Step Across This Line Part 14

In the world outside TV, our numbed senses already require increasing doses of t.i.tillation. One murder is barely enough; only the ma.s.s murderers make the front pages. You have to blow up a building full of people or machine-gun a whole royal family to get our attention. Soon, perhaps, you'll have to kill off a whole species of wildlife or unleash a virus that wipes out people by the thousands, or else you'll be small potatoes. You'll be on an inside page. And as in reality, so on "reality TV." How long until the first TV death? How long until the second?

By the end of Orwell's great novel 1984, 1984, Winston Smith has been brainwashed. "He loved Big Brother." As, now, do we. Winston Smith has been brainwashed. "He loved Big Brother." As, now, do we.

JULY 2001: THE RELEASE OF THE BULGER KILLERS.

Like a character in a Greek tragedy, a woman-Denise Fergus is her momentarily famous name-figuratively holds up the dead body of her murdered child, James Bulger, and howls for justice. The murderers have been released from jail, and the mother finds that unjust. "No matter where they are," she cries, "someone will be waiting. No stone will be left unturned." Then, descending from such cla.s.sic blood-must-have-blood heights, and rather giving her game away, she adds, "For eight years I have kept my dignity. In the near future I will tell my side of the story." Let us hope that this doesn't mean that eye-for-an-eye calls for "justice" will soon be splashed all over a tabloid near you. Dignity doesn't rate the front page, after all. And if one or other of the released men is killed by vigilantes-or if innocent men, mistaken for the freed killers, are attacked by the same vigilantes-then so much the better for sales.

The case of the 1993 Merseyside murder of two-year-old James Bulger by the then ten-year-old Robert Thompson and Jon Venables raised big questions from the beginning. That the killers were themselves children, and that the killing was unusually brutal, made us ask ourselves about the nature of evil, a profound question inevitably rendered shallow by the media, for whom evil appeared to be some sort of videonasty manifestation of the "demon seed" variety. It was indeed suggested that Venables and Thompson had been influenced by a video nasty which, as it turned out, they hadn't seen. But it wasn't the killers who thought in the cliched stereotypes of horror fiction. It was the British press.

Because of the ugliness of the murder, lots of people clearly find it impossible to accept that Venables and Thompson could have been successfully rehabilitated. For many, their reported sorrow is just a devious ploy. In Evelyn Waugh's famous story "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing," a murderer who has been, for many years, the mildest, gentlest, sweetest-natured prisoner imaginable is finally paroled, and instantly kills again. This fear of re-offending is constantly voiced by opponents of Venables's and Thompson's release, and this is the spark of suspicion that British newspapers are trying so hard to fan into a fire.

Yet all the best-informed sources have been telling us that Venables and Thompson really have changed; that they are poster boys for the efficacy of rehabilitation. Mark Leech of the ex-offenders charity Unlock, for example, says that there is "no prospect that they will re-offend." So now we have to face this straightforward either/or decision. Either we believe that rehabilitation is possible, in which case we must accept the opinion of the experts that it has succeeded in these cases-or we reject that option, in which case, let's stop trying to rehabilitate people and decide that prison sentences should be society's revenge on criminals, who should be treated as lost causes and locked up for good in dreadful conditions. If people can't get better, if rotten eggs are rotten eggs and bad apples can't become good, then let's just throw them away.

The big questions just keep on coming. Repentance and forgiveness aren't as closely connected as people imagine. We sometimes forgive the unrepentant, and on other occasions condemn the genuinely remorseful. So even if the Bulger killers really are different now, even if the eighteen-year-olds who are to be released on life licenses have been utterly transformed, they can be allowed to live the rest of their lives in anonymous peace only if a separate process-call it the growth of fairness-in the hearts of those most injured by their crime and, beyond that, in society at large leads to their being forgiven.

It is because this is so complex and important a matter that the rabble-rousing behavior of much of the British press has seemed particularly disgusting, and the old accusations about it being out of control have seemed unusually apt. People, even lifetime free-speech stalwarts, have been saying that the behavior of the British tabloids makes the free-speech argument harder and harder to sustain-that a cherished democratic principle is being destruction-tested by yellow journalists. The feedback loop between events and their reporting is now so tight, so fast, that the media are major protagonists in the stories they report; and in this story they are working to subvert all civilized principles of justice and creating in their readers a lynch-mob mentality that may actually get people killed.

