Dear Mr. Morrow;
Rage is by its very nature indiscriminate, and it has been the human willingness to kill and maim indiscriminantly, typically for causes that seemed just at the time, that has brought us to the present tragedy. The ruthless indignation you call for is exactly the mindset which, in some presumably Middle-Eastern command center, conceived, nurtured, planned, and executed Tuesday's tragedy. The Japanese Internment Camps were the work of rage, the result of a collective Pearl Harbor anger-fed blindness to the fact that these were Americans we were herding off of their own land and into barb-wire surrounded compounds. A brutal retaliatory strike is the work of rage - a strike in which it is inevitable that innocent civilians would perish - a strike destined to make martyrs of our enemies, to justify the inevitible next attack, and to create yet another generation of terrorists. Rage is easy, but the truth in this matter is much harder - There may be as few as 50 people directly responsible, and 18 of them, at least, are already beyond the reach of our retribution. No missile attack and no assasination campaign - even if they broke every terrorist cell and left every perpetrator dead, will rebuild the lives of those affected or the great towers in which they or their loved ones perished. I am discouraged that you chose to use your very public pulpit to air your very understandable private anger. By doing so, you contribute to sowing once again the seeds of misunderstanding and mistrust amongst us all. Our president has called upon us to "whip" terrorism, as if it were an uncooperative child and we it's abusive parents. While it may never be possible to soften the hardened hearts of the world's many terrorists, it is possible to guide our country and our world in such a way as not to create more of them. While I hope a cold and inescapable justice awaits those who contributed to Tuesday's events, we would only become the enemy we fear if we were to embrace, as you recommend, the rage that has driven them for so long.
You wrote, in an editorial in the current Time Magazine:
For once, let’s have no “grief counselors” standing
by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all
this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible.
We shouldn’t feel better. A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let’s have rage. What’s needed is a unified, unifying, Pearl Harbor sort of purple American fury—a ruthless indignation that doesn’t leak away in a week or two, wandering off into pixils of forgetfulness or into the next media sensation (O.J. … Elián … Chandra …) or into a corruptly thoughtful relativism (as has happened in the recent past, when, for example, you might hear someone say, “Terrible what he did, of course, but, you know, the Unabomber does have a point, doesn’t he, about modern technology?”). Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness—and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred. As the bodies are counted, into the thousands and thousands, hatred will not, I think, be a difficult emotion to summon. Is the medicine too strong? Call it, rather, a wholesome and intelligent enmity—the sort that impels even such a prosperous, messily tolerant organism as America to act. Anyone who does not loathe the people who did these things, and the people who cheer them on, is too philosophical for decent company. It’s a practical matter, anyway. In war, enemies are enemies. You find them and put them out of business, on the sound principle that that’s what they are trying to do to you. If what happened on Tuesday does not give Americans the political will needed to exterminate men like Osama bin Laden and those who conspire with them in evil mischief, then nothing ever will and we are in for a procession of black Tuesdays. This was terrorism brought to near perfection as a dramatic form. Never has the evil business had such production values. Normally, the audience sees only the smoking aftermath - the blown-up embassy, the ruined barracks, the ship with a blackened hole at the waterline. This time the first plane striking the first tower acted as a shill. It alerted the media, brought cameras to the scene so that they might be set up to record the vivid surreal bloom of the second strike (“Am I seeing this?”), and then - could they be such engineering geniuses, so deft at demolition? - the catastrophic collapse of the two towers, one after the other, and a sequence of panic in the streets that might have been shot for a remake of The War of the Worlds or for Independence Day. Evil possesses an instinct for theater, which is why, in an era of gaudy and gifted media, evil may vastly magnify its damage by the power of horrific images. It is important not to be transfixed. The police screamed to the people running from the towers, “Don’t look back!” - a biblical warning against the power of the image. Terrorism is sometimes described (in a frustrated, oh-the-burdens-of-great-power tone of voice) as “asymmetrical warfare.” So what? Most of history is a pageant of asymmetries. It is mostly the asymmetries that cause history to happen—an obscure Schickelgruber nearly destroys Europe; a mere atom, artfully diddled, incinerates a city. Elegant perplexity puts too much emphasis on the “asymmetrical” side of the phrase and not enough on the fact that it is, indeed, real warfare. Asymmetry is a concept. War is, as we see, blood and death. It is not a bad idea to repeat a line from the 19th century French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Prou-dhon: “The fecundity of the unexpected far exceeds the prudence of statesmen.” America, in the spasms of a few hours, became a changed country. It turned the corner, at last, out of the 1990s. The menu of American priorities was rearranged. The presidency of George W. Bush begins now. What seemed important a few days ago (in the media, at least) became instantly trivial. If Gary Condit is mentioned once in the next six months on cable television, I will be astonished. During World War II, John Kennedy wrote home to his parents from the Pacific. He remarked that Americans are at their best during very good times or very bad times; the in-between periods, he thought, cause them trouble. I’m not sure that is true. Good times sometimes have a tendency to make Americans squalid. The worst times, as we see, separate the civilized of the world from the uncivilized. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started. Response ©2001 Robert Kent. All rights reserved. Editorial © 2001 Time Inc. |
