Reflections  

Quid pro no — The Democrats are so hungry to find wrongdoing on the part of George W. Bush that they are now claiming that he should have offered Enron a bailout. To a Democrat, it's only a scandal when you take money from a donor and don't perform a political favor. — Tim Slagle

It's good, but is it believable? — Aristotle said that there are certain things you shouldn't put into a work of imaginative literature, because people won't believe them, even if they're historically true. People will accept a plausible lie before they'll accept a flamboyantly ridiculous truth.

Aristotle's theory came irresistibly to my mind last night, when I watched a television documentary on the life of Sept. 11 terrorist Mohammed Atta. The guy was just too good to be true. The pinched little worried face that would have been handsome, if it hadn't spent most of its time peering out at the world — or at least the wicked Western camera — with hatred and envy. The moronic resentment against America, because Atta had grown up in a country (Egypt) where there weren't a lot of easy job opportunities for people like him, as there were in America. The furious contempt for the cheapness of American culture, which was presumably a main topic of conversation for Atta and his fellow terrorists during their last night on earth, which they chose to spend sleeping in a Comfort Inn, dining at a Pizza Hut, and visiting a nearby Wal-Mart. It's all a perfect, and perfectly incredible, portrait of the evil that is envy and arrogance. But if you put it into a satirical novel, it just wouldn't work. It would be too cartoonish. Yet that's what Mohammed Atta was. He was a cartoon.

I don't need to tell you that the same thing could be said about Taliban Johnny Walker Lindh, except that this time most of the color and detail on his section of the funny pages would come from the true-life stories of modern liberal America and its literally incredible self-conceptions. The allegedly brilliant, caring, and above all "nice" parents, who were brilliant, caring, and nice enough to send their 17-year-old son for a year's excursion to (you'll never guess! and what a perfect choice!) the Republic of Yemen, so that he could learn to read the Quran in circumstances more congenial to his newly adopted fanaticism. The broken English that the "kid," the "youngster," the "nice young man" affected, even after he was discovered to be a homegrown product of the U.S.A., as if he was entitled by birth to continue telling any kind of stupid, obvious lie he wanted, whether anybody caught on to him or not. The furious umbrage shown by the good citizens of Marin County, "perhaps the wealthiest and best-educated county in America," when it was suggested that the atmosphere of the place might conceivably have had something to do with the way that T.J. turned out. And, best of all, the liberal papers and pundits that worked themselves into a froth about the possibility that this sweet young child could actually be punished for adhering to the enemies of his country, and giving them aid and comfort. Where, pray, could the constitutionally required two witnesses to his overt act — fighting in an enemy army — possibly be found? Pundit-by-the-grace-of-God Eleanor Clift suggested that Johnny's ill-fated journey to spiritual discovery qualifies him less for a prison cell than for employment in the CIA — since he knows so much, you understand. Comes from such a good family, I presume.

Well, those are just a few things you couldn't work into a novel, not without being laughed to scorn. And I suppose you've noticed that whenever Osama bin Laden wants to denounce the Satanic nature of the West, he wears some Western military fatigues over his nightgown. A nice touch, a very nice touch. But you can't use it in fiction. — Stephen Cox

My madrassa — I was thinking recently about the long-term threat posed by the possibly millions of Muslim boys educated in madrassas (religious schools) in Pakistan, Egypt, Palestine, and other Muslim countries. In the West, we consider these kids to be programmed like robots to pursue a narrow, dogmatic system. And they probably are. How much sense does it make to commit to memory a book written by a 7th-century bandit who claimed to hear voices from on high and to be able to commute nightly from Mecca to Jerusalem? Well, probably about as much sense as reading any other book of divine revelation. Better they should memorize a translation of Harry Potter.

Then it occurred to me that I been through something quite similar, if somewhat less extreme.

