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Source: Reuters -
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With the news that a second man had been arrested from Delta Airlines Flight 253, and the speedy disavowal by the FBI of the seriousness of his behaviour, we are on the cusp of a new year- travelling back through time.
You may remember how, after 9/11, the air was thick with plots and counter plots, one of which, the delivery of anthrax to several federal and media addresses in Washington and New York, only left more questions than answers. Everyone liked America in those days, because it was a victim, even if - reflexively - the tenor of American public life had become even more jingoistic and exceptionalist. David Letterman wept on telly. American newsman Dan Rather, weeping also, offered to fight. He was then in his late 60s. T-shirts were worn in public bearing red white and blue in the shape of an eagle, and the legend, 'These colors don't run.'
I remember being told (and put this through your own
apocrypha-detector) about a patriot who had dressed his pooch up in
the US flag in New York City.
No big deal, you might say; dogs, after all, are condemned to live
out their owners' fatuity.
But as mutt and man walked down the street together, pedestrians were saluting the dog.
Following every terrorist attack, or attempted attack, there is a 'saluting the dog' freeze frame when public hysteria runs high, and authorities must take events they would normally discard as being worthy of investigation.
In this case, that high (or low) water mark was the arrest of an individual whose suspicious activity consisted locking himself in the toilet because he was unwell.
Such Keystone Cops-ishness is a welcome by-product for al-Qaeda of a failed attack. Ditto anything to make the citizens of functioning social democracies feel less safe, or make their apparatuses seem ludicrous.
Add to that criticism of political jockeying that follows from the attack/attempted attack, the livid pronouncements of patriots, and the incursion into hitherto private space. Does the name Richard Reed mean anything to you? It should, he's the coward that tried to blow up a plane using explosive devices in his shoes. He's also the reason that slip-on shoes are desirable in every metropolitan American airport.
I've been reading 'The Revolt of the Pendulum', Clive James'
most recent collection of essays during my holiday haze. In the
opening squib on the writer Karl Kraus, James links Nazi terror,
and the effects it had on democratic societies to the strains
wrought by al-Qeada on the places where you and I live.
James will forgive me if I do a disservice to him by
misappropriation, but a point that hit me was his contention that
the political nodes and public moments of democratic societies are
riven with hypocrisy, double-dealing and foolishness because these
are signs of freedom. The al-Qeada utopia would be empty of such
frippery, and much more besides.
Please don't interpret this as an argument for the enshrinement of, say, 'Dancing With the Stars' as a symptom of political health. But the absence of such a show, and all its political equivalents are to be praised.
Dress up your dogs if you like. Salute them if you must.
