In this season of the spirit, some somatic news arrives from the
Department of Homeland Security. Those busy elves have never left
the building, toiling in the caverns and corridors of government to
assure our safety. And assure us they do, and then reassure us,
that we need not fear Bin Laden during this period. As proof they
adduce the fact that the terrorist “chatter,” generally as
ubiquitous as it is iniquitous, seems momentarily to have quit us.
The color code for Christmas seems to be White.
Some would argue that the Department itself is the victim of
terrorism, having been beheaded by Mr. Kerik’s au pairs and
paramours. Others do not find the evidence so suasive; boxing the
chatter does not equate to boxing the tinder. I personally find the
silence more ominous than the rant. A blustery wind of foreboding
blows over me when I don’t hear the usual crackle of windy
bluster.
Yet in a more profound way, all may agree that the threat from
Bin Laden that is most urgent is felt very strongly indeed amid the
holiday trappings. Namely, the attack on the expression of
religious sensibility that has been restocked with contraband
ammunition by a special delivery from Bin Laden. Don’t tell me that
you have not shared this experience, which now seems to occur
daily. You make even the slightest reference to applying a moral
standard to public or private activity, and your secularist
interlocutor says: “Aha, Bin Laden.” Of course, Republican types
are inured to this sort of thing after years of offering critiques
to affirmative action and getting in return: “Aha, KKK.”
Clearly the advent of Bin Laden is not only endangering Jews and
Christians physically as his targets, it is besmirching them
intellectually by its creedal reflection. It perpetuates a sense
that the human mind, by relinquishing its own sense of science in
favor of a Divine intelligence, is lowering its barriers against
that which is repelled by reason. If God knows better than you and
you do not know what God wants until an imam (or a rabbi or priest)
passes along the message, then you are a million times scarier than
a robot. You are a robot with passion and zest; if you are
programmed to destroy, then watch out, world.
This argument always existed, but it had no fresher support than
the Crusades and the Inquisition, rather old news. Some credence
was added by those of the Nazi collaborators who cited Christianity
as a motivation, but the fact is that brutally powerful conquerors
can always recruit quislings among the cowardly. Now Bin Laden’s
merger of the turban with the turbine has resharpened the point of
this philosophical and rhetorical bayonet.
The religious counter-argument runs like this. First of all, the
human mind is limited, no matter what your belief system. It needs
reinforcement for the walls that it builds against the unreasonable
and the insane. Religion actually provides that by securing for the
individual a sense of place that has preordained coordinates within
the cosmos. The range of choices has to be processed using criteria
that conform in some measure with reality as perceived, what I like
to call syllogistic symmetrical synchronicity. The atheist, by
contrast, is the one without existential moorings, because although
there is some grounding provided by the physics of time and place,
the fact that those things do not have to be there tomorrow
ultimately brands them as ephemera. Witness the secular
environmentalists who expect the world to implode at any
moment.
In truth, the Bin Laden phenomenon in Islam is an aberration.
Terrorism is inherently non-religious. Its history is firmly rooted
in the secular. All the terrorism of the '60s through the '80s,
from the SDS to the SLA to Baader-Meinhof to the Japanese Red Army
to the original PLO, was not only avowedly secularist, it based its
approach on a nihilistic worldview that viewed religion and
government as twin towers of stultifying orthodoxy. Terror is
designed to drive a devastating wedge into the structures that
enable the traditional society to cohere.
The Muslims who have jettisoned Burke and are hiding bombs under
the burqa have taken a scorpion into their tent. It is only a
matter of time before this venom corrodes the authority of their
religious leadership. Mullahs are meant to mull, not maul. I would
tell them that it is too late to squeeze the toothpaste back into
the tube, but I’m not sure if they are familiar with that product.
So let me use a simile that will register: it is too late to get
the genie back into the bottle.
Which reminds me of the old Jewish joke about the man on the
beach in Miami who finds a genie in a bottle. After gaining wealth
and fame with his first two wishes, he hardly needs the third. But
he doesn’t want to waste it, so he says, “You know what? Make me a
malted.” The lifeguard never found his body, but he said that the
malted was delicious. This time around, on the arid desert sands of
Arabia, I would recommend bringing your own canteen; that malted is
likely to be toxic.
