New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | August 12, 2005

Brendan O'Neill talks to a British literary senastion manqué who's just suffered the novelist's equivalent of having your birthday fall on 9/11.

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|8.12.05 @ 10:58PM|#

I always liked the sound of "Eurasia", but "Al-Qaida" works just as well. Think I'll read his book.

|8.12.05 @ 11:44PM|#

Fascinating. At first blush a lot of it reminds me of whatever weird "collective unconscious" thing is going on with "immanentizing the eschaton" as Robert Anton Wilson has put it.

There is no question there are people lining up to throw themselves under the bus of terrorism. The '04 election run-up was illustrative. You had people in places like in big terrorism targets like Chicago, S.F., D.C. and NYC voting overwhelmingly against Bush and his handling of terrorism. Meanwhile, people in places Al Qaeda has neither heard of nor gives two dicks about like East Fuckall Alabama and Nowhere Oklahoma voting overwhelmingly FOR Bush. and seemingly WANTING to escalate this global "clash of civilizations."

It always struck me that the Nowhere Towners really just wanted a piece of the Action. They wanted to "bring it on" because "it" wasn't sufficiently being "brought on" to them. And it was easy for THEM to say how we should go about things, since THEY weren't the ones in the line of fire.

But on another level, we all know people love to be faced with disaster. When i was a kid, it seemed like every movie was "Earthquake" or "Airport '77" and people just couldn't get enough of seeing their civilizations blasted to bits. The sight of the Statue of Liberty getting fucked up one way or another is practically a cliche (everything from Planet of the Apes to The Day After Tomorrow and everything in between have shown this).

So... have some people literally WISHED FOR these things, even the terrorist attacks? Undoubtedly yes. Yes they have. As shocked and outraged as they'll all piously claim they are at the suggestion of it, yes, of course they have. These books and movies don't sell like hotcakes for nothing.

Why that is, or what that is... i'll leave that to the philosophers and the psychologists. Even to the "immanentizing the eschaton" theoriests who believe elements of world governments are inhabited by religious freaks hell-bent on setting up the Second Coming with their own tailor-made Battle of Meggido. They can all offer theories and explanations better than i can.

Like most theories, I'll buy them for a dollar and see what happens, but I'm not holding my breath for Absolute Metaphysical Certainty of their validity.

In the meantime, the question each and every person alive has to ask is: what kind of world do I want? Do I choose life and happiness, or do I choose death, misery and destruction? The answer seems superficially obvious, but observation bears out that the true answer to that is anything but.

/end weird late-night pseduo-philosophical raving