I'm not promoting the idea in the subject line. I'm mocking it. No one this article wasn't actually printed in the newspaper, but only released online:
From: http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/RTGAMArticleHTMLTemplate/D/20011012/wxcorex13?hub=homeBN&tf=tgam/realtime/fullstory.html&cf=tgam/realtime/config-neutral&vg=BigAdVariableGenerator&slug=wxcorex13&date=20011012&archive=RTGAM&site=Front&ad_page_name=breakingnews
Column: A guy, a cave and a gun By REX MURPHY
We seem to have entered a whole new world very suddenly. There is now as much talk on television about anthrax as there was on diet supplements or weight-loss pills a month or so ago. Someone leaves his lunch on a subway platform and the police are out in full in Toronto.
An octogenarian in Charlottetown asks "Are you looking for a bomb?" on his way through airport security, and the initial response is to ban him from flying "for life" and to lay criminal charges. The over-80 set in Charlettetown is a ripe culture for likely terrorists.
Terrorism experts show up on TV panels all over North America retailing a spurious familiarity with the thinkings of the shadowy and surely pathological world of the terrorist mind. I'm working on a definition of "expert" as someone whose advice and knowledge is only available after it's needed.
A plane flies overhead in Toronto and people stop to watch it until it disappears from sight. Since Sept. 11, especially in large cities, a plane flying overhead is anything but routine.
We're in a "brave new world," but it's closer to Huxley's nightmare novel than the innocent vision of Shakespeare's Miranda. If the time comes when we may look coolly back on it, I hope someone remarks on the disappearance of the pop stars. Remember J-Lo? Where's Puff Daddy? Has Britney gone � clothed or unclothed � underground? Was there ever a Tom Green and Freddy Got Fingered? Was it possible that anyone cared?
I seem to remember that, around the time of the attacks, there was a film festival in Toronto. But it disappeared "into air, into thin air." Suddenly, the moron of the minute peddling his or her latest "vehicle" doesn't seem to litter so conspicuously the pages of People, or sink so deeply into the couch next to Dave or Jay.
The pop world of movies, TV and music seems to have been shuffled offstage into what must be, for its brittle inhabitants, a limbo or hell of inattention. All the disaster movies have been shelved except for Mariah Carey's Glitter. The Emmys were again postponed, and I may never know if Everybody Loves Raymond would have beaten out Dharma & Greg.
I wonder if this is what Osama had in mind. Given the remarkably 13th-century tone of his mindset, I suspect that derailing Hollywood "and all its works and pomps" is closer to his chilly heart than fixing the Palestinian problem or his programmed concern about suffering in Iraq. If all the world could just stop, then regress a couple of centuries, Osama and his band would be considerably cheered.
But what is the point of trying to read the mind of the terrorist? Terrorism exists to hurl up anxieties and doubts. To sow a thousand fretful questions in what was, before Sept. 11, our largely innocuous, innocent world. A ham sandwich in a bag temporarily paralyzes a city, an 81-year-old in Charlettetown gets the third degree. Terrorism pollutes the mind � it is the anthrax of our rational approach to life.
As for crediting anything that Osama and his band actually say, this is the deepest lunacy. Are we to expect honesty and straight dealing from merciless megalomaniacs? From four men sitting outside a cave holding a parody of a press conference, going on about infidels and declaring holy war every three phrases?
Except for what they have done, or may do, they are ridiculous and pathetic. The monstrosity of their deeds magnifies them out of all proportion � their depth, their cunning, their goals take on the properties of the superhuman. We reason backward from the sinister splendour of the New York towers collapsing on themselves, the gigantic spectacle of ruin and death, and colour them with some proportion of the image and the deed their miserable hearts confected.
But stripped of the ability to act, to haul out a word Hannah Arendt culled from a like context, they are banal. If Osama couldn't summon his suicide fanatics, or was prevented by some well of human decency within him, from executing his murderous fantasies, what would he be like to talk to? Probably not much different from Carlos the Jackal, another figure that, as long as he was uncaught, loomed large in the imagination of half the world. Once caught, he was as boring as Ned Flanders, poor Homer's bland neighbour on the Simpsons.
There is no great mind here, or large soul. Most likely a bucket of assorted inadequacies and petty frustrations, third-rate thoughts and prefab ideology, projected wildly on the world. He has no life. So he wants to take other people's.
The great villains of history are almost without exception a mundane lot. They amputated, perverted or never had a real moral imagination. That's what made them dangerous. It is what left them uninteresting and pathetic. Hi, Adolf. - - - Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's National Magazine and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
TTYL