Masked Men on Monkey Bars

I have wondered why it is that, whenever the media wants me to worry about incipient terror attacks, they frequently show me footage of masked men on monkey bars. Somewhere in the Middle East, some men in pajamas swing menacingly toward the camera, and I am supposed to sign up for increased restrictions on my civil liberties. Don’t get me wrong. I believe Islam is a very real threat to the West. But it is not the kind of threat that Fox News has made it out to be.

I have mentioned before the essay by Francis Fukuyama in which he declares the “end of history.” By this he does not mean that stuff stops happening, but rather that we finally have managed to clamber off the Hegelian see-saw. We have settled on liberal democracy as the way to govern ourselves, and it is here we shall stay. But in the midst of this essay, Fukuyama acknowledges something astonishing.

“The rise of religious fundamentalism in recent years within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions has been widely noted. One is inclined to say that the revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies. Yet while the emptiness at the core of liberalism is most certainly a defect in the ideology — indeed, a flaw that one does not need the perspective of religion to recognize” (“The End of History?, p. 9, emphasis mine).

This acknowledgement reminds me of an old Monty Python skit where a television interviewer is talking to a man who claims to be Queen Elizabeth I. The host raises a series of objections, which the interviewee deftly handles, but finally the interviewer says, “But Queen Elizabeth has been dead for three and half centuries!” And the man responds, “Yes, well that’s where my theory falls apart.” Fukuyama has declared the City we have built to be invincible . . . but he admits that the city is hollow.

We are currently governed by practioners of realpolitik, men who believe that we can be manipulated indefinitely by images of threatened terror from external and alien sources. So far they have been largely correct; we have been so manipulated. But the Bush-haters are very much a part of this charade because they agree that, in order to constitute a threat, the problem must be a military one. And they, just like Bush, are champions of making the real problem with Islam worse. The fans of the current war on terror say that this is in fact the central threat, while the surrender monkeys say that there is no such threat. But what if the problem is coming from another direction entirely? The problem is babies, not boxcutters. The problem is faith, not Fallujah. The problem is that hollow cities cannot stand. If you do not know who you are, then you have nothing to say to those at the gates who demand to be let in. This just another way of saying that the crisis of our times is religious and demographic, not military and political. And in this setting, Islam is a very potent threat indeed.

My point is not to quarrel with those who say that the “war on terror” is the defining event of our times. I would be willing to debate with such people — if they existed. But even President Bush does not believe this. If we really were in a fight for our lives, if this particular threat really were right outside the gates, then our airports would be bastions of unabashed racial profiling. We would discriminate like crazy. Young males from Saudi Arabia would have to show up at the airport two days early to catch a flight. There would not be a single radical madrassah operating anywhere in the United States. Radical imams would find that preaching sedition in “moderate” mosques provided them with no protection whatever, and they would be summarily deported — instead of being recruited to say a little something at one of our inane prayer breakfasts. Under the current conditions, none of this kind of thing is even remotely possible, from which it may be concluded that whoever is running this country is not that worried about it. And if they are not, then why should I be? But if they want me to worry about it, while they continue blithely on, then I for one decline to do so. And at some point I might be prevailed upon to start asking what their game is.

Try to imagine this if you can. It is a couple years after Pearl Harbor. We are technically at war with Japan. And yet, all over America, thousands of Japanese-Americans still show up at shrines in order to worship Hirohito. Other American citizens standing by say something like, “What’s with that?” and find themselves hustled into sensitivity classes for the celebration of diversity. And in this situation, Roosevelt tries to convince us that he is really serious about prosecuting the war on “surprise attacks against naval installations, although Japan rightly understood remains a deep friend of the United States.” Yeah, right. Call me when you think it’s serious.