The Future of the Past

"The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David (I787)

The notion of free expression is almost quaint. Will the equivalent of history texts in the year 5000 record a period in civilization where people actually treasured notions like inalienable rights? Will they look at such ideas as form of dystopia masquerading as utopia? Of course free speech has always been a complex issue. Am I free to make defamatory comments about my adversary? Am I free to scream the equivalent of fire in a crowded theater or in common parlance creating a witch hunting atmosphere which exploits fear of political or sexual aggression. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the famed Schenck decision which placed limits on free speech, but seemed to reverse himself in Abrams v. United States. Would that such issues were black and white and we could say that either free speech is impossible and must be disgarded in war time (an element of Schenck by the way) or that it must be prized and nurtured at all costs—even when, for instance, you find that the incendiary exhortations of ISIS followers are inflaming disturbed individuals and causing them to become mass murderers. There are opponents of pornography who would say that violent porn has an insidious effect on the minds of those who can’t distinguish imagination from reality. In the case of ISIS it’s the lone wolf copy cat murderers, the Raskolnikovs, the Underground Men, the outliers, who are the most dangerous since they're the very ones who fall off the radar of security agencies and are thus almost impossible to track—as was apparently the case in the San Bernardino shootings.  But getting back to the year 5000. Will American society at the apogee of its constitutionality be looked at the way we do Athens today--as a series of old men in togas, whose short lived dream, ran afoul of the barbarians and one of whose greatest spokesmen was forced to drink Hemlock because of his beliefs.

“Off With Their Heads!"

 The King and Queen of Hearts (John Tenniel)

Have you ever emerged from a posh department store like say Bergdorf Goodman and wished that a brigade of ISIS terrorists would wipe the plastic smiles off the faces of both the supercilious customers and haughty sales staff? Of course one way to eradicate all forms of materialism including demeaning the worth of the person facing you and your own self worth is to cut off their heads. The Queen of Hearts’ famous “Off With Their Heads!,” once a cherished line from a childhood fable is now almost triggering language in this age of terrorism. One wonders if the NSA is monitoring video animations of the famed line. ISIS has no monopoly on the idea of radical craniotomy, but they have definitely cornered such a significant part of the market that one gives pause before indulging the kinds of angry fantasies of revenge that one might have enjoyed in the more innocent age in which Lewis Carroll originally wrote his fable. What's the average neurotic person with low self-esteem who feels socially ostracized, the kind of person who is constantly smarting from real or imagined insults, who constantly obsesses about unreturned emails and phone messages, going to do? In the old days, you simply exorcised the demons by imagining elaborate tortures for your torturers in which they were made to suffer for what they did to you. However now you stop, like someone waking up from a nightmare, before you fantasize guillotining the snotty maître d’, since you don’t want to be associated with the people who actually do these things. This poses two questions. Is colonialism a phylogenic form of snubbing and have generations of this behavior produced a culture of disenfranchised youths ready to act out the murderous fantasies the rest of the world only dreams of?

The Art of Dying

 Virginia Woolf by George Charles Beresford

Are suicidal people the antidote to suicide bombers? Ostensibly the ISIS folks are trying to create unhappiness by killing as many infidels as possible and then shutting down human life. But what if they were encouraged? What if there victims said they wanted to die? Wouldn’t that take the power out of their punch? You have to fight fire with fire and make suicide not just an elite past time for poets and writers like John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton and Virginia Woolf. Suicide is the ultimate form of passive resistance. Those who fell by their own hands would be in good company, with the likes of King and Gandhi. ISIS would be stopped dead by mass suicides. Fear is one of their basic weapons and it would be taken away. What if ISIS henchmen were about to launch one of their attacks and they found that their target had already succumbed to vats of the same poison that killed the Jim Jones cult. What would their Facebook postings look like then? Imagine tabloid headlines like, “Town Beats ISIS to the Punch. 300 Hundred Kick Bucket in Mass Protest.” Imagine the potential victims of a terror attack turning their Kalashnikovs against themselves. Imagine a bunch of ISIS thugs entering a concert hall or satiric magazine. Before they get off a shot, all their marks take their their own guns out of their desk drawers, stick their tongues out teasingly and then shoot themselves in their heads. A suicidal person is going to be just as angry, if not more so than any of the slew of murderers who used their victimized status to perpetrate atrocities. Suicidal people just turn their anger against themselves. Suicide is a powerful weapon that should be used in the war against terror. Here is Sylvia Plath from a poem called “Lady Lazarus:"

                    Dying is an an art, like everything else.
                    I do it exceptionally well.

