Lacking their ignorance, Becker says, we compensate by making ourselves stupid. We tranquilize ourselves with the trivial; we make friends, raise families, drink beer, follow the Redskins, find comfort in religions promising eternal life, all of which takes our minds off the potentially paralyzing truth. We deceive ourselves into believing—not literally, but emotionally—that we are immortal. Paranoiacs and depressives are in some ways the sanest among us, according to Becker, because their layer of denial is so fragile it fractures. Most of us, though, are able to retain our sanity so long as our anxiety is held at bay, and our anxiety is held at bay so long as our bold illusion remains manageable.
This is not exactly the anthem of romantic poets or motivational speakers, but no one has ever successfully challenged Becker’s central thesis. On some level, we attempt to smother our elemental fear of death with a grand lie.
That’s where terrorism comes in. Terrorism penetrates that self-deception in a way that few things can.
During the Cold War, Americans knew that the Soviets had missiles pointed at us, and we at them. And yet, paradoxically—applying Becker’s paradigm—this gave comfort. Mutually assured destruction seemed to offer an anodyne, a plausible measure of deterrence and thus a toehold for our state of denial.
It would take something truly diabolical to dislodge that toe, something that existed only in fiction. Remember SPECTRE, the shadowy international organization that was James Bond’s nemesis? The acronym stood for “Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion.” It was an absurd concept, really—an entity of no fixed address, affiliated with no state, answerable to no constituency, diffuse, elusive, nihilistic, unavailable for negotiation, promiscuously cruel, fueled by hatred, with no comprehensible agenda other than mayhem, destruction, and death.
You know, al Qaeda.
With al Qaeda, however, there is an additional fillip, a small, elegant frisson. It was probably best expressed in a quote attributed to Osama bin Laden himself, a few weeks after 9/11: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”
SPECTRE, with a suicide wish.
My terrorism field trip had destinations other than Jerusalem. The itinerary would take me to Madrid, to ride the same train route that al Qaeda blew up on March 11, killing 191 and injuring nearly 2,000. Then, Jerusalem. And then I would fly home on British Airways Flight 223, the one that kept getting canceled because of reports that terrorists were going to bring it down. There was really nothing to worry about, from a rational standpoint. Just a few days on vehicles of public transportation.
I brought The Denial of Death with me. Also, Kafka.
AWAITING TAKEOFF FOR the first leg of my trip, Dulles to Heathrow, I found myself seated on the aisle watching the last of my fellow passengers boarding the plane. It looked as if I might luck out, with the middle seat beside me unoccupied. But at the last moment a man arrived, struggled to stuff a large duffel bag in the overhead compartment, then plopped down next to me. I nodded, smiled, and looked away to compose myself.
A few months after 9/11, I told a coworker that I thought the Pulitzer Prize for news photography for the year 2001 should go to a machine. I couldn’t decide which machine—the overhead camera in an airport in Maine that caught a shirtsleeved Mohamed Atta passing briskly through security on the morning of September 11, or the ATM camera in Maryland that snapped hijackers Hani Hanjour and Majed Moqed withdrawing cash.
Both photos were riveting for their grainy banality, and for what they say about the duality in all of us. Here were ordinary-looking people engaged in ordinary-looking activities, indistinguishable from any of us, with dreadful secrets in their head. I hadn’t thought about those photos in a long time, until now. I gathered my thoughts, prepared my face, and looked back at my seatmate, Hani Hanjour.
In the ATM snapshot, Hanjour—the Saudi national believed to have piloted the plane that hit the Pentagon—is standing behind and to Moqed’s right, both looking placidly down as their money plops into place. I had pretty much the same view of him, here in the plane, to my left. Small guy, lithe build, olive complexion, angular face, sparse goatee, hard eyes.
If you Google “Hani Hanjour” you will find a spiderwork of conspiracy theories speculating that he is still alive—a demonic Elvis who has recently been seen walking the streets of Riyadh. He wasn’t on that plane at all; his piloting skills were too feeble to have maneuvered a 757 through a hairpin turn at breakneck speed and bring it down onto a target that was, comparatively, the height of a Necco wafer.
