The second plane, p.1
The Second Plane, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
The Second Plane
The Voice of the Lonely Crowd
The Wrong War
“In the Palace of the End”
Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind
“The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”
Iran and the Lord of Time
What Will Survive of Us
Conspiracy Theories, and Takfir
Bush in Yes-Man’s-Land
Demographics
On the Move with Tony Blair
An Islamist’s Journey
September 11
Also by Martin Amis
Copyright
To Delilah, Louis, Jacob, Fernanda, and Clio
Author’s Note
The fourteen pieces included here—two short stories and twelve essays and reviews—are reproduced in order of composition: an acknowledgment of the obvious truth that our understanding of September 11 is incremental and can never hope to be intact and entire. I have added to all of them (the Tony Blair travelogue has grown by 40 percent), and I have cut nothing, briefly tempting though it was, at times, to cover my tracks. For example, the first piece—published on September 18, 2001—has a slightly hallucinatory quality (it is fevered by shock and by rumor), and also indulges in what Paul Berman, the author of Terror and Liberalism, has called “rationalist naïveté”—a reflexive search for the morally intelligible, which always leads to the chimera of “moral equivalence.” Similarly, the longest essay, “Terror and Boredom: The Dependent Mind,” written in the midst of the Cartoons Affair and the Pope’s inflammatory indiscretion, is rather heavy on “respect” for Islam. These misemphases are preserved. But I admit that I silently revised my remarks on Israel in the piece called “The Wrong War.”
Terror and boredom are very old friends, as onetime residents of Russia (and other countries) will uneasily recall. The other face of the coin of Islamist terror is boredom—the nullity of the non-conversation we are having with the dependent mind. It is a mind with which we share no discourse. But if September 11 had to happen, then I am not at all sorry that it happened in my lifetime. That day and what followed from it: this is a narrative of misery and pain, and also of desperate fascination. Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits, and medics’ smocks of the Islamic radical? I was once asked: “Are you an Islamophobe?” And the answer is no. What I am is an Islamismophobe, or better say an anti-Islamist, because a phobia is an irrational fear, and it is not irrational to fear something that says it wants to kill you. The more general enemy, of course, is extremism. What has extremism ever done for anyone? Where are its gifts to humanity? Where are its works?
M.A., LONDON, AUGUST 2007
The Second Plane
It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her.
I have never seen a generically familiar object so transformed by affect (“emotion and desire as influencing behavior”). That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanized with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the South Tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.
Terrorism is political communication by other means. The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. United Airlines Flight 175 was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, launched in Afghanistan, and aimed at her innocence. That innocence, it was here being claimed, was a luxurious and anachronistic delusion.
A week after the attack, one is free to taste the bile of its atrocious ingenuity. It is already trite but stringently necessary to emphasize that such a mise en scène would have embarrassed a studio executive’s storyboard or a thriller-writer’s notebook (“What happened today was not credible” were the stunned and wooden words of Tom Clancy, the author of The Sum of All Fears). And yet in broad daylight and full consciousness that outline became established reality: a score or so of Stanley knives produced two million tons of rubble. Several lines of U.S. policy were bankrupted by the events of last Tuesday, among them national missile defense. Someone realized that the skies of America were already teeming with missiles, each of them primed and cocked.
The plan was to capture four airliners in the space of half an hour. All four would be bound for the west coast, to ensure maximum fuel load. The first would crash into the North Tower just as the working day hit full stride. Then a pause of fifteen minutes, to give the world time to gather round its TV sets. With that attention secured, the second plane would crash into the South Tower, and in that instant America’s youth would turn into age.
If the architect of this destruction was Osama bin Laden, who is a qualified engineer, then he would certainly know something about the stress equations of the World Trade Center. He would also know something about the effects of ignited fuel: at 500˚C (a third of the temperature actually attained), steel loses 90 percent of its strength. He must have anticipated that one or both of the towers would collapse. But no visionary cinematic genius could hope to re-create the majestic abjection of that double surrender, with the scale of the buildings conferring its own slow motion. It was well understood that an edifice so demonstrably comprised of concrete and steel would also become an unforgettable metaphor. This moment was the apotheosis of the postmodern era—the era of images and perceptions. Wind conditions were also favorable; within hours, Manhattan looked as though it had taken ten megatons.
Meanwhile, a third plane would crash into the Pentagon, and a fourth would crash into Camp David (the site of the first Arab-Israeli accord) or possibly into the White House (though definitely not into Air Force One: this rumor was designed to excuse Bush’s meanderings on the day). The fourth plane crashed, upside down, not into a landmark but into the Pennsylvanian countryside, after what seems to have been heroic resistance from the passengers. The fate of the fourth plane would normally have been one of the stories of the year. But not this year. The fact that for the first few days one struggled to find more than a mention of it gives some idea of the size of the American defeat.
My wife’s sister had just taken her children to school and was standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street at 8:58 a.m., on the eleventh day of the ninth month of 2001 (the duo-millennial anniversary of Christianity). For a moment she imagined herself to be on a runway at Kennedy Airport. She looked up to see the glistening underbelly of the 767, a matter of yards above her head. (Another witness described plane number one as “driving” down Fifth Avenue at 400 mph.) There is a modest arch that fronts Washington Square Park; American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles was flying so low that it had to climb to clear it.
We have all watched airplanes approach, or seem to approach, a large building. We tense ourselves as the supposed impact nears, even though we are sure that this is a parallax illusion and that the plane will cruise grandly on. My sister-in-law was right behind Flight 11. She urged it to swerve, to turn into the plentiful blue sky. But the plane did not turn. That afternoon her children would be bringing refreshments to the block-long queue waiting to give blood at St. Vincent’s.
Now the second aircraft, and the terror revealed—the terror doubled, or squared. We speak of “plane rage,” but it was the plane itself that was in frenzy, one felt, as it gunned and steadied and then smeared itself into the South Tower. Even the flames and smoke were opulently evil, with their vampiric reds and blacks. Murder-suicide from without was now duplicated within to provide what was perhaps the day’s most desolating spectacle. They flailed and kicked as they came down. As if you could fend off that abysmal drop. You too would flail and kick. You could no more help yourself than you could stop your teeth from chattering at a certain intensity of cold. It is a reflex. It is what human beings do when they fall.
The Pentagon is a symbol, and the WTC is, or was, a symbol, and an American passenger jet is also a symbol of indigenous mobility and zest, and of the galaxy of glittering destinations. The bringers of Tuesday’s terror were morally “barbaric,” inexpiably so, but they brought a demented sophistication to their work. They took these great American artifacts and pestled them together. Nor is it at all helpful to describe the attacks as “cowardly.” Terror always has its roots in hysteria and psychotic insecurity; still, we should know our enemy. The firefighters were not afraid to die for an idea. But the suicide killers belong in a different psychic category, and their battle effectiveness has, on our side, no equivalent. Clearly, they have contempt for life. Equally clearly, they have contempt for death.
Their aim was to torture tens of thousands, and to terrify hundreds of millions. In this they have succeeded. The temperature of planetary fear has been lifted toward the feverish; “the world hum,” in Don DeLillo’s phrase, is now as audible as tinnitus. And yet the most durable legacy has to do with the more distant future, and the disappearance of an illusion about our loved ones, particularly our children. American parents will feel this most acutely, but we will also feel it. The illusion is this. Mothers and fathers need to feel that they can protect their children. They can’t, of course, and never could, but they need to feel that they can. What once seemed more or less impossible, their protection, now seems obviously and palpably inconceivable. So from now on we will have to get by without that need to feel.
Last Tuesday’s date may not prove epochal; and it should be the immediate task of the present Administration to prevent it from becoming so. Bear in mind: the attack could have been infinitely worse. On September 11 experts from the Centers for Disease Control “rushed” to the scene to test its atmosphere for biological and chemical weapons. They knew that these were a possibility; and they will remain a possibility. There is also the integrally insoluble hazard of America’s inactive nuclear power stations (no nuclear power station has ever been dismantled, anywhere). Equivalent assaults on such targets could reduce enormous tracts of the country to plutonium graveyards for tens of thousands of years. Then there is the near-inevitable threat of terrorist nuclear weapons—directed, perhaps, at nuclear power stations. One of the conceptual tasks to which Bush and his advisers will not be equal is that the Tuesday Terror, for all its studious viciousness, was a mere adumbration. We are still in the first circle.
It will also be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly. How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5 percent of the Iraqi population? How many of them then transfer that figure to America (and come up with fourteen million)? Various national characteristics—self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in Western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity—have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away. Most crucially, and again most painfully, being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree: Americans are good and right by virtue of being American. Saul Bellow’s word for this habit is “angelization.” On the U.S.-led side, then, we need not only a revolution in consciousness but an adaptation of national character: the work, perhaps, of a generation.
And on the other side? Weirdly, the world suddenly feels bipolar. All over again the West confronts an irrationalist, agonistic, theocratic/ideocratic system which is essentially and unappeasably opposed to its existence. The old enemy was a superpower; the new enemy isn’t even a state. In the end, the U.S.S.R. was broken by its own contradictions and abnormalities, forced to realize, in Martin Malia’s words, that “there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built it.” Then, too, socialism was a modernist, indeed a futurist, experiment, whereas militant fundamentalism is convulsed in a late-medieval phase of its evolution. We would have to sit through a Renaissance and a Reformation, and then await an Enlightenment. And we’re not going to do that.
What are we going to do? Violence must come; America must have catharsis. We would hope that the response will be, above all, non-escalatory. It should also mirror the original attack in that it should have the capacity to astonish. A utopian example: the crippled and benighted people of Afghanistan, hunkering down for a winter of famine, should not be bombarded with cruise missiles; they should be bombarded with consignments of food, firmly marked LENDLEASE USA. More realistically, 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 V. S. Naipaul’s story “Tell Me Who to Kill.”
Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called “species consciousness,” something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear.
SEPTEMBER 18, 2001. The Guardian
The Voice of the Lonely Crowd
Were I (who to my cost already am
One of those strange prodigious Creatures, Man)
A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,
What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas’d to weare,
I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear
Or any thing but that vain Animal
Who is so proud of being rational.
These bitterly charged lines, from Lord Rochester’s “Satyr Against Mankind,” were written in 1675. They now seem somewhat premature, do they not? The age of reason, individuality, and empiricism was on its way; and Rochester was suspicious of the new reality. His worries were needless. On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational—to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he’s really proud of.
After a couple of hours at their desks, on September 12, 2001, all the writers on earth were considering the course that Lenin menacingly urged on Maxim Gorky: a change of occupation. I remember thinking that I was like Josephine, the opera-singing mouse in the Kafka story: Sing? “She can’t even squeak.” A novel is politely known as a work of the imagination; and the imagination, that day, was of course fully commandeered, and to no purpose. Whenever that sense of heavy incredulity seems about to dissipate, I still find, an emergent detail will eagerly replenish it: the “pink mist” in the air, caused by the explosion of the falling bodies; the fact that the second plane, on impact, was traveling at nearly 600 mph, a speed that would bring it to the point of disintegration. What was it like to be a passenger on that plane? What was it like to see it coming toward you?
An unusual number of novelists chose to write some journalism about September 11—as many journalists more or less tolerantly noted. I can tell you what those novelists were doing: they were playing for time. The so-called work in progress had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of autistic babble. But then, too, a feeling of gangrenous futility had infected the whole corpus. That page headed “By the same author”—which, in the past, was smugly consulted as a staccato biography—could now be dismissed with a sigh and a shake of the head. My own page, as an additional belittlement, ended with a book called The War Against Cliché. I thought: actually we can live with “bitter cold” and “searing heat” and the rest of them. We can live with cliché. What we have to do now, more testingly, is live with war.
Imaginative writing is understood to be slightly mysterious. In fact it is very mysterious. A great deal of the work gets done beneath the threshold of consciousness, and without the intercession of reason. When the novelists went into newsprint about September 11, there was a murmur to the effect that they were now being obliged to snap out of their solipsistic daydreams: to attend, as best they could, to the facts of life. For politics—once defined as “what’s going on”—suddenly filled the sky. True, novelists don’t normally write about what’s going on; they write about what’s not going on. Yet the worlds so created aspire to pattern and shape and moral point. A novel is a rational undertaking; it is reason at play, perhaps, but it is still reason.
September 11 was a day of de-Enlightenment. Politics stood revealed as a veritable Walpurgis night of the irrational. And such old, old stuff. The conflicts we now face or fear involve opposed geographical arenas, but also opposed centuries or even millennia. It is a landscape of ferocious anachronisms: nuclear jihad on the Indian subcontinent; the medieval agonism of Islam; the Bronze Age blunderings of the Middle East.
We recall that Ronald Reagan habitually anathematized the Soviet Union as “godless” (meaning, presumably, that its government was secular). This epithet could hardly be unleashed on Osama bin Laden. So Bush, who is religious, and Blair, who is religious, offered the patent falsehood that the war on terrorism was “not about religion.” Iraq is godless too, but this fact is unlikely to be parlayed, just now, into another good reason for invading it.
The twentieth century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows little sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.
