Martin Amis, “The Second Plane.” Written seven days after September 11, this essay is one of the more cogent from that time. I want to quickly note that Amis is no antagonist of America, nor is he an apologist for Islamofascism; he writes that America is hated “intelligibly,” not “intelligently,” and in his prose is nothing like the celebratory tone used by those motivated as much by Nietzschean “ressentiment” as by political reflection.
But Amis is interested in a fundamental question of our time: what accounts for the radical disparity between America’s self-image and its image around the world? Again, I don’t here mean competing views held by the uneducated; we make our task easy if we confine the scope of our enquiry to reactionary rednecks and Afghan villagers without schools.
For the fact is that educated and intelligent Americans are utterly incapable of recognizing or contextualizing the slaughter of Iraqis as morally meaningful (as though our lack of intentionality mitigates the rage and despair of their kin). What Amis calls our “incuriosity” is often blamed on the media, but I doubt the cause is so simple. There is a deep unwillingness to confront America’s historical missteps, the consequences of our errors in judgment (or our malice), the sources of the world’s antipathy towards us.
(I personally think it is largely the same old oppositonal bullshit: privately, you can like get someone to admit that installing the Shah in Iran was not merely unethical and contrary to our principles as a nation but also terribly stupid and still costs us, to this day; but in public, they are so hostile to the opposition, whom they view as pathologically anti-American, that they’ll clam up or talk about the urgent necessity of stemming Communism in the Middle East).
He closes the essay with a warning that was prescient, if not unique in its vision:
…unless Pakistan can actually deliver bin Laden, the American retaliation is almost sure to become elephantine. Then terror from above will replenish the source of all terror from below: unhealed wounds. This is the familiar cycle so well caught by the matter, and the title, of VS Naipul’s story “Tell Me Who to Kill.”
And so it happened. His book contains many rousing and brilliant condemnations of terrorism, the idiocy of theocracy and the banal stupidity of the “philosophies” on which Islamofascism is based, and so on, but we know all that. What remains a mystery is this: what truly accounts for the American disconnect? What will remediate it?
(If you’re waiting for a generational change, here’s a dispatch for you from the South: it isn’t coming).