There comes a point when Mike has learned to imitate a human quite well, to speak fluently and obey even the most confusing human customs. But he just doesn’t get humans—can’t understand, for instance, why if there is hunger, nobody volunteers to become soup. In particular, he does not get humor. Mike cannot laugh, cannot fathom why humans sometimes bark like that…and it bothers him.
Then one day at the zoo, he tosses a peanut to a monkey. A bigger monkey comes along, beats the little monkey up and steals his peanut. Mike watches. The little monkey gets up, looks around…spots an even smaller monkey and suckerpunches it. And suddenly, for the first time in his life, Mike begins to laugh. And laugh, until he falls to his knees and they have to carry him away, gasping for breath. At last, he understands humans…and thus finally is one himself.
A few days ago I e-mailed several friends a Salon.com essay by Afghanian-American Tamim Ansary, urging us not to blame the starving people of Afghanistan for the actions of the Taliban that crushes them or the terrorists it shelters among them. One respondent agreed, but said the terrorists themselves and their supporters should be “stamped out like cockroaches.” I emphatically agreed.
Today Jef Raskin, the man who thought up the Macintosh, responded. “Stamp them out like cockroaches? No. Capture suspects and try them like humans. We have had too much treating humans like cockroaches.”
I sent a hasty reply I now regret, saying I was comfortable with a definition of “human” which excluded the Nineteen Nitwits, and anyone who helped them.
I was dead wrong. That’s exactly the way those Nineteen Nincompoops thought. They were able to butcher thousands of innocent strangers because they had redefined “human” so as to exclude them. Just like Milosevic or Pol Pot or Amin or Hitler or Stalin in their turn. If we do the same to them, they win. As Walt Kelly said during the Vietnam War, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
That’s the very essence of human civilization: the sense to realize that revenge is not possible, that the generational feuders of Belfast and Jerusalem and other such places are wasting not only their blood, their substance and their lives, but their time. It’s a game that can never end, unless and until one side simply makes up its mind to stop. Maybe not to forgive—maybe that’s too much to ask—but just to stop. For the sake of the children, who don’t care whether their ancestors slew or were cruelly slain, and shouldn’t have to.
Like everyone else in the civilized world, I am too heartsick to stand it, and like everyone else, I would like to transmute my pain into anger. It’s slightly easier to carry, and much easier to unload. This tragedy also offers me license to unleash some of that free-floating rage and bitterness I carry around, the accumulated residue of a lifetime of petty indignities, frustrations and humiliations. The murderous anger that must have led the Nineteen Numbskulls to bushwhack nearly 3,000 strangers somehow sanctifies my own anger, makes it righteous. In the very words the Blues Brothers used to justify killing or crippling dozens of policemen doing their jobs, “We’re on a mission from God.”
Well, the Nineteen Knuckleheads thought they were too.
Back in 1976 my wife Jeanne and I wrote, in a novella called “Stardance,” these words:
“This is what it is to be human: to see the essential existential futility of all action, all striving—and to act, to strive…This is what it is to be human: to reach forever beyond your grasp…This is what it is to be human: to live forever or die trying…This is what it is to be human: to perpetually ask the unanswerable questions, in the hope that the asking of them will somehow hasten the day when they will be answered…This is what it is to be human: to strive in the face of the certainty of failure. This is what it is to be human: to persist.”
I imagine the Nineteen Nimrods felt the same way, as they saw their unsuspecting targets grow larger in their windshields. They were human, all right. Sick, but human. I apologize, Jef: you were quite right. Let us accord them the same humane treatment we gave Eichmann. Sure, it’s more than they deserve. But hey—I want more than I deserve. Who doesn’t?
Let’s not demonize them. Let’s just bring them in, try them, offer them a bit of a lie-down…at Tim McVeigh’s table…and then, as quickly as possible, do the one thing in our power that might make them squirm even more in the flames of Hell. Forget them.
The Only Thing We Have to Fear
FIRST PRINTED DECEMBER 2001
AS USUAL, THE TRUTH turned out to be both stranger and (thank God) duller than fiction.
