-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.sunday-
times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2001/10/21/stiusausa02003.html
}}}>Begin
October 21 2001
TERRORISM
A new generation is getting used to the idea that the planet is not
a safe place. It never was, writes Bryan Appleyard
It's the end of the world . . . again
'Inhale and exhale," advises Gary Stollak, professor of psychology at
Michigan State University, "and hold each other's hands."
Norine G Johnson, president of the American Psychological
Association, says: "We are using our scientific knowledge and our
therapeutic expertise to help the nation through this time of trauma
and terror. This is trauma on a level never experienced in this
country."
Meanwhile, the University of California at Los Angeles has created 50
new undergraduate courses since September 11 to "explore the scope of
issues emerging from the terrorist attacks".
These new courses include Navigating between Blithesome Optimism and
Cultural Despair, Women's Participation in Political Violence and the
Zen-like Understanding the Unthinkable and the Incomprehensible.
What Americans do best is domesticate things. That is what is
happening here. An unprecedented assault on mainland America is being
turned into sentimental psychobabble, an occasion for nationwide
counselling or politically correct pseudo-courses. Daft as these
things are, they are like tea and crumpets to the Americans - they
exude the cosy glow of home.
But, this time, it doesn't work. Something huge is missing. These
mandarins of calm and counselling sound as desperate and misguided as
those people who have been buying gas masks, bio-hazard suits and
anti-anxiety drugs. Beneath their words is the fear that everything
they have thought or taught for the past 12 years is now
meaningless.
The cold war ended in 1989 and, with it, the immediate likelihood of
global nuclear conflict. Certainly the spectre of an environmental
apocalypse haunted the 1990s but, compared with nuclear winter, it
seemed remote. Abo
ve all, it seemed fixable.
When the time came we could just switch to electric cars, solar power or whatever the
scientists were going to dream up for us. Similarly, the local conflicts of those
years - the Balkans, Ulster, the Middle East - seemed
fixable once enough heads had been banged together. Nothing more accurately captured
this attitude than Bill Clinton's remark - which he later had to withdraw - that
dealing with Ulster was like handling a fight in a pub
. It was a stupid,
local row among people who just weren't American enough.
Furthermore, if any of those problems really were intractable, then there was always
the safety of isolation in Fortress America. There the people could console themselves
with violent Hollywood fantasies that were invari
ably resolved by a home-grown superhero. Not any more.
"Superman or Bruce Willis aren't going to turn up and sort this one out," observes
Peter Wilson, director of the children's mental health charity, Young Minds. "People
have been living an unreal life among ever more viole
nt images of frenzy and terror. This is for real and it breaks through the strange
veneer that has separated people from reality."
Wilson has been thinking about how children deal with this. Children, of course, add
poignancy to the equation, but they also increase our sense of helplessness. What do
we tell them? And what, most appallingly, do we tel
l them about the 10-year-olds and 11-year-olds bearing Kalashnikovs and yelling their
allegiance to the cause of killing the infidels? We tell them, says Wilson, our truth.
It's all we have.
But, of course, it's not just about children. "Children are pretty much the same as
all of us," Wilson points out. "We are all in this pickle together." And it's not just
about Americans; we were all lulled by the apocaly
pse-free, economically buoyant 1990s. Suddenly the 1990s seem like what W H Auden
called the 1930s as the world descended into war - "a low, dishonest decade".
For those of us who remember the slow, livid days and the sweaty, dream-laden nights
of the Cuban missile crisis, the proximity of the end of the world may be familiar.
But, for anybody under 40, this really is a new way
of life.
Suddenly the world in every aspect, however banal, is loaded with ominous portent. The
morning post may bear disease; inside that plane dipping into Heathrow may be a hell
of cut-throats and screaming fanatics.
"Everybody is in a state of hyper-vigilance or hyper-awareness and things that people
ordinarily wouldn't look at are looking strange," says Harvey Schlossberg, professor
of criminal justice and psychology at New York's S
t John's University.
©
A new armageddon: once our worst fears centred on a nuclear winter, now we see
apocalypse in an aircraft or a child with a gun. Photograph: Zia Mazhar/Force
Photo/Retuers
Once, some years ago in Tel Aviv, I was told, authoritatively, to get out of town. A
terrorist group had got hold of a nuke and it was targeted at the city. I had every
reason to believe the threat was genuine. The street
s and shops became unreal, the people spectral, as if dead already. A total threat
changes everything.
But it's not just about terrorism. Some corner has been turned in the human
imagination. Apocalypses, like buses and bananas, tend to come in bunches. Now we have
Stephen Hawking warning us in his new book, The Universe i
n a Nutshell, that novel, artificial bugs could destroy the species. Hawking also says
we had better start bio-engineering our brains before demonically smart machines take
over. Hawking must have written his book long be
fore September 11, but some malign synchronicity
is now at work in the world.
Try averting your gaze. You can't. Every casual chat now veers into apocalyptic
speculation. What will happen in Saudi Arabia, Kashmir? Will India or Pakistan unleash
a nuclear weapon? What else have the terrorists got in
store? And, even when you stop talking, the images persist.
"Childhood has vanished," says Wilson, "we can't close their eyes to
this. It all happened on television. It happened in the middle of the
day and was replayed constantly. They can't help but see it. They are
as exposed as we are. Their gut feelings are the same - terror, fear,
anger, helplessness, despair, fury, maybe guilt. We can't make it
better - we must tell them whatever it is we think."
During the missile crisis I was appalled by the silence of the
adults. Did they not know? But this time nobody is silent. Everybody
talks about it all the time and the "it" is vast, indefinable,
terminal.
But there is one consolation, though you may think it doesn't amount
to much. Everything the human species has ever done was achieved in
the shadow of the apocalypse.
For the truth is that the period between the end of the cold war and
the beginning of global terror was, in historical terms, an
aberration. Humans have always lived in close proximity to the end of
the world, real or imagined. Even before nuclear weapons, there was
the widespread belief that aerial bombardment would signal the end of
civilisation.
Before the advent of modern scepticism, it was commonplace to believe
that the book of Revelation could start to happen at any moment.
Bubonic plague - at least in its non-bio-engineered form - can now be
cured by antibiotics, but not long ago it could rage unchecked
through whole populations. And so on.
Wealth, peace and secularism have, for a few brief years, concealed
from us the customary presence of the abyss. But now it is back in
full view.
So the hard message is: the apocalypse? Business as usual. Deal with
it. Or, more tenderly, there are the words of Wilson, a good man who
fights to keep children sane: "We must stay together and love each
other and see what happens."
Next page: Andrew Sullivan
Next: Andrew Sullivan
Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.
End<{{{
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