It’s a sign of the times to see vested policemen standing guard outside No. 10, Downing St. I was sprawled on the floor, staring dumbly at the screen as talking heads gave their varied opinions on Tony Blair’s after the live telecast of his press conference. Robin Oakley, speaking for CNN, looked pasty white and for a while I wondered what possessed a man to wear foundation. It was an idle thought, but his anaemic-looking face brought to mind the morbid image of a people on death-watch.
Waiting for the next bomb.
I can hardly remember Conrad’s ‘The Secret Agent’, and much of it was spent delving into the particular psyche of the insurgent, I seem to remember. But an image that has stuck to mind are the bright, almost shimmering descriptions of the Crystal Palace, an important landmark at the time in the UK, I’m led to believe, but which holds not a bit of real significance for me.
I didn’t know what that erstwhile insurgent was fighting for, I was caught up in the image of a cannibalistic Europe devouring itself in reaction to its sheer comportment to the mechanical. It echoed like Hawkmoon’s glorified and bloody response against a familiar, mechanical, inhuman ‘Granbretan’, no doubt a transparent play on “Great Britain”, in Moorcock’s stories.
Maybe it was that familiar reaction of the organism, of the organic, of the holistic against the stretched and skewed duality of that Modern age that captured my imagination at the time; my lecturers used to insist that the antecedents of that ‘war about nothing’, World War I, could be found prophesied by literary minds who had, before the fact, seen and predicted the madness that would grip a civilization uprooted from its own centre by its very hands.
Like a dog gnawing at its own leg to be free of the steel jaws of some hunter’s trap.
Just after 11 September 2001, that vicious horror, Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama both presented views that were oddly similar in their call for a another sort of convenient duality, a another schism of abstractions to explain away the coming (existing?) conflict.
To think we made some progress in the ’60s, stumbling away from convenient dualisms of the past only to fling ourselves headlong into yet another one, this time between the ‘West and Islam’ cast definitively in a ridiculous “either/or”.
At the time, part of our own private readings revolved around the implied dualism between Hegel and Nietzsche, attempting to evince a phenomenological perspective of the works of both thinkers. We were young, we were stupid, we were ambitious and ultimately, we gave up upon witnessing the horror of those two twisted hunks of metal dissolving in clouds of dust and tortured girders.
XM sank into a strange sort of reverie. He had, by that time, developed and adopted a keen sense of the place of a class of the elite, of the aristocrat; I don’t mean this in its lowest form or implication. That and his incisive cynicism – incisive, really, and oh, the walls of irony he could dart behind – became more and more pronounced.
Joyce wrestled with her own demons, alternating between the authentic and the worry-unto-death. She’s still caught up and lost in her own metamorphosing mazes.
I wrestled with the implications of that bombing cast against the subject of my thesis, by now submitted, and by now – to me – all the more stark. It disillusioned me further to that laudable, but ultimately naïve project of a philosophized hermeneutics.
You wouldn’t believe how hard-lined we became, then. As I said, we were young. In turns, we found justifications in the tyranny under which Athens persisted; we found justifications for action, for the will to act, in Mills; we argued long and loudly over characterising, rightly or wrongly, the anachronism we thought Islam to be – a pitiful artefact of the pre-Modern. We even agreed that staring into the abyss would now be justified, under just these sorts of conditions, when the very ideals propounded by democracy had seemed to become our own weaknesses.
We became warped in our adherence to that convenient “either/or”; it’s easy to get lost in the need for some kind of vengeance, though none of us had any personal and/or immediate attachment to those 3,000 plus who died. Fortunately, some conclusions stand in time, stand in large vacuum vats unaffected by changing circumstances. These conclusions tend to become anachronisms.
I was thinking of all this while watching that hour-long press conference. A call to fight not just the methods but the ideals of the terrorist. A call to fight the rhetorical slants that often equate the aspirations of the Muslim world with the methods of the radical few.
“It’s time we stop thinking, ‘oh, we disagree with their methods but maybe there’s a sliver of truth, a justification for their ideas‘” — Tony Blair
Remarks by an Al Jazeera reporter struck home; Tony Blair barely flinched, but you could see his mind working, and when he replied, you could see his exasperation. It was unsurprising that he focused on terrorism as being wrong, but could only prescribe democracy as the cure for the ills Muslims in the Middle East and beyond have been trying to push into the light.
Without doubt, such an ephemeral cure can only mean nothing to the Muslim, living in the immediacy of his or her plight.
Worst, on the most superficial level, would presenting ‘democracy’ as the solution serve to strengthen arguments of a ‘Clash of Civilization’, of subsuming the Muslim world under the blanket of democracy, an artefact of the ‘West’?
Where will bombs go off next, this time?
