost to the perpetrator, in a vibrant asymmetry, was estimated at the time to be about $2,500). And there was a third impact: the cost in fear. Anthrax is not contagious; but fear is. The scale of the attack was minuscule, yet for a while the terror filled the sky.

  Unlike the poet, the novelist (see Auden’s lustrous sonnet of that name) assumes that his or her reactions to the main events (in life, in history) are utterly median, average—predictably and dependably human. I am confident that my reaction to September 11 was quite normative: a leaden and sourly mineral incredulity. It is with rather more diffidence that I divulge my reaction to September 18: I followed the example of that large and flightless African bird which, when sighting a threat to its existence, chooses to bury its head in the sand. Rather than keep my eyes open, I accepted a mouthful of grit.

  This was the kind of datum I was unable to contemplate (from an official “projection”):

  Using one aircraft dispensing 1,000 kg of anthrax spores. Clear calm night. Area covered (sq. km): 300. Deaths assuming 3,000–10,000 people per sq. km: one million to three million.

  The affective content of September 18 ran as follows: you must abandon forever the notion that you can protect your loved ones. Staggering, too, was the perceived magnification of the enemy’s power. Al Qaeda swelled like a Saturn; and for a while they seemed to be everywhere on earth—the whisperers, the night runners of Osama. September 18 was very cheap, very terrifying, and durably elusive. It entrained over nine thousand interrogations and six thousand grand jury subpoenas; and the case is not yet closed.

  The anthrax letters contained two near-identical cover notes. The first said:

  09-11-01

  THIS IS NEXT

  TAKE PENACILIN NOW

  DEATH TO AMERICA

  DEATH TO ISRAEL

  ALLAH IS GREAT

  After the ebbing of panic (the widely reported “subclinical hysteria”), no one took the cover note seriously, let alone literally. “Take penacilin now”: this was sound medical advice (anthrax is a bacterium, not a virus), but the misspelling was obviously tactical—a false lead, a false flag. The perpetrator was not a zealot; he was a scowl in a lab coat, a Unabomber, a Timothy McVeigh with a PhD. And so it proved—or so it seems.

  September 18, we concluded, was “not about religion” (“Allah Is Great” was a blind). Was September 11 about religion? This is still controversial. Both President Bush and former British PM Tony Blair, who are religious, were very quick to say that September 11 was “not about religion” (religion, hereabouts, being a euphemism for Islam). A gathering consensus then emerged that September 11 was about religion—or, at least, was not not about religion. But in the last year or two, evidently, we have gone back to saying that September 11, and March 11 (Madrid, 2004), and July 7 (London, 2005), and all the rest, were “not about religion.”

  The two most stimulating IT watchers known to me are John Gray and Philip Bobbitt. Professor Gray (Straw Dogs, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern, and Black Mass) and Professor Bobbitt (The Shield of Achilles and the masterly Terror and Consent) are utterly unalike, except in brainpower and literary panache. Bobbitt is a proactive and muscular Atlanticist, whereas Gray is almost Taoist in his skepticism and his luminous passivity. Bobbitt is religious, and Gray is at least philoreligious (secular, but wholly reconciled to the inexorability of “faith”); but neither man is an exponent of relativist politesse. And they assert, respectively, that international terrorism is “not about Islam” and that international terrorism has “no close connection to religion.”

  Al Qaedaism, for them, is an epiphenomenon—a secondary effect. It is the dark child of globalization and, equally, the mimic of modernity: devolved, decentralized, privatized, outsourced, and networked. According to Bobbitt (rather more dubiously), Al Qaeda not only reflects the market state: it is a market state (“a virtual market state”). Globalization created great wealth and also great defenselessness; it created a new space, or a new dimension. Thus the epiphenomenon is not about religion, they argue; it is about human opportunism and the will to power.

  Then what, you may well be wondering, was all that about jihad and infidels and Allahu Akbar and crusaders and madrasas and sharia and fiqh and takfir and the scriptural prophecies and the cleansed caliphate and the martyrs’ paradise? Why did people write whole books with titles like A Fury for God and The Age of Sacred Terror? There are several reasons for hoping that international terrorism is not about religion—chief among them the immense onerousness, the near impossibility, now, of maintaining any kind of discourse that involves creedal “convictions” and (I’ll put this simply) less than reverent generalizations about nonwhite foreigners. Al Qaedaism may evolve into not being about religion, about Islam. But one’s faculties insist that at the very least it is not not about religion yet.

  Let me devote a paragraph to the British perspective. In the United Kingdom, in 2007, there were 203 arrests on terrorism charges, nearly all of them connected to radical Islam. It is possible to open your newspaper (The Independent) and read about three thwarted or bungled cases of jihadism on a single day (May 24, 2008). The main purpose of the Quilliam Foundation, recently established, is to deradicalize young British Muslims. And consider the otherwise extraordinarily weak motivation of the four men responsible for July 7. Experience of conflict or of foreign occupation? No. A set of demands or the prospect of benefits? No. Community support? No. Familial heroization postmortem? On the contrary.

  Then, too, the rise of suicide attacks directly targeting civilians is astonishing—and it is also astonishing how unastonished we claim to be in the face of it. Many commentators like to remind us that this tactic is (a) nothing new and (b) nontheological, and then follow that up with a perfunctory reference to the Tamil Tigers, the godless Sri Lankan separatists who have been blowing themselves to pieces since 1987. The relevant essay in Making Sense of Suicide Missions (edited by Diego Gambetta and updated in 2006) states, of the Tigers: “There are no clear examples of civilians being directly targeted.” Moreo
ver, one database (quoted in The Times Literary Supplement) concludes that “over 80 per cent of all suicide attacks in history have taken place since 2001.” Suicide bombing is a cult. And Gambetta makes the haunting point that this weapon, unlike any other, is self-replenishing. The bomber uses up one martyr, but he creates many others; and “we know that the number of volunteers soars immediately after Ramadan.”

  It may also emerge that the use of religion is, or is becoming, merely a means of mobilization. Religion is for the foot soldiers, supposedly, and not the masterminds. At some later date we may see that religion provided the dialectical staircase to indiscriminate death and destruction. The idea, for instance, that democracy (fundamentally unclean) inculpates every citizen in its nation’s policies; the idea (or ancient heresy) of takfir, whereby the jihadi preabsolves himself of killing fellow Muslims. Interestingly, though, Ayman al-Zawahiri is currently squirming about in a theological debate with the venerable cleric Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, as Al Qaeda itself is having to defend its religious legitimacy. Osama bin Laden is often similarly embroiled. Even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian jailbird proudly known as the “sheikh of the slaughterers,” constantly sought doctrinal ballast. Are these masterminds persuaded that terror is not “about religion”?

  We can further expect international terrorism to become much more diffuse in its motivations, reflecting changes in the contemporary personality. John Gray has identified a vein of what he expressively calls “anomic terrorism.” This would be the carnage inspired by alienation, the self-extending despair evident in the random serial stabbings in the cities of Japan, or in the campus massacres in the United States—or indeed in the threats voiced by Dr. Ivins during the weeks before his death. The historian Eric Hobsbawm believes that the pandemic collapse of moral inhibition has to do with a general coarsening, the desensitization of violence brought about by the mass media (and of course the Internet). This prompts some further points.

  It is Bobbitt’s thesis (which Gray, incidentally, tends to pooh-pooh) that the current conflicts are epochal, having to do with a shift in the constitutions of the polities of the West. As the welfare state evolves into the market state, it abandons many of its responsibilities to its citizenry, and concentrates above all on the provision of opportunities to the individual. This, I think, has clear consequences for the self: there is simply more pressure on it. In Mr. Sammler’s Planet, which appeared at the end of that great spurt of narcissistic eccentricity known as the 1960s, Saul Bellow has his elderly hero reflect (with delightful restraint) that mass individualism is relatively new and, perhaps, “has not been a great success.”

  Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), with its dank crew of self-righteous anarchists, is horribly prescient. Here we find (for example) the observation that merely to erect a building is to create a new vulnerability; here we find a revolutionist observing that the power of life is far, far weaker than the power of death. In his reading of the terrorist psyche, Conrad persistently stresses the qualities of vanity and sloth—i.e., the desire for maximum distinction with minimum endeavor. In other words, the need to make an impression is overwhelming, and a negative impression is much more easily achieved than a positive. In our era, this translates into an ungovernable thirst for fame. Probably no one under thirty can fully grasp it, but fame has become a kind of “religion”—the opium, and now the angel dust, of the mass individual.

  By some accounts it took the Ayatollah Khomeini several nauseous years of war with Iraq before he came to see the theological viability of nuclear fission (and the groundwork was then begun). Osama bin Laden has never made any secret of his admiration for WMDs: “It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God” (statement entitled “The Nuclear Bomb of Islam,” 1998). All these tools are now for sale; and how very remarkable it is, in the larger scheme, that the world’s first megadeath madam, the metallurgist A. Q. Khan, is “a national hero” in Pakistan.

  There is another good reason for wanting international terrorism to stop being “about religion.” One can think of scenarios of extortion, compellence, and ransom, but only an eschatological dream could justify the clear calm night and the 3 million dead. On the other hand, the actors would unquestionably make an impression; and it would be supergeohistorical in size.

  International terrorism, for now, represents a puny apocalypse. Philip Bobbitt is as droll about this as anybody: since September 11, “the total number of persons worldwide who have been killed by terrorists is about the same number as those who drowned in bathtubs in the US.” But at any moment it—IT—could go from nothing to everything. After an untraceable mass-destructive strike on one of its cities, what political system would ever know itself again? And all other nation-states would be unrecognizable, too, as would relations between them.

  The Wall Street Journal 2008

  In Memory of Neda Soltan, 1983–2009: Iran

  The writer Jason Elliot called his recent and resonant Iranian travelogue Mirrors of the Unseen; and I should say that I’m aware of the dangers generally associated with writing about the future. But what we seem to be witnessing in Iran is the first spasm of the death agony of the Islamic Republic. In this process, which will be very long and very ugly, Mir Hossein Mousavi (the recently defeated moderate) is likely to play a lesser role than Neda Agha-Soltan.

  According to Time magazine, it was “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history.” There she is, in the amateur video, spiritedly present on the periphery of a demonstration (which was being broken up); then comes the jolt of the gunshot wound to the chest. “NeDA!” cries her avuncular companion (in fact her music teacher). The bullet was fired by a paramilitary policeman. She died in two minutes. “I’m burning, I’m burning,” she said.

  Her metamorphosis (from youth, hope, and beauty to an agonized end) unforgettably crystallized the core Iranian idea—the Shia tragedy and passion—of martyrdom in the face of barbaric injustice. A traveler, a linguist, a performing musician, and a divorcée, apolitical but civic-minded, a defiant individualist (in dress and mores), a questioner, Neda Soltan embodied something else, too: she was the gentle face of the modern. Jason Elliot’s title should again be borne in mind as we consider the June Events of 2009, which are open to two interpretations.

  Quite possibly, things are more or less as they look: the results of a fraudulent election were presented to the people with indecent haste and indecent flippancy (with, in other words, contempt for the democratic participants); civil unrest was then followed by the application of state violence. Now consider that if, after the usual interval, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had soberly announced a 51 percent win for President Ahmadinejad, then Iran, and the world, might well have bowed its head and moved on. Just as possibly (the Islamic Republic being what it is), the landslide was ostentatiously rigged and vaunted to bring on the unrest, the terror, and the crackdown, which continues.

  Back in 1997, the regime felt confident enough to sanction the surprise victory of Muhammad Khatami, who won by the same landslide margin of 69 percent in a joyous election that no one disputed. Khatami, a cleric, had nonetheless far stronger liberal credentials than the technocrat Mousavi (who, during the Iran–Iraq War, was well to the right of Khamenei). Lovingly hailed as “Ayatollah Gorbachev,” Khatami was soon talking about the “thoughtful dialogue” he hoped to open with America. It seemed possible that international isolation, which so parches and deoxygenates the Iranian air, was about to be eased.

  Everyone understood that this process would take time. In June 2001, Khatami was reelected with a majority of 78 percent. Seven months later came George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech (one of the most destructive in American history), and the Tehran Spring was at an end. In truth, Bush was heaven-sent for the Iranian right; without meaning to, he greatly enhanced Iran’s regional power (with the adventurist, indeed experimentalist war against Iraq), and at the same time remained sufficiently “arrogant�
� (the most detested of all attributes in the Shia-Iranian universe) to maintain and service popular hatred.

  Today, the mullahs are aware that the new president is for several reasons much more formidable. Had Mousavi won, Obama would have rewarded Iran, and in ways palpable to every Iranian. Such a “linkage”—liberalization equals benefits—would have fatal consequences for the regime. The earth is already stirring beneath their feet, with the pro-Western, anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian election in Lebanon. And other historical forces are conspiring to rattle the armed clerisy of Iran.

  For the mullahs now know that they are afloat on an ocean of illegitimacy. The great hawsers of the revolution of 1978–79 are all either snapped or silently rotting. Of the four foundational narratives, three are myths: the “Islamic Revolution” was not an Islamic revolution; the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), which destroyed a generation, was not the “Imposed War,” as it is still called; and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was not the infallible, inerrant “Divine Authority” (as every inquisitive Iranian has long understood, he was a world historical monster). Perhaps most important of all, for now, the fourth narrative, or thread (anti-Americanism—anti-“Westoxication,” and “Death to America!,” an old battle cry still chanted by schoolchildren), has been severed by the person of Barack Obama.

  Over the course of the summer and autumn leading up to November 4, 2008, opinion polls in the Middle East showed a near-unanimous certainty that in America “they” would never let a black man take possession of the White House. But there he was, with his democratic superlegitimacy glittering all about him, and he spoke to Islam in a new voice, a voice of historical awareness and respect. When, in July 2008, President Sarkozy received Obama in Paris, he said in greeting, “This is the America we love.” It was a sentiment very likely to find an echo from the youth in the cities of the Middle East.