                    I do it so it feels like hell.
                    I do it so it feels real.
                    I guess you could say I've a call.

"

A Nobel Prize for War?

Alfred Nobel

The Times headline read, “Boko Haram Ranked Ahead of ISIS for Deadliest Terror Group," (NYT, 11/18/15) and the story went on to report that “Boko Haram, the militant group that has tortured Nigeria and its neighbors for years, was responsible for 6664 deaths last year,  more than any other terrorist group in the world, including the Islamic state, which killed 6073 people in 2014.” The figures come from an organization The Times identifies as the Institute of Economics & Peace, but it makes one think that there's a crying need for a central clearing house where the success of terrorist plots, murderers, beheadings are all tallied with the aim of presenting year end awards to organizations which have been most successful in promoting terror. Boko Haram and ISIS may have ranked first and second, but where how did al-Qaeda fare? Competition is one way to build excellence in any field and there are undoubtedly many other fledgling terrorist organizations who would be helped if they could have their sights set on some kind of prize which like the Nobel might even come with a financial reward. We hear about how wealthy ISIS has become, but there are terrorist groups in Chechnya, in Malaysia, in the Philippines and Myanmar, (where there’s the seemingly oxymoronic prospect of militant Buddhists who want to rid the country of Muslims) all in sore need of funding so that they fulfill their dreams of killing thousands of people and one day finding glory as the winner of a prize. Studies will undoubtedly show that terrorist groups who win awards are also more feared than those who remain relatively low on the food chain in terms of recognition. Perhaps there should also be a terrorist hall of fame, like the one that celebrates our great baseball players, in Cooperstown. We vilify the Nazis, but during the Third Reich, many of those we regard as criminals today were considered heroes who would definitely have been qualified to be championship terrorists. If the world continues on its present course, perhaps someday there will even be a Nobel Prize for War.

Diasporic Dining XXXIX: The Specialities of the Islamic State

You can’t help thinking about how life is lived amidst desperadoes and extremists, outlaws not from the world in which they govern, but from the notion of civilization perpetrated by the Enlightenment in which reason prevails against passion and the notion of inalienable rights leads to legal principles like due process. Charisma by nature always becomes routinized as Max Weber pointed out. A sect becomes a church and even the zeal of the fanatic runs becomes institutionalized. What, for instance, is it like in an ISIS barracks? What kind of food is fed to their recruits and who creates the menus for both the foot soldiers and those in command? Does Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi have his own private chef who presides over a well-equipped kitchen out-fitted with appliances like a Sub Zero refrigerator? Does he host banquets attended by other prominent terrorists like Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader al-Qaeda? And which of his wives does he appear with at public occasions? Beyond the exhilaration of beheadings and public relations coups that come in the form of pulling off brazen attacks that only increase the attractiveness of the organization to a base demographic, do members of ISIS experience the joy of cooking? Getting back to the kitchen, does Mr. Baghdadi delight in the smells emanating from his crockpot as much as he does the shrieks from the cells in which prisoners are tortured or raped. ISIS militants in Raqqa get toothaches and diarrhea and there are undoubtedly men suffering from erectile dysfunction and those who are afraid they’re dicks will be cut off if they are found spanking the monkey. ISIS is known for its social media savvy, but do their PR types have anything in common with t counterparts in enemy territory? Are there redoubts which cater to those who present the face of ISIS to the world and do these cafes and restaurants, if they exist, have anything in common with similar establishments around the world? Is there a Michael’s which caters to publishing big wigs in the Islamic state. The South Korean director Shin Sang-ok was famously kidnapped by Kim Jong-il, who was a film buff? Can we expect that a terrorist like Baghdadi will start to indulge his esthetic appetites if and when ISIS becomes a state rather than simply a state of mind? Will Anthony Bourdain be doing a segment on the culinary delights that await those who make the journey to ISIS’s promised land?