London Bridge Is Falling Down

Just when it seemed that it was safe to go back into the water--metaphorically meaning that current sociopolitical events had "stabilized" enough so that the world could confront common geo-economic concerns as global warming, third-world poverty and epidemiological remedies--the mad bombers have struck again. They administered a one-two-three-four punch to the renowned London transit system, blowing up innocent commuters with relatively small but lethal sacks of dynamite. Given the fears of dirty bombs, poisoned water systems and anthrax dispersal, this type of terrorism was surprisingly, almost reassuringly low-tech, but a terrible reminder of the fractious world that still exists.

I find it somewhat disconcerting that this particular event seemed to arouse much more sympathy in American circles than a much bloodier terrorist attack in Madrid that killed over 200 people in a train station. That probably reflects our Anglocentric culture. After all, the people in Madrid spoke Spanish, an inferior tongue. And although the fifty-or-so fatalities in thse bombings was a horrendous toll, it is only slight compared to the weekly total of people blown up by the insurgents in Iraq. But those deaths are among Moslems and who don't even use our alphabet, and probably fought at one time to defend Saddam, so the hell with them, right?

The hand-wringing in America is to a certain extent genuine, but also fraught with a degree of, if not schadenfreuden, relief that terrorists found another target rather than Shea Stadium or the Mall of America. We in this country are still traumatized by 9/11, and demand some magical preventive; but Londoners, who have experienced their town blasted before, and frequently, from the Luftwaffe to the I.R.A., and have learned the proper stoical response that would most frustrate the terrorists. They just sally forth, realizing that terrorism is one of unfortunate illnesses of society and has no apparent remedy.

The comparison to trying to exterminate the cockroach is, by now, banal but apt. Six billion persons in a world beset by inequity, starvation, and the mental and emotional slavery of unyielding religious orthodoxy, will produce the conditions that promote this kind of behavior.
There will always be the have-nots, the rage, the misdirected suicidal impulses. History reveals a dark calvacade of terrorist movements, some reviled, some forgiven. Think Jericho, Spartacus, The American Revolution, Harper's Ferry, Sarajevo, the Irgun, Munich, the IRA, and now Al Qaeda. Is patriotism the last refuge of a scoundrel, or is it terrorism? Each of these movements had their adherents and their detractors. But, as a character says in Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors," "History is written by the winners."

There are those narrow thinkers, like our current president, who use the omnipresence of the terrorist threat for political purposes, to justify foreign entanglements and to rouse the negative emotions of fear and vengeance that rally people to the polls. Senator Kerry last year was lambasted for suggesting that terrorism may at best have to be limited to an occasional nuisance. The braying of the neo-Cons suggests somehow that the War on Terrorism can actually be won, as though we and a properly chastened Bin Laden could meet some day on the Battleship Missouri and sign a treaty ending terrorism forever. Reality check--terrorism does not respect any political boundaries or affiliations. Rather, it is an illness of the human spirit, a failing of our arrogance in assuming we are the masters of the planet, when we are much more a virus doing everything we can to poison the biosphere and self-destruct.