Something awful is happening here, some general degradation of public response caused by years of exposure to tabloid values. Spanish newspapers are reported to be prepared to pay big money for information about Venables's and Thompson's whereabouts-not because Spanish readers are particularly interested but because it's summer and Spain is full of Brits. The Internet, that brothel of irresponsibility, has already started providing this information, and more will no doubt flood out soon. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson can run but they probably can't hide, and in a Britain that's increasingly conducting itself like Dodge City or Tombstone at their wildest, these young men will be lucky not to end up in Boot Hill. We can only hope they don't, because on the run along with them is another idea of Britain, in which restraint is valued more highly than melodrama, compa.s.sion is better than revenge, and dignity is worth keeping for longer than eight years.

AUGUST 2001: ARUNDHATI ROY.

Nargis, the Indian movie queen of the 1950s, who later had a career in politics, once denounced the great film director Satyajit Ray for making films that offered too negative an image of India. In her own movies, she said, she had always celebrated the positive. When asked for an example, she replied, "Dams."

Big Dams (defined as those over fifteen meters-41 feet-high) have long been an essential part of India's technological iconography, and their role in providing water and power to the nation was for a time unquestioned, even unquestionable. Lately, however, there has been "an increasingly confrontational debate about the role that large dams have played in development," to quote the chairman of the World Commission on Dams (WCD), South Africa's education minister, Professor Kader Asmal.

One of the biggest new dams under construction is the Sardar Sarovar Project on the Narmada River in the state of Gujarat, with a proposed final height of 136.5 meters (375 feet). Among its most vocal opponents is the novelist Arundhati Roy. "Big dams," she says, "have let this country down." She objects to the displacement of more than 200,000 people by rising waters, to the damage to the Narmada Valley's fragile ecosystem, and points, tellingly, to the failure of many big dams to deliver what they promised. (India's Bargi Dam, for example, irrigates only 5 percent of the area promised.) She argues further that while the rural poor are the ones who pay the price for a dam, it is the urban rich who benefit: "80 percent of rural households [still] have no electricity, 250 million people have no access to safe drinking water."

The recent report of the WCD largely supports Roy's arguments. The WCD was set up by the World Bank and the World Conservation Union and based its report on surveys of 125 large dams. (Mysteriously, permission to visit the Sardar Sarovar Project was refused by the Gujarat state government.) The report blames big dams for increased flooding, damage to farmland, the extinction of freshwater fishes. It agrees that the benefits of dams go largely to the rich, that many dams fall short of their targets, and that of the forty to eighty million people displaced by worldwide dam building, few have received the compensation they deserve. Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners have long argued that alternative methods are capable of meeting Gujarat's water needs; the WCD report echoes this view, stressing the need to focus on renewable energy, recycling, better irrigation, and reducing water losses.

The battle over the Narmada Dam has been long and bitter. However, there has been a surreal new twist. Arundhati Roy and two leading members of the protest movement, Medha Patkar and Prashant Bhushan, have been accused by five lawyers of having viciously attacked them during a December 13, 2000, protest, outside the Supreme Court in Delhi, against the Court's decision to allow work on the Sardar Sarovar Project to proceed. Roy and Patkar allegedly called on the crowd to kill the lawyers, and Bhushan grabbed one by the hair and also allegedly threatened him with death.

All this somehow happened under the unconcerned noses of a large detachment of policemen. Curiously, the affray also pa.s.sed unrecorded by the filmmaker Sanjay Kak, who was covering the demonstration with a video camera. And it was later revealed that Mr. Bhushan had in fact been somewhere else entirely at the time.

In spite of the demonstrable absurdity of these charges, however, the Supreme Court decided to entertain the lawyers' pet.i.tion and served the three activists with criminal-contempt notices. In doing so it ignored its own stipulated rules and procedures. The lawyers' pet.i.tion was incorrectly filled out and did not receive, as it should have, the written support of the attorney general. Most important of all, the Supreme Court did not try to authenticate the claims in the pet.i.tion, even though video and eyewitness evidence was readily available.