Media accounts of the videotape of Osama bin Laden discovered shortly after the World Trade Center Massacre all seem to focus on the same aspect: at last, proof he was behind it! I had thought that case was proved long ago, and even if I hadn’t, that was still the least interesting thing about the tape as far as I’m concerned. Assuming it to have been reported accurately, here’s what I find most fascinating:
1.Mr. bin Laden was stunned when the towers came down.
He volunteers this information. He says he had presumed the destruction would be limited to those floors above the points of impact. That’s right: the fiendishly brilliant criminal genius we’ve all been so terrified of for months now, the millionaire mastermind whose intellect was so vast it wasn’t safe to show him on TV lest he somehow send his minions coded instructions right under our noses, is an idiot. He did absolutely no homework. He knew nothing about the construction of those towers, never troubled himself to study the blueprints. He who made his billions largely in construction is utterly ignorant of engineering, architecture or even basic physics. He didn’t even assign an underling to bone up on such matters and brief him at any point during his planning process. The man just plain got lucky.
What we all thought was the ingenious coordination of the WTC attacks and the anthrax assault was an illusion too, purest serendipity. Mr. bin Laden seems to have had exactly the same secret weapon the cartoon character George of the Jungle famously depended on: Dumb Luck. And he doesn’t even have the sense to be embarrassed about that. As George’s colleague Bugs Bunny would say, what a mo-roon.
2.He casually admits betraying his own men.
An unspecified number—perhaps most—of the Nineteen Nitwits apparently thought they were on a suicide mission; they believed they were engaged in a simple generic hijacking. They were not martyrs: the correct technical term would be “suckers.” They probably died screaming, just like their victims. Since they did not knowingly, willingly, give their lives for jihad, they might well be roasting in Islamic hell right now for all Mr. bin Laden knows.
Or cares. He reportedly expresses no shame or even sorrow for their deaths, and makes no apology for, or even defense of, his appalling treachery. It does not occur to him to reassure his surviving followers worldwide that he will sacrifice them only if it should ever prove absolutely, positively useful.
He seems to believe the same thing we all mistakenly thought for awhile just after September 11: that somewhere, he has a large force of eager kamikaze fanatics at his disposal. We believed at least Six Hundred were ready to ride into the Valley of Death at his command. It now appears he may have been able to come up with as few as eight…supported by eleven other trusting chumps who probably expected at worst to get tear-gassed and handcuffed, face a few tough questions from Geraldo and a bad headshot on CNN before getting exchanged for some American or Israeli hostage or another.
The Einstein of Evil—Fu Manchu, Rayt Marius, Lex Luthor, Dr. Moriarty, the Dark Lord of Mordor and You-Know-Who all rolled into one—is an ignorant fathead and doesn’t care who knows it. The most sophisticated technological artifacts he seems familiar with are fax machines, cheap camcorders and box-cutters. And jeeps, in which to run away. He cheerfully admits bushwhacking his own troops as policy. His notorious success at mass murder, he admits, was at least two-thirds an accident. His entire escape plan was to go hide behind a big bunch of starving people. We’re talking about a mental midget and a moral microbe. His best friend has to have noticed b
y now he has a heart the size of a raisin.
For fear of this thumbfingered hamhanded braindead stumblebum, we should all swallow Bill C-36? He isn’t worth swallowing a Tylenol-2.
Mr. bin Laden isn’t worth an extra half hour of wasted time at the airport and a twenty-four dollar ticket surcharge, forever—much less a heart-stopping momentary lurch in the planetary economy—and he certainly isn’t cause for Canada to abandon such useful concepts as the right to open due process, the right to counsel of choice, the right to remain silent, the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, freedom from arbitrary search, seizure or arrest or any of the other minor alterations of the present social contract contained in that bill. Terrorism is a terrible disease, yes…but personally, I’m far more terrified of the self-appointed surgeons of Parliament who propose to cure the disease with radical amputation of essential parts of our country’s brain and heart.
