Hubris, Arrogance, and Cultural Dissonance

On Jeopardy, the correct question to that answer would be “Why is the western world losing the war on terror?”

I think about this right now as the anniversary of the London Bombings has passed. My daughters’ in-laws were in London and they had exited Kings Cross station not thirty minutes before that blast. That made the British attacks a little close to home. My granddaughters other set of grandparents were lucky to have exited the tube before the blast.

When I was a child and my dad was at the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, I watched the towers go up. To watch them fall – over and over again, in some ghastly, ghostly, video loop was eerie and disheartening and I felt a helpless rage that left me trembling and crying and unable to stop.

My son was a freshman at Rockhurst University when the towers fell, away from home less than three weeks. That night, ten freshmen were in my living room, as my son was a local scholarship recipient and went exactly 30 blocks from home when he went off to college. Kids from Colorado, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, as well as some local kids whose folks lived farther from campus, all crowded in my living room, jockeying for broadband and glued to the satellite dish. I gave up and loaded one of those “free for 45 days” AOL disks and resorted to dial-up that night.

I lived on hospital hill at that time, about 30 blocks from Wheeler Downtown Airport on the bend of the Missouri River. It was eerily quiet. No airplanes. I saw one life flight in three days and three hospitals operated within six blocks of my house. On a normal day I would see six or seven, without paying attention very close.

That night as I lay in bed, unable to sleep, ten extra kids scattered through the living room, two kids’ bedrooms, and the miniature room that passed for my home office, I realized that the jets from Whiteman and McConnell didn’t scramble. Nothing was flying. (Except that plane with bin Laden family members slipping out of the country.) The next day, we went to an air base and had dinner at the Officers Club. There was a seething undercurrent of rage and imposed impotence. The officers that we talked to were astounded that the orders weren’t already coming down, and really pissed at the disorganization they perceived coming from the capital.

For over forty years the plan was simple – if the shit hits the fan, get the president to NORAD, it’s a fortress under a mountain, if he isn’t safe there, kiss the planet goodbye. Not fly his ass around from place to place while vice goes into hiding. When we finally see him again, he looks like a deer in the headlights – more like Dan Quayle than Dan Quayle did in that Bentsen debate.

I didn’t do a Y2K freakout. I did, however, make a huge trip to Costco after our little dinner at the O Club. I came home that night numb, and thinking that this might be it. I feared my own government declaring martial law more than I feared enemy combatants at that point. The next morning I spent two grand. I laid in beans and rice and pastas and sauces and canned goods and marine batteries and inverters and a generator and I filled the coolers and I headed for the place in the country. (If it comes to my front door, I won’t be in Kansas City fighting urban combat. I’ll be in the top of a tree on a high ridge in Mercer County picking off anyone I perceive as an unfriendly with a .270 deer rifle before they get within a mile of me. I’m a damned good shot and I know how to reload ammo.)

Nothing was handled right, from the very start. Some would say all the way back to the British destruction of the last rusticated Ottoman Calliphate in 1924. Others would say that it goes even further back, to the crusades themselves. Where ever on this spectrum you might fall, there is one given: The western-rationalist way of thinking and viewing the world is not comparable with an Islamic world-view. Where we value separation of church and state, that is an abomination to many Islamists who view church and state as one and the same. They find abhorrent man-made laws, instead embracing Shari’ia law.

Western hubris, that our way is the best way and all others are wrong, inferior, even downright silly, that we must change others for their own good; has us in over our heads. And remember the first rule of holes? When you find yourself in one, stop digging. Put the god-damned shovel down, and start thinking of a way to get out of the hole.