It is a serial, a real cliffhanger. It's a fable. It's aboutcavemen. Cavemen on horseback and in high-tech command centers. StoneAge meets Space Age, isn't that what they say? Vice President Cheney isin a bunker in a mountain. Batman had a Batcave. Osama bin Laden islike that, like a bat, but he's also a rat, scurrying into his fortifiedhole, leaving droppings, a videotape here and there. I've already heardsongs about it, Country songs and corridas. I'm sure there are balladsin Arabic.
There will be epic poems, folktales. There are probably lots oflimericks. There will be serious plays and ridiculous movies. It's areligious lesson. It's a morality play. It's a pageant. It's acostume drama. They are the Evil-doers. We are the Evil un-doers.Hooray. Boo, hiss.
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We try to follow the narrative. We post-moderns know what the oldbards knew: there are many narratives. Al Qaeda, a band of TrueBelievers from around the world, gather in Talibanland, and with moneyfrom a dozen or a hundred sources storm the castle and citadel of theSuper Power. The Twin Towers fall and fall and turn inside-out.Tolkien may be too tame for our tastes.
What's the ROI, the return on their investment? What is the multipliereffect? With $200,000 they caused more than $30,000,000,000 damageandanother $50,000,000,000 in subsequent costs, losses and expenses, andthen another $100,000,000,000 in military and aid responses, recovery,rebuilding. They lost 19 men who killed over 3000. Most of them werefrom Saudi Arabia, the dead were from at least 86 countries. They areall men, the dead are women as well as men. They are all ferventMuslims, the dead are of many faiths and no faith. How do we calculatethe symmetry and asymmetry, how do we measure the moralequivalence?
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The fire is still burning in lower Manhattan. (There is a coal mine inPennsylvania that has been burning for 40 years.) There are firesburning in the hearts of people everywhere. There is snow on themountains in Afghanistan. "Into the valley of death rode the sixhundred." (Tennyson, 1853.) There is major poetry here. Death fromthe sky. Avenging angels.
What is the story and the glory? How will the tale be told? Thereareheroes of different cultures and uniforms, of different worldviews andaccents and time zones. They meet from the opposite ends of the earth,from Washington, D.C. and London, at the Khyber Pass, for God's sake,and on CNN and al-Jazeera. Strike up the band.
The fighting is taking place where Alexander the Great, the BritishEmpire and the Soviet Union gave up and went home. Now, the Westernallies and the Northern Alliance, the United Front, the United Kingdomand the United States against Al Qaeda, the warlords of the Pentagon andthe clans of the Stans, the tribes and the bribes, against theguerrillas, criminals, terrorists, fanatics, brigands, holy warriorsall. It's a melodrama. It hurts too much to laugh.
This is great material. There are more than enough mixed metaphors.There is too much history. It is Grand Guignol and Greek chorus. Itis1492 in reverse, from the siege of the Alhambra to breaching thePentagon. It is 661, with the split between Sunnis and Shi'ites stillreverberating. It is the Old West and the new West. Wanted: Dead orAlive. Saladin meets Paladin. $25 million on his head, for his headona platter or a spike. We are told, tellingly, Afghanistan is the sizeof Texas. And you're supposed to know you Don't Mess With Texas. Thiswill be a musical soon, even an opera. I've always liked "The DesertSong" (1926, then three movie versions). But that was a love story.
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"In the next war, the dead will be buried in cellophane," ErnestHemingway wrote, in a poem, not his war reporting. What anold-fashioned idea. The dead in New York became dust. An even olderidea.
It's El Cid, Lawrence of Arabia, Kipling, the Great Game, Marco Polo,the Desert Mystics. Take notes for the mid-term exam. "Poetryisemotion recollected in tranquility," wrote Wordsworth. Meanwhile,bombsare falling, fires are burning. Christmas is a-comin' and the geese aregetting fat. People killing people, what do you think of that? Peaceon earth as a vaudeville routine. It's in such bad taste, but that'sthe name of the game. Please, hold your applause. It's not over yet.
