That Day

It was a school day. I was a high school sophomore. After waking up and showering, I got ready for class. My high school operated on the block system, whereby instead of seven or eight classes of less than an hour each were crammed into one day, three or four classes roughly an hour and a half long were spread over A and B days. The B days had a kind of study hall period in the early morning, so that one needed not be there until 9:30 or thereabouts. That Tuesday was such a day, and so I was able to be more leisurely about getting ready.

My mother, having worked the night shift at the hospital the night before, called the house. No surprise there. From what I remember, it was a typical phone call: be there in 15 minutes (or whatever), don't forget to put the garbage out.

Then, before hanging up, almost as an afterthought, "Turn on the TV, the World Trade Center's been attacked."

What?

Such was my understanding of the wider world around me that the phrase 'World Trade Center' sounded familiar, though I really had no idea what it was, not even that included two iconic twin skyscrapers. In any case, it was news. I went over to the living room TV and switched it to some station, any station, to the chagrin of my younger, hockey playing brother who had been watch ESPN.

And here memory, notoriously unreliable, fails completely. I don't remember what I said, much of what I immediately felt, or even what I saw. I might have seen the live 8:28 (my time) collapse of the second tower, but probably not the 7:59 collapse of the first. But everything is fragments.

At the school they had the TV, a box large-screen sitting on top of a rolling cart, airing coverage of the unfolding disaster. Classes proceeded as normal.

A friend of mine was somewhat bewildered, saying, "They cancelled classes at my dad's school when Kennedy was assassinated."

Being so removed from the disaster, the following days felt less alarming than slightly menacingly strange. The grounding of nearly all air traffic felt particularly off because the high school is located in front of our town's landing strip, and descending aircraft were an unremarked feature of everyday life.

My brother was angry with Muslims. My mother and I explained to him that collective punishment was wrong, and used as a personal hypothetical his Chinese friend whose life would be made more difficult by an attack by China. He came around.

We heard about people saying very unkind things to the Egyptian family with whom we were friends.

Strange times. Strange times, all and ever.

Security Theatre

When it comes to movies about Islamic terrorism, there is a certain amount of timeliness expected. It's a zeitgeist thing. But Four Lions' timing was especially fortuitous: an English satire of jihadists, it arrived on U.S. shores November 5th, just a week after the TSA patdowns and body scanners began meeting some resistance, and just another week before John Tyner’s “don’t touch my junk” objection became a cause célèbre for ACLU lawyers and right wing authoritarians alike. Though Four Lions doesn’t particularly concern itself with these issues or the post-9/11 security apparatus, it is useful in defusing the mentality that allows them to thrive.

The four lions in question are actually five English Muslims living in the suburb of Sheffield, of varying levels of unintelligence: there is Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), stupid but mostly harmless; Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a recent and very possibly gay convert, bloodthirsty to the point of spiting his own face; Hassan (Arsher Ali), who thinks his Islamist bona fides make him much cooler than he actually is—and who has one of the funniest introductory scenes I can remember—Waj (Kayvan Novak), generally confused and clueless; and Omar (Riz Ahmed), the protagonist, generally klutzy but on some level cognizant of his cohorts’ ineptness and with a growing ambivalence on what the group is trying to do. (I am dealing with generalities here, as the film’s comic surprises are best kept concealed. The film’s trailer spoils far too much.)

Making characters stupid but not hatefully obnoxious is a tough balancing act--see Idiocracy for an example of when it doesn’t work, and Burn After Reading for when it does--but the movie pulls it off pretty well, making them interesting enough that we want to see how gloriously they screw up next. It's smart stupid comedy, like seeing different permutations of Ali G bounce off one another.

Yet Omar and his friend are far from the only fools on parade. Omar’s conservative brother, his co-worker at a security firm, Barry’s ditzy neighbor, are all head-bashingly oblivious to what he’s up to. Indeed, even as the group’s big operation gets underway, the police are grossly ineffective at stopping them.

A little frustratingly, the only characters not to come in for audience scorn are the ancillary jihadists: Omar’s smart wife is the sharpest character in the movie, and fully aware of her husband’s plans. And a group of Pakistani terrorists, who end up kicking Omar and Waj out of their training camp for being so useless, are the straight men in their section of the film. Ordinarily this would not be worth mention, since the Taliban are generally understood to be the bad guys. But Bagram and Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg, whom director Chris Morris consulted so as not to offend Muslims (what kind of satire sets out not to offend?), doesn’t share that understanding.

But I digress. What does all this have to do with the TSA’s groping and lurid photography?

More than any particular goal or character motivation, the driving force of the movie’s episodic story is the complete ineptness of its characters, who lurch from scheme to scheme as their plans sometimes literally go up in smoke. Though work on Four Lions began several years ago, its subject matter has a useful analogue in Umar Farouk Abulmutallab, who last Christmas failed to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner when he attempted to light on a fire a bomb in his underwear. (He also invited Moazzam Begg to speak at University College London’s 2007 Islamic Awareness conference…) Abdulmutallab’s terror fail invites mockery, but it also prompted the new TSA procedures, which would detect any crotch fire potential and prevent such an attack from occurring.

The scanners and pat-downs are a convenient dodge for the fact that Abdulmutallab would never have boarded his flight had intelligence agencies acted on his dubious profile and the tip-off given by his father. Other recent terror plots and incidents either stemmed from similar failure to act on reasonable suspicion, such as Nidal Malik Hasan’s massacre of troops at Ft. Hood, or had nothing to do with airport security, such as Faisal Shazhad’s Times Square bombing attempt this past spring.

Abdulmutallab and Shazhad are most pertinent to discussing anti-terror measures because they were successes in spite of the utter failure of their plots. Even though they were caught and no one was injured, influential swaths of the country still lost their collective minds anyway. The TSA, of course, implemented its new invasive measures. Meanwhile the conservative intelligentsia demanded Abdulmutallab be tortured in spite of his cooperation with authorities, and wanted to revoke Shazhad’s Miranda rights. Only on Wall Street can failure reap such benefits.

All of this is done in the name of fighting a shadowy terrorist threat that, with a little light shone on it, loses a lot of its capacity to inspire, well, terror. Four Lions’ depiction of domestic terrorists as bumbling fools then, while imperfect, provides a necessary corrective to the constant scare-mongering that often seems to do the terrorists' work for them. Sometimes the best response to the lions’ roar, is to roar back, in laughter.

On Joe the Bomber

The Austin airplane suicide bomb attack is certainly terrorism. The temptation is to blame this on the teabaggers, but that's a mistake: the bomber's suicide note is an angry screed against the IRS, corporate greed, the airline industry, the government in general.

The unifying thread is hatred of elites who are screwing the everyman: "[T]he justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies." "The sleazy government." "Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws."

Its classic populism, which neither the left nor right holds a monopoly on. The current conservative moment, of course, is built on a ressentiment of "cultural elites" who, they think, hold the common man in contempt. The leftist version seeks to punish rich bankers and businessmen who wrecked the economy and have made off like bandits. There is a much common ground between them, enough that liberal activist Jane Hamsher argued for an alliance with the Tea Partiers when the Senate passed their Health Care bill.

A formal merger of the two groups is impossible, of course: there are far too many fundamental philosophical differences. More likely are events like this, where individuals decide to take matters into their own hands to violently strike out at the bigwigs they blame for their current problems. Those problems are ultimately what it comes down to: Joe Stack, it seems, had ongoing financial difficulties and claims he never got the help he needed. Put in a desperate situation, he resorted to desperate measures. At a time when unemployment is still hovering at 10%, banks are continuing to throw obscene bonuses at their CEOs. This will piss anybody off, no matter their political persuasion, and the longer this goes on, the greater the chance of more Joe Stacks turning to violent means to vent their frustration.

Frank Rich has been sounding the alarm on this realignment for several months now:

“Wall Street owns our government,” Beck declared in one rant this July. “Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged.” He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right’s usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore’s coming film, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” which reportedly takes on Goldman and the Obama economic team along with conservative targets.

This development gets to the heart of the problem of growing economic inequality and wealth concentration in the United States. Conservatives refuse any notion of "redistribution" as a matter of principle, that the rich are rich and the poor poor because they deserve to be so. There are plenty of problems with this argument--again, after the near-destruction of our economy, who thinks these bankers deserve their million-dollar bonuses?--but until now the debate has mostly been one on fairness. Wealth may be more concentrated than ever, the argument went, but as long as it's only the lower classes' problem, who cares? Now, of course, the threat of violence makes it the rich peoples' problem too.

None of this is a defense of Joe Stack's behavior, but simply an objective observation. Increasing economic polarization, to say nothing of fairness, guarantees social instability. It is in everybody's best interest to return us to some semblance of equilibrium. The question is whether Wall Street and the political establishment (I'll go ahead and finger the Republicans, since they are the ones trying to strip the Senate finance reform bill of the Consumer Protection Agency) will put the long-term health of the Republic ahead of short-term gain; the answer, given recent history, is too bleak to contemplate.