Summoned to court, Arundhati Roy delivered a characteristically trenchant affidavit in which she said that the Court's willingness to haul her and her colleagues up before it on such flimsy charges "indicates a disquieting inclination on the part of the court to silence criticism and muzzle dissent, to hara.s.s and intimidate those who disagree with it." The Supreme Court insisted that she withdraw this affidavit; she refused, and the Court is now considering contempt-of-court charges that could send her to jail. She is, as she told a British journalist, "now deeper in the soup."

The Court should realize that by pursuing Arundhati Roy, Medha Patkar, and Prashant Bhushan in this fas.h.i.+on, it places itself before the court of world opinion. The U.S. Supreme Court has just disgraced itself internationally by carrying out the judicial coup that made George W. Bush "president." (Two authoritative new books, by Alan Dershowitz and Vincent Bugliosi, leave no doubt that the U.S. Supremes made a politically motivated judgment that already looks like very bad law.) Can it be that the Supreme Court of the "world's largest democracy" will emulate that of the world's most powerful country by revealing itself to be biased-in this case against free speech-and prepared to act as the "muscle" for a particular interest group-in this case the powerful coalition of political and financial interests behind the Narmada Dam?

Only by abandoning its pursuit of Arundhati Roy and the Narmada Valley campaigners can the Supreme Court escape this judgment. It should do so at once. *28 *28

SEPTEMBER 2001: TELLURIDE.

In the beginning were Butch Ca.s.sidy and the Sundance Kid, and the little town of Telluride, Colorado-originally To h.e.l.l You Ride, so named by the nineteenth-century silver miners who tobogganed down the mountains to what was then a wild place full of wh.o.r.ehouses-was the site of their first bank robbery. Then came the movie, and Robert Redford named his Sundance Inst.i.tute after his most famous role. The Sundance Film Festival became a celebrated showcase for new, independent filmmakers. Telluride itself became the USA's other most famous festival for independent cinema, playing the role, you could say, of Butch to Sundance's Sundance.

I'm writing this in Telluride's thin air, amid spectacular mountain scenery, at the end of the town's twenty-eighth such film festival (to declare an interest, I was this year's guest director). Over the past four days, a feast of good movies has been reminding crowds of pa.s.sionate moviegoers why they fell in love with the cinema in the days before the coming of the giant multiplexes and the domination of the first weekend's gross.

Anyone who's been going to the movies lately could be forgiven for thinking it might be more fun to stay home and stare at a wall. Planet of the Apes Planet of the Apes is, well, unkind to primates. A much-praised thriller, is, well, unkind to primates. A much-praised thriller, The Score, The Score, turns out to be a pedestrian, do-it-by-numbers heist movie. (The hackneyed figure of the old pro on his one last big job can also be seen in a somewhat better British film, turns out to be a pedestrian, do-it-by-numbers heist movie. (The hackneyed figure of the old pro on his one last big job can also be seen in a somewhat better British film, s.e.xy Beast. s.e.xy Beast.) The Julia RobertsCatherine Zeta-Jones "comedy," America's Sweethearts, America's Sweethearts, is a movie-biz in-joke that n.o.body got. is a movie-biz in-joke that n.o.body got. Blow Blow sucks. The one genuine movie thrill on offer of late has been Coppola's sucks. The one genuine movie thrill on offer of late has been Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux, Apocalypse Now Redux, and even this contains disappointments. The restored "French plantation sequence" is the biggest; it's too expository, not fabulist enough, for its place close to the heart of darkness. It's merely eccentric at a point in the film when insanity ought to rule. And Brando's performance as Kurtz hasn't improved with time (and a little re-editing). Still, given the high ambition of the filmmaking, and performances such as the great Robert Duvall's ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning"), and given, above all, the dross on offer elsewhere, it's easy to forgive its trespa.s.ses. and even this contains disappointments. The restored "French plantation sequence" is the biggest; it's too expository, not fabulist enough, for its place close to the heart of darkness. It's merely eccentric at a point in the film when insanity ought to rule. And Brando's performance as Kurtz hasn't improved with time (and a little re-editing). Still, given the high ambition of the filmmaking, and performances such as the great Robert Duvall's ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning"), and given, above all, the dross on offer elsewhere, it's easy to forgive its trespa.s.ses. Apocalypse Apocalypse is a Himalaya among anthills. is a Himalaya among anthills.

Listen to young filmmakers in L.A., and even the most talented of them will tell you that they have no choice, they have to bow down before the power of the marