[lit-ideas] Re: Five Years Ago
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 00:09:24 -0400
This sentence jumped out at me: "More, we regard the Great Leap Backwards as a
tragic development in Islam's story, and now in ours." This does describe the
battle between Creationism and Darwinism in the U.S.; the merger of politics
with religion; the flap over whether to keep God in the pledge of allegiance.
A Great Leap Backwards straight into the New Middle Ages in these here United
States. And who much cares?
This passage speaks to the utility of our invasion of Iraq:
"By the summer of 2005, suicide-mass murder had evolved. In Iraq, foreign
jihadis, pilgrims of war, were filing across the borders to be strapped up with
explosives and nails and nuts and bolts, often by godless Baathists with
entirely secular aims - to be primed like pieces of ordnance and then sent out
the same day to slaughter their fellow Muslims. Suicide-mass murder, in other
words, had passed through a phase of decadence and was now on the point of
debauchery. In a single month (May), there were more human bombings in Iraq
than during the entire intifada."
And to the loss of our rights in the U.S. and the call for censorship in
universities: "Islam means 'submission' - the surrender of independence of
mind."
The bottom line in my opinion is that we're fixated on them even as our own
country goes down the tubes, embodied in the very fact that we're fighting some
ridiculous war in Iraq while our ports are untouched by security, etc. etc.
while we lay the groundwork for a police state.
----- Original Message -----
From: Lawrence Helm
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 9/11/2006 10:20:45 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Five Years Ago
In the Martin Amis three-part article Simon asked Eric and me to read, Amis
says ?Suicide-mass murder is astonishingly alien, so alien, in fact that
Western opinion ahs been unable to formulate a rational response to it. A
rational response would something like an unvarying factory siren of unanimous
disgust. But we haven?t managed that. What we have managed, on the whole, is
a murmur of dissonant evasion.?
Mike Geary?s dissonant evasion reads, ? . . . we were attacked again by people
we?ve known for some time are desperate to get our attention??
Furthermore Mike tells us that though it was ?an horrendous crime,? it wasn?t
all that horrendous: ? . . . it was a minimal military and material threat to
our existence as a nation.? Why Mike should tell us that is a mystery inasmuch
as these attention-seekers, bless their little poor hearts, prefer civilian
targets.
Mike tells us that the greater crime was our being stuffy about it: Such that
?we would probably kill tens of thousands of innocent, very poor people in
revenge that would accomplish nothing.? The poorness of these people should
exonerate them from their crimes or at least reduce the horrendousness of them,
but we are heartless as well as greedy: Our ?blood-lust would make billions for
many American corporations.?
Which, Mike tells us, is a dirty rotten shame because our neither our
blood-lust nor our corporate greed is going to solve the problem, not the ?root
causes of 9/11? which scholar after scholar (Mike doesn?t read scholars so I?ll
fill this in for him) tell us is a virulent Jihadist ideology formulated by
Sayyid Qutb. See Martin Amis? article: Part One:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1868732,00.html Part Two:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1868743,00.html and Part Three:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1868746,00.html
I know that Simon suggested that only Eric and I read Martin Amis? article, but
others might be interested. Amis is another literary type so might not be of
interest to the fat-loving Jack Spratt but others might enjoy it. Of course,
not Andreas because it won?t fit in with any of his pre-conceived ideas. Nor,
since the article is long will it be of interested to those with short
attention spans, but there might be one or two beyond Simon, Eric and I who
will want to read it.
Lawrence
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