I attended St. Barnabas grade school in Chicago, where the nuns (sporting the outlandish penguin outfits of the era) drilled us mercilessly in the Baltimore Catechism. We parroted rote on all manner of preposterous abstractions like the Immaculate Conception, Original Sin, the Ascension, and the Trinity. We logged hundreds of hours attending Holy Mass, spoken in a language we didn't understand. We were often sent home with a graven image of the Virgin Mother, before which we were supposed to say the rosary, roping our families into joining us (Remember, kids: The family that prays together, stays together). We spent hours of valuable classroom time in church making the Stations of the Cross. In eighth grade, we spent much of May — "the Month of Mary" — singing interminable hymns to the latter-day reincarnation of Isis. By then I realized that our time would have been much better spent dancing around a maypole in a meadow with maidens, as my ancestors did before St. Patrick convinced them to join a puritanical cannibalistic death cult.

We were taught that anyone who didn't adhere to the True Faith would, regrettably but entirely justifiably, burn in hell for eternity. Our consciences, and senses of horror, were assuaged with the thought that there was a limbo for the unconverted righteous — but only those who, through no fault of their own, had never been exposed to The Message. We were regaled with innumerable tales of saints who, after a lifetime of severe asceticism (often involving self-mutilation), were granted the most gruesome martyrdom as a reward, in much the way, I would later discover, the Church often treated troublesome nonbelievers as a punishment. The Crusades were portrayed to us as a glorious endeavor to regain the Holy Land from the infidels who'd stolen it, rather than as a cynical adventure to get shiftless thugs to do to Muslims (and their fellow Christians of Byzantium) what they'd be executed for doing to fellow Christians at home.

Although I was always one to question authority, whisper in class, and make jokes about anything, I was subverted by all this for much longer than I care to admit. If called upon to engage in a jihad . . . er, crusade, I would almost certainly have joined my less introspective classmates in doing what I believed was in defense of faith and fatherland.

Fortunately, however, I was living in America, a secular society rife with a myriad of influences from which a thoughtful and independent person may choose. And so I became an apostate.

As socially liberal as it is, however, America presents the paradox of also being the most traditionally religious country in the West. I say traditionally religious, because there are numerous religions out there that don't worship any God you find in a church, synagogue, or mosque. Communism, for instance, which at its zenith claimed close to 2 billion believers, was never more than a secular religion manufactured from a hodgepodge of nitwit opinion, irrationality, and psuedo-science. The most popular religion in today's Europe, and probably the most rapidly growing one in America, centers not on a successful tribal war god from the Mideast, or a Messiah, but a trinity composed of The Earth, The Environment, and The Ecology. Greenism, with dogmas and rituals as goofy as any, is well on its way to replacing Communism, and is making serious inroads on the older monotheistic religions from the Mideast.

That brings us back to the madrassas and Islam. I'm confident these things will eventually wind up on the scrap heap of history, although perhaps not for the reasons I'd prefer. But you've got to take what you can get. In the meantime, most Muslim societies are far poorer and far less open to outside influence than America was in the '50s and '60s, when I was growing up. I'm forced to conclude that the Forever War with the Muslims, terrorism, or whatever, now that it's started, has a long way to run. I just have to imagine me and my friends back at St. Barnabas, and multiply the fervor by ten. A scary thought. — Doug Casey

The wrong target — During the Gulf War there was a lot of chatter about how, if only we paid more attention to Iraqi culture, we wouldn't be bombing an entire ancient civilization back to the Stone Age just for the sake of our wasteful dependence on foreign oil.

It seemed to me that people who said things like that had it backwards; that Saddam Hussein would have been better off paying more attention to our culture. Fat, dumb, and happy as we may have been in 1991, our armed forces were at the beck and call of a commander in chief who had almost gotten himself personally killed in a war that wouldn't have even happened if the world had stood up to a bully when he first got rolling. What possible lesson did Saddam think Mr. Bush had learned? Which brings us to Afghanistan.

Had bin Laden and his hangers-on known the slightest thing about America, they would have realized that New York City is the beating heart of the professional liberal establishment and that attacking anything on Manhattan would bring elite opinion-makers together with redneck yahoos in a common cry to tear al Qaeda a new asshole.

But he didn't see that simple fact and, when it came, Sept. 11 wasn't Pearl Harbor. It was the My Lai massacre of the Peace Movement.