“So,” I said as cheerfully as possible to my new seatmate as the plane taxied for takeoff, “where are you from?”
“Saudi Arabia,” he said.
Yes, yes, security for this flight had been formidable. This was the sister flight to the infamous Flight 223—the return leg on the Corridor of Terror. There were two separate inspections of our persons and our belongings. The second machine was so sensitive it busted a woman with a gold chain no thicker than a yo-yo string. Security officers took aside a little girl, five or six years old, with a gappy smile, and wanded her thighs up under her skirt.
This sort of thing went on for twenty-five minutes, until it came time to board, at which point the final twenty or thirty people in line, and their carry-ons, were waved aboard with no inspection whatsoever. I was one of those people. Hani, here, came in after me—he must have been one of them, too. His duffel bag was enormous.
So, what does a terrorist seem like, anyway? How do you know one if you see one?
Social scientists and law enforcement agencies have been focusing on this question for more than a quarter-century, with no coherent results. In the late 1970s, a psychologist interviewed eighty imprisoned terrorists in eleven countries and concluded that most of them had defective vestibular functions of the inner ear. This was an exciting finding, until it fell apart under further scrutiny. More rigorous studies have found, disturbingly, that terrorists tend to be fairly ordinary people—relatively sane if politically extreme individuals of ordinary appearance and demeanor. Like Hani, my seatmate.
What should I do? Summon a flight attendant? Stop the plane on a wild suspicion? Too late anyway, we were in the air.
I think you know where this is going. My seatmate’s name turned out to be Tareq Ali Alghamdi. He’s twenty-two, an engineering student at the University of New Haven—a nice guy, no more of a terrorist than I. I know all about him because he burbled it all out within minutes of takeoff, even showing me his visa papers, unbidden. I’m guessing he does this all the time—he knows what he looks like, and is aggressively and engagingly open about himself in a preemptive defense. I know, for example, that he’s a Muslim but no fanatic. He will have a beer every once in a while and is, he emphasizes, a regular guy: “Hey, if I see a pretty girl, I’ll look at her ass, too.”
Tareq says customs officials often detain him for unreasonable lengths of time, simply by virtue of his passport and his general appearance. He says that his brother, who is diabetic, has been held for questioning for hours without access to his insulin.
As we began our trip across the Atlantic, Tareq and I solemnly agreed that terrorism is making people too tense, that ethnic profiling is a dreadful indignity, and that dumb Americans are too darn willing to leap to unjustified conclusions about people on slim evidence.
Life is possible only with illusions. And so, the question for the science of mental health must become an absolutely new and revolutionary one, yet one that reflects the essence of the human condition: On what level of illusion does one live?
—Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
IF THERE WAS anxiety, it was not apparent on the faces of the people on this double-decker commuter train that brings workers into Madrid from the blue-collar northeastern suburbs. People dressed for work sat quietly, in that state of swaying, hypnotic detachment familiar to subway riders everywhere. Some glanced at the time and temperature, which flashes continual
ly in these trains on a dot-video display. But no one seemed to be noticing a large hiker’s knapsack, left unattended. It was getting stares only from me, and only I bothered to nudge awake a dozing man across the aisle, to ask if it was his. It was.
Of course, most of these people had ridden here fifty times since the day that this very train—same destination, same time of day—exploded. That was ten weeks before, March 11, one of four bombings that occurred almost simultaneously, in different rush-hour trains, along the forty-minute commuter line. The instruments of destruction were backpacks detonated by cell phone. Al Qaeda masterminded it; Spain was said to be a target because of its cooperation in the war in Iraq.
This train took the worst hit, multiple bombs detonating a minute before it was to roll into the giant Atocha station—Madrid’s version of Grand Central. Dozens of people died in unspeakable ways. When some survivors tried to describe for TV crews what they had witnessed, they began, but fell grimly silent.
