Saturday, September 13, 2003
A couple of items at the always trenchant Little Green Footballs seem like appropriate additions to yesterday's post on 9/11. First consider some lines from W. H. Auden.
There Will Be No Peace
Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shire of your esteem
And its colours come back, the storm has changed you:
You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall.
You must live with your knowledge.
Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,
In moonless absences you never heard of,
Who have certainly heard of you,
Beings of unknown number and gender:
And they do not like you.
What have you done to them?
Nothing? Nothing is not an answer:
You will come to believe - how can you help it? -
That you did, you did do something;
You will find yourself wishing you could make them laugh,
You will long for their friendship.
There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate's sake.
Auden, to be sure, probably had fascists in mind when writing this, but Bin Laden's fundamentalism has been profitably compared to fascism before.
Another take on the root causes of 9/11 can be offered here, by the following story from Yahoo News:
Barbie Deemed Threat to Saudi Morality
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia's religious police have declared Barbie dolls a threat to morality, complaining that the revealing clothes of the "Jewish" toy — already banned in the kingdom — are offensive to Islam.
"Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful," said a poster on the site.
This, of course, follows the earlier banning of Pokemon in Saudi Arabia because leading clerics concluded (in the apparent absence of any knowledge of the Japanese language) that the word 'Pokemon' is Japanese for "I am a Jew."
These stories of Wahhabis Gone Wild used to be funnier to me, but all I can see now is a country's religious elite determined to lead its congregants toward mass lunacy. And there is no way that we can ultimately avoid addressing the Saudi sources of the ideology that we face.
There Will Be No Peace
Though mild clear weather
Smile again on the shire of your esteem
And its colours come back, the storm has changed you:
You will not forget, ever,
The darkness blotting out hope, the gale
Prophesying your downfall.
You must live with your knowledge.
Way back, beyond, outside of you are others,
In moonless absences you never heard of,
Who have certainly heard of you,
Beings of unknown number and gender:
And they do not like you.
What have you done to them?
Nothing? Nothing is not an answer:
You will come to believe - how can you help it? -
That you did, you did do something;
You will find yourself wishing you could make them laugh,
You will long for their friendship.
There will be no peace.
Fight back, then, with such courage as you have
And every unchivalrous dodge you know of,
Clear in your conscience on this:
Their cause, if they had one, is nothing to them now;
They hate for hate's sake.
Auden, to be sure, probably had fascists in mind when writing this, but Bin Laden's fundamentalism has been profitably compared to fascism before.
Another take on the root causes of 9/11 can be offered here, by the following story from Yahoo News:
Barbie Deemed Threat to Saudi Morality
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Saudi Arabia's religious police have declared Barbie dolls a threat to morality, complaining that the revealing clothes of the "Jewish" toy — already banned in the kingdom — are offensive to Islam.
"Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful," said a poster on the site.
This, of course, follows the earlier banning of Pokemon in Saudi Arabia because leading clerics concluded (in the apparent absence of any knowledge of the Japanese language) that the word 'Pokemon' is Japanese for "I am a Jew."
These stories of Wahhabis Gone Wild used to be funnier to me, but all I can see now is a country's religious elite determined to lead its congregants toward mass lunacy. And there is no way that we can ultimately avoid addressing the Saudi sources of the ideology that we face.
