by Richard Stern

Why is it that the U.S. has not been struck by al Qaeda or an al Qaeda group since 9/11? Have we so disrupted its chains of command and operation that it hasn't had enough time, intelligence, equipment, money, and concentrated will power to prepare and execute a theatrically damaging act? Or is a friend of mine right in saying that it got everything it needed from the 9/11 attacks, the refocusing, if not transfiguring of the country, indeed the world, on terror and what lies behind it (the power of the dispossessed, the ignored, the insulted, brutalized and exploited to grip the world with novel claws of assault)? That such terrorism became complicated by certain versions of Islam in rejecting the vulgarity, materialism, sensuality, monopolizing and faith-killing speed of modernity evokes the Huntington notion of a "clash of civilizations," and perhaps another 100 Year War. Has there been enough restraint in the Moslem and Christian worlds to hold off such a world threat? Perhaps more than a sensation-hungry media has allowed to surface. Let's hope that the human force of parenthood and peace-needy village-and-town hood has shunted to the sidelines the publicized heroics of hatred, martyrdom, and blood sacrifice (mostly other people's blood, other people's sacrifice) and kept what's already horrible from becoming far more horrible, far more death-soaked. I've been reading a wonderful, oddly prescient book about terrorism, Don De Lillo's MAO II (1991). It's full of the madness of crowds and crowd behavior as opposed to the semi-maniacal reclusiveness of artists--particularly a writer of the sort which used to knead and shape the mentality of the world as terrorists with their noise and mindless bloodiness do today. The novel does not have the psychological genius and tragi-farcical narrative drive that the greatest of all terrorist books, Dostoievski's The Devils (The Possessed) (1872) has, but to a puzzled questioner like me, it does have wise insights which serve at least temporarily as answers.