Things could have easily gone the other way. All bin Laden had to do was take out the National Rodeo Championships in Las Vegas, and the liberal establishment would have waxed all superior and multicultural and started showing off their pet terrorists at fancy cocktail parties, and the biblical plague that rained down would have been upon American heads in an endless sanctimony about why the whole thing was our own fault, and how speciesist rodeos are, and all bin Laden did was send us a much-needed wake-up call, and at least he doesn't eat pigs, and we need to rethink this whole thing about how we treat animals and, besides, violence never solves anything.

I think the problem was too much formal education. Even a good Quranic education is too narrowing. Spend most of your days memorizing the words of the Prophet, and the rest praying, and you miss some of the big-ticket stuff, like understanding your enemy. And, the first thing you know, you attack the wrong target and bring down the wrath of Satan himself upon your head. — William Merritt

The trouble with Islam — Despite what Mr. bin Laden may feel on the subject, Muslims don't have anything special on us in the grudge department. America has enemies everywhere.

Vietnamese and Cubans have every right to hate us. Along with Serbs and Chinese. As do, I'm sure, plenty of Germans, Japanese, Russians, Latin Americans, Caribbeans, and Sikhs. I bet lots of sub-Saharan Africans don't wish us very well, either. So why is it just Muslims who try to purchase half-way tickets to Miami?

It's because there is something wrong with Islam, that's why. Two somethings, actually.

In the first place, Muslims pray too much.

Anybody who makes a point of getting up before dawn to take a compass bearing on which way to aim a rug so he can say his prayers, and does the same thing four more times before turning in for the night, and then starts all over again the next day, that person is truly righteous, clean living, and follows the tenets of his faith. But he is not a child of the Enlightenment.

And the only thing our poor species has ever done throughout the entire history of the world that's worth a jar of warm spit is the Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, it was all wars and princes and priests and people getting jerked around by bandits, famine, pestilence, and their own, rotten governments.

After the Enlightenment, well . . . afterwards there are still plenty of wars and preachers and princes, and lots of bandits and hunger and disease, and way too many rotten governments, but sometimes there's something else. Sometimes there's real change. Sometimes, now, we find a medicine that actually makes people better. Or build a machine that works. Or see nature as she really is. But none of that comes through faith.

A thousand generations of faith never looked into a spiral nebula, nor weighed a single atom of gold, nor saw the face of Earth from the moon. And all the faithful all the world over never listened to the background hum of creation, nor learned how to make economics into something other than a zero-sum game, nor discovered how to limit the power of kings.

And all of that, every bit of it, was earned painful step by painful step through a rigorous and unrelenting ethic of skepticism of endless suspicion of everything we are told and most of what we see; through unremitting distrust of inherited knowledge, through constant doubt in place of belief. And, for every illusion we cast off, the reward was a deeper insight into the mind of God. And whatever else you say about somebody who prays five times a day, he is a man of faith, not skepticism.

A community of faith that stretches from Tangiers to Mindanao is bound to be impoverished, superstitious, and bitter of the success of others. But whether that community will breed up a generation of mass murderers requires more than naked religious conviction. It requires something that only Islam of all the world religions provides: a swarm of rich guys hogging the chicks.

For every extra woman a rich man locks behind his private walls, there is a young buck somewhere with no hope of ever finding a bride, or siring a son to carry on his name; someone whose only prospect of a normal life is to cash in on the 72 imaginary virgins rubbing their legs together in Paradise in hopes he will join them after the next B-52 raid.

You can see it in the papers, the stories from Kabul and Kandahar of Northern Alliance fighters chatting with Marines and Rangers. When they ask about America, it's not to find out about video games or rock concerts or where you buy blue jeans. It's, how do you meet girls? And, what happens on a date?

It's not economic divisions between nations, nor cultural affronts, or anything else we as Americans have participated in, that inspires these guys to go up in a ball of flame along with a thousand innocents. It's the genuine human desire for the wife and family that's been kept from them, all mixed up with prayer and faith and other spooky nonsense. — William Merritt

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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