Even the so-called “sunset clause” recommended by the Canadian Bar Association—basically, an expiry date—is nowhere near enough protection or reassurance to suit me. Would you care to sit in jail without counsel until sunset…if sunset were five years away? Suppose the next diabolically lucky terrorist happens to be of your ethnic background? As Silver Donald Cameron pointed out recently, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Nelson Mandela would be considered a terrorist, if he hadn’t won. Just about every friend I had in the sixties would easily have qualified as a potential threat to national security under the vaguely defined parameters of C-36; today they are, without exception, assets to their community, society and culture. The ones who aren’t in jail, anyway.
I’m not willing to sacrifice the kind of people governments usually keep thick dossiers on—you know, undesirables like Harlow Shapley, Nikola Tesla, Mahatma Gandhi, Robert Oppenheimer, Lenny Bruce, Farley Mowat, John Lennon, Ken Kesey, Judith Merril—to try and guard against an occasional Keystone Konspirator with the devil’s luck.
Strapped for Takeoff
FIRST PRINTED SEPTEMBER 2001
COULD WE ALL PLEASE take a deep breath—take an Ativan, if necessary—and just chill for a minute? I’m much more afraid of panic than I am of terrorists, and when we reach the point where American airline pilots—of all people—start behaving irrationally, it’s past time for a reality check.
Okay, Captain Rambo: there you are in the securely locked cockpit of your 757, packing the loaded sidearm you say will make you feel safer. Here comes a bad guy. A guy who, in order to become your target, has to have killed or neutralized every flight attendant, controlled all the passengers and then come through a locked pressure-sealed bulkhead in a big hurry. My question is this: how worried is this guy going to be about a middle-aged man in a sedentary profession with a .22 pistol? (Surely you weren’t even dreaming of using some more authoritative caliber?)
Whatever the caliber of your weapon, consider your tactical situation. The enemy can stand beside the hatch, reach in with just his gun hand and spray bullets randomly: anything he hits is good for him and bad for you. Your return fire is most unlikely to shoot the gun out of his hand; far more likely it will hit—
—me. See me, back there in coach, in seat 27C? Trying desperately to duck, only it’s physically impossible for a six-foot-one man to crouch in one of those tiny damned seats? I’m the one who’s probably going to take that round you just fired—
—if everyone else on the plane is lucky, that is. Because you know better than I do what’s probably going to happen if the slug misses me. There are no wasted cubic inches in an airliner: if that slug doesn’t hit somebody, odds are it’ll either wreck something crucial or depressurize the cabin…or both.
The enemy isn’t that dumb: instead of potting away at you with a handgun, he has almost certainly announced his arrival in your life with something more sensible, like gas or smoke or pepper spray. Are you sure there’s no place outside your sealed cockpit from which someone knowledgeable enough could add, say, nitrous oxide to your cockpit air supply, Captain? Or cyanide to your water?
Let’s grant you some of the quibbles I hear you muttering. Let’s say you spend your whole transatlantic flight breathing and drinking exclusively from bottles. You carry a newly invented zero-cost gun that fires high-velocity low-impact needles of a magic new drug that makes people instantly unconscious with no long-term health risks, and you are an expert in its care and use. Suddenly your cell phone rings. Answering it, you hear an unearthly shriek, and then a heavily-accented voice says, “Your child still has one eye left, are you going to do exactly as I tell you?”
Face it: there is no security this side of the grave. Spending a fortune upgrading airport security is much worse than useless: it’s exactly what Osama bin Laden would like to see us do. Raise the price of air travel and he has won, as though he’d damaged every single plane in the world.
Surely if there’s any lesson we should have learned from the WTC Massacre, it is that security precautions are mostly irrelevant. For the last several decades we have spent countless millions of dollars, irradiated trillions of bags and hard drives, impeded, inconvenienced and insulted millions of honest travelers and wasted enough paper to give every living human three copies of each of my thirty-one books. It accomplished nothing. When the enemy was good and ready, he took and held three out of five target planes using box-cutters.
If we demand a security system good enough to keep out every box-cutter, the price of an airline ticket must at least double, and probably worse. And then the enemy will use the con’s old standby: a sharpened toothbrush handle. Forbid passengers to carry any utensil whatsoever, and he will garrote the armed sky marshal with his necktie, or she will with her pantyhose. Require all passengers to submit to anal probe and board naked: how will you cope with two or three martial arts experts? Do you know how many planes fly each day? We don’t have enough martial artists to cover them all.
There is no security measure, however expensive, that the enemy cannot circumvent dirt cheap. So why throw away barrels of good money that could be used to buy better intelligence and catch the bastards before they ever get to the airport?
A lot of American airline pilots are of my generation. I think I know a little of how they feel now. We spent the first three or four decades of our lives at least half-expecting Ragnarok to come at any time, fearing that any day now world war might break out and bring the end of everything. It seemed inconceivable that the Soviet Union could ever just quit. Then it did…and in the dozen plus years since, we’ve slowly allowed ourselves to relax, to hope, finally to believe that we might yet live out our days without seeing another planetary bloodbath. No wonder we’re so angry and frightened now. It’s always confusing and infuriating when your alarm clock goes off.
Perhaps we should try and remember that: remember how well it turned out the last time disaster seemed inevitable, and calm down a little. As my wife, a Soto Zen Buddhist monk, often tells me: don’t just do something, sit there. Molasses border crossings, fascist national ID cards, gunmen on planes, biowar panic—these things will affect only honest citizens, and won’t impede terrorism in the slightest.
Frank Herbert wrote, “Fear is the Mindkiller. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I must face my fear. I must permit it to pass over me and through me.” Sounds to me like a wonderful way to annoy a terrorist. Not to mention save a few megabucks with which to buy and equip better spies.
The Beam Up Mine Own
FIRST PRINTED APRIL 2003
COMPARED TO THE AVERAGE IRAQI, I’ve suffered nothing from this war. I have not spent one minute at risk, or in fear. Well, maybe a minute or two last week, when I walked through midtown Manhattan and noticed that every street corner had a minimum of eight cops. But nothing actually happened. Unlike some, I do understand the difference between a virtual war and a real one, between an imagined threat and one that turns your niece into hamburger and rags.
Nonetheless, for a while there I was starting to
feel invaded—by war fever.
Every morning, the Iraq war was on nearly every page of my paper. First in the news, which alternated between telling me things I have no business knowing and things I wish I could avoid learning, both in excruciating detail. Then in the comment pages, in which a brigade of blind men and women explained the elephant: the war is good; the war is bad; the war is really about oil—no, it’s a secret struggle between the dollar and the euro—no, it’s a vendetta by the Bush family—no, it’s a parting prank by the Clinton administration…
Nearly every TV channel insisted on telling me about the war. The news channels would barely consent to mention anything else. The worst part was realizing that, compared to what I have come to accept as a reasonable evening’s entertainment, real butchery is unbelievably boring. So I couldn’t even bring myself to switch to some channel where people had the courtesy to die properly lit and in frame. Okay, forget television. I’d go to the office and—
—find fifty e-mails about the war. It’s like the comment section of this newspaper, but without the rigor, wit or credentials. The war’s really about the Christian fundamentalists trying to exterminate Muslim fundamentalists…no, it’s arms dealers repossessing the weapons of mass destruction Saddam failed to pay for…no no, the war is really about sand. (What do you think computer chips are made of? Do you have any idea what percentage of the world’s silicon is currently found in Iraq?) Just add your name to this virtual petition, here, and surely it will then acquire enough manna to break America’s will to fight—
Enough. In the first place, I never found a single e-mail commentator who had any more right to an opinion than I did, which was none. None of us had access to accurate information, nor the training, experience or skills to analyze it if we did. We were simply blowing smoke. As I age, sometimes the things I said as a callow youth return to embarrass me—and particularly anything I had to say about a war while it was going on. I always find, ten or twenty years afterward, that everything I thought I knew was wrong, my premises were mistaken and my logic was flawed.
The Crazy Years Page 17