On this day, on this train ten weeks later, there was nothing. Soldiers with assault rifles had been very much in evidence at the park-and-ride suburban station of Alcalá de Henares, where I had boarded. Alcalá was where most of the terrorists were thought to have entered the system with their deadly cargo.
But the train itself held only commuters, staring blankly ahead as they passed through gray industrial parks, clotheslined shantytowns with rusted corrugated-metal roofs, and the familiar New York–style graffiti that turned rocks into gaily spray-painted monogrammed pastel pillows. For many people on 3/11, this was the last sight they ever saw.
The train I was on was now standing room only. As we neared Atocha and the display time hit 7:39—the moment of the bombing—I approached a small, trim woman in her forties and asked her if she was nervous. Celia Alves, a secretary, was headed for work. Nervous? She shrugged no, and nodded disgustedly toward the newspaper I was carrying. It was that day’s El Pais; I had picked it up at the station but hadn’t yet looked at it.
“Obtuvieron lo que desearon,” she said. They got what they wanted.
This was May 25. The headline read “Los Últimos de Irak.” It reported that the final group of Spanish advisers had returned from Iraq. The troops had been ordered home by Spain’s new antiwar government, elected in a backlash after the bombings.
They got what they wanted. Nothing to worry about anymore.
Can it be that easy to banish fear? Just find a reason for optimism, and optimism returns. But is the threat really gone? Isn’t Spain still a modern, Western, capitalist, secular democracy, flagrant corrupter of a large Muslim population—as despised by radical Islam as any country other than ours?
The fact is, the Spanish economy has rebounded nicely from 3/11. When I was there, the country was giddy over the marriage of the dashing Crown Prince Felipe to a pretty TV anchorwoman. And at Atocha station, when I got off the train into a crowd five deep waiting to board (this disaster would have been much worse had the train detonated in the station), things were at a brisk and seemingly normal morning pace—though everywhere, a police presence was evident.
The public consciousness of the dead and wounded of Madrid’s 3/11 wasn’t gone; it was tucked away at one corner of Atocha, behind barriers, next to vending machines that sell Doritos and Toblerone and ham sandwiches. The improvised shrine was similar to those spontaneous memorials in downtown New York that sprang up after 9/11—personal messages, religious icons, photos, flowers, teddy bears. But there was an additional element that made this particularly powerful.
I felt it before I actually understood what it was. Many people who left a letter or a message also left a votive candle, contained in a broad, foot-deep glass cylinder. These candles have stout flames that burn for a week or more. Hundreds of them were on the floor, maybe a thousand in all, and, as I approached this shrine, I literally felt its warmth. I knew none of the dead, and yet, standing there at the barrier, at this small furnace of grief, I was startled to feel a tear on my cheek.
Weeks later, a wire story would report that the candles at Atocha had been removed and replaced with video screens and computers on which passersby can leave messages. People had complained that the candles were too emotionally powerful, preventing them from putting the attacks behind them.
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.
—Genesis 2:17
ADAM AND EVE’S punishment for getting too curious was banishment from the Garden of Eden. But that was the least of it. The Bible is unclear about whether the first couple were immortal before their expulsion, but in a way, it is immaterial. What matters is that, as their punishment, they learned that they would someday die. That’s when their Hell on Earth began.
To enter the modern, stone-porticoed building on King David Street in Jerusalem, I needed to give my name and show ID to an armed man who stood outside with a walkie-talkie. He radioed the information to a woman inside, who checked the name against her manifest and radioed back a clearance. Only then was I admitted.
“Welcome to Jerusalem,” the guard said, deadpan. I was not sure if this was meant ironically or not. Probably not. This was my hotel.
Things are different in Jerusalem, different from anywhere you have ever been. Before entering a grocery store, or a bus station, or a movie theater, you are stopped and wanded, often questioned, and sometimes frisked. Many restaurants keep their doors locked and buzz their customers in. At Ben-Gurion International Airport, the X-ray machine is the size of a panel truck, and the inspection of a single laptop computer can take fifteen minutes. Ordinary citizens walk the streets of Jerusalem carrying concealed pistols—this is not only legal but encouraged, to maintain an omnipresent citizen militia. Soldiers on weekend leave stroll the street in civvies, but with assault rifles slung over their shoulders, like ugly, 15-pound handbags. This, too, is encouraged. Soldiers are also under orders to carry tourniquets, just in case. All of this is to make ordinary people feel safer, against the onslaught.
There is a Hebrew word, hamatzav, that is used to describe the state of dread that has swaddled Jerusalem like damp, clammy gauze since the Palestinian intifadas made merely living a daredevil act. Hamatzav literally means “the situation,” and it seems to cover everything: the high security, the high anxiety, the high-stakes game of chicken. Palestinian militants believe they can make the Israelis so fearful, so desperate for peace of mind, that they will end their occupation and surrender more land than they ever bargained for. Israeli leaders believe their fierce reprisals will, in time, crush their attackers’ will to kill. Both sides, of course, know fear: Plenty of innocent Palestinians have been killed in Israeli military actions—for Palestinians, the act of living must also, at times, seem like a mortal risk. Each side accuses the other of terrorism. Each side describes its own actions as self-defense. And so it goes.
On my first night in the city, I walked from my hotel to the Western Wall, Jewish Jerusalem’s holiest site, and there I met Ozer Bergman. It is hard to miss Bergman. He stands 7 feet tall—6-feet-5 of it is Ozer, and the rest is hat, a dramatic, thick cylinder of fur. It was sundown on the holy day of Shavuot, and Bergman, a Hasidic Jew, had come here to pray. He works for a research institute that translates the writings of Nachman of Breslov, a revered nineteenth-century rabbi.
“That’s a full-time business?” I asked.
“In Jerusalem it is,” he said with a laugh.
I almost didn’t approach him, anticipating a language problem. It turns out that Bergman is originally from Long Island. Devout Jets fan.
We were speaking outside the Western Wall’s security gate, where Bergman was waiting in a crowd of hundreds to board the No. 2 bus, which carries the faithful to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood where he lives. It’s a mob scene, with an empty bus arriving every minute or two and leaving moments later, packed cheek by jowl. Eight months before, one of these buses—crowded just like these, on a simil
ar day—blew up, killing 23 people, many of them children. Many more were grievously injured. The suicide bomber, a father of young children, was black-bearded like Ozer and dressed to resemble a Hasid. He had boarded the bus, wedged himself in the middle of a crowd of riders, patiently waited until his bus passed another bus to assure maximum loss of life, and exploded.
Bergman is not afraid to take buses?
“Never!” he thundered. “I take buses all the time. My wife, too. It’s my country, I will not let them push me around.” Bergman, forty-eight, said that if a Jew dies in a terrorist attack, he is in a state of martyrdom and is guaranteed the highest reaches of Heaven.
Isn’t this more or less what the suicide bombers believe, about themselves?
There are ironies in this situation, Bergman conceded, that “sound obscene.” But it doesn’t matter, he said. Bergman believes what Rabbi Nachman taught: that God intends all things, good and bad, to happen for a reason—that there is pain in the world but no evil, because whatever occurs is part of an eternal plan leading to a state of utopia for all mankind. It’s all predetermined: “If your number’s up, your number’s up,” he said. But since it’s all for good, in the end, there is no need for fear, and no reason to meet apparent misfortune with sadness or regret.
It was time to go. Bergman gently took the hand of his adult son, Nachman. Nachman Bergman wore a black suit, side locks that curled down from his temples, and the sweet, trusting eyes of the mentally retarded.
Hand in hand, father and son headed for the No. 2 bus.
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when the anthrax bombs are popping all around you?… People were ready to have their appetites controlled then. Anything for a quiet life.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 18