Culture Clash - obituaries of terrorist victims - Brief Article

National Review, Nov 5, 2001 by Richard Brookhiser

New York Times obituaries, along with the Times's wedding announcements, are the last American titles of nobility: the class distinctions awarded by professional egalitarians. If you are Hector Average or Maury Middle, you get a single line, like a stock price, when you go to your reward. The little biography, sometimes with a photograph, is reserved for what Joseph Conrad called "one of us."

Not since September 11. Nobly, the Times has run ten to twelve obituaries a day, for all the dead of the World Trade Towers-firemen, cops, vice presidents, keypunchers, dishwashers at Windows on the World. They are now all of ours; they have become the soulmates we never knew, but whose common personality we instantly recognize from their newsprint eulogies-on the job at 9 a.m.; racially profiled for their identity as Americans; killed for the crime of going to work. I know people who feel an obligation to read every tribute; I know others who stop after one or two, for sheer sorrow. Among the saddest are the obits of the young women-just married, or just engaged, or waiting until they meet Mr. Right. They come from places like Exurb in states like Flatlandia. One young lady was reported to do a "happy dance" in which she held her arms over her head and shouted "Woo-hooo!" Young ladies were doing that happy dance even when I was that age.

So I asked myself: Would Ali the Terrorist have liked to date an American girl? You bet. Could he actually have done so? No way. But he could do the next best thing-he could kill her.

This thought was prompted by another phenomenon: the unusually mild and beautiful late-summer weather in which the attack occurred, and which bathed the aftermath. It is cool now, but in that warm spell, New York girls greeted the sun with their midriffs, their many navels flashing like little black-eyed Susans. Had Thuggy ogled such bouquets on his way to flight school?

All the TV Arabists assure us that the pious murderer believes that, when he ascends to heaven, he will be greeted by seventy sloe-eyed virgins. A weird vision of heaven, compared to Dante, Milton, or even the cloud-islands of New Yorker cartoons. But hold that thought for another day: We don't have to speculate on our enemies' religious opinions, for we know that they got a jump-start on their reward in this life. At least one of the hijack crews, we have learned, went to a gentlemen's club before their debut in paradise, and engaged the attentions of lap dancers. These hardened professionals, with surgical enhancements and refried hair, are a poor simulacrum for the American girl, but that's the best strange young men with accents like syrup could come up with on short notice, and they took it. Soldiers, of course, have ever done thus. But that should tell us something about these soldiers, whom we have been led to believe are different.

Everyone knows that established Muslim rulers are hypocrites, especially the Saudis; the minute they leave home they grab for forbidden fruit: pork, champagne, blondes. Every New Yorker has seen Muslim royalty, out on the town. My view was of a Bruneian prince, celebrating New Year's with an entourage and a roll of natural-gas revenue. He was taking pictures with a solid-gold camera; the booze flowed like cant. But aren't our murderers holy men? Yes, and no. They hate what they think of as degeneracy. But they also want it, and their wanting makes them hate it all the more. Add the normal erotic attraction of the Other, especially when the Other represents a superior civilization, and a poisonous mix is brewed.

No doubt the Gay Moment in American and New York culture also excites the repulsion and the desire of some holy killers in the same fashion. One man-in-the-street interview in the Times quoted a Pakistani who said he had heard a prophecy that, before the end of the world, men would dress as women. What would such a madrassah-bocher think of Wigstock? But no one has to cross an ocean to find gays. Like any polygamous society, the Arab world has been a great breeder of homosexuality. "The men were young and sturdy," wrote T. E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, "and hot flesh and blood unconsciously claimed a right in them and tormented their bellies with strange longings. Our privations and dangers fanned this virile heat . . ." Lawrence honestly recorded how his Arab comrades behaved. But what he could not recognize, tormented by his own longings, was that there was nothing unconscious or strange about their behavior. As it was during that world war, so it is in this.

New York's enemies did not come from some premodern inverted Arcadia. They knew our world; their noses were pressed against the candy-store window as flat as anyone else's, and they wanted the candy just as much. They just wanted to destroy the store. It is tempting to ascribe to the evil some of the virtues that they often claim for themselves. We would not do what they do, whatever the wickedness of our imaginings. Isn't that partly because we lack their idealism? Their singleness of purpose? Their dedication? Poets have been ringing tiresome changes on the virtues of vice since Shelley misread Milton; thinkers have been doing it since Machiavelli. The truth is simpler. Terrorists have all our foibles; they just want to murder lots and lots of people.