The Second Plane – September 11: Terror and Boredom (II)

Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the last eleven hundred years.

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The age of terror, I suspect, will also be remembered as the age of boredom. Not the kind of boredom that afflicts the blase and the effete, but a superboredom, rounding out and complementing the superterror of suicide-mass murder. [...] we haven’t got a chance in the war against boredom. Because boredom is something that the enemy doesn’t feel. To be clear: The opposite of religious belief is not atheism or secularism or humanism. It is not an ism: it is independence of mind – that’s all. When I refer to the age of boredom, I am not thinking of airport queues and subway searches. I mean the global confrontation with the dependent mind.

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A depopulated and simplified Europe might be tenable in a world without enmity and predation. And that is not our world. The birth rate is 6.76 in Somalia, 6.69 in Afghanistan and 6.58 in Yemen. [...] In the US, with some Hispanic assistance, the birth rate is 2.1. If we look more closely we see that it’s Alabama and Wyoming we have to thank for that, not California or Massachusetts: The red states are 12 percent more fertile than the blue. According to Mr. Steyn, the “progressive agenda”, the culture of rights and entitlements, is “a litteral dead end”. The unspoken corrollary, then, is that societies now need to be more reactionary: patriarchal, churchgoing, majoritarian, and philoprogenitive. [...] A practiced sayer of the unsayable, Mr. Steyn nonetheless fails to ask the central question. Will the culture of choice be obliged to give ground to the culture of life?
Itself profoundly retrograde, Islamism may force retrogression on us all.

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I have now completed Martin Amis’ book. First, to be clear, I must admit this is one of those books I would not have bought on my own at the moment (as I mentioned before, it was a birthday present). It is too short and too expensive, especially as it is a completely new book (2008) about ‘current affairs’, so no cheap used versions are available yet. Having said that, it is one of the better ‘current affairs’ books I’ve read (almost all ‘current affairs books’ are, in my mind, too short and too expensive, and for this very reason of course I have also only read a few of them; so do have this in mind when evaluating my opinion on this particular book…). I disagree with Amis about some of the things he writes, I agree with him on some of the things he writes, and I have no opinion one way or the other about yet other things, as I don’t know enough about them to have an opinion. To give a few examples, I agree with him on his ‘death cult’ view of Islamism, and I agree with him that Leninism and Islamism have a lot in common. I blatantly disagree with him that there ever was a ‘War on Terror’ going on, and/or that that ‘war’ is winnable.

The two essays that made the greatest impression on me were the essays In the Palace of the End and The last days of Muhammad Atta; the first one following the life of one of the doubles of ‘Nadir the Next’, a hypothetical dictator-to-be and heir to the throne in a country that, well, ‘sounds a lot like Iraq under Saddam Hussein’; the second one following the (of course primarily speculative) thoughts and (less speculative) actions of Muhammad Atta during what was to be the last day of his, and thousands of New Yorkers, life. The latter had a particularly large impact I guess partly due to the fact that I watched Paul Greengrass’ United 93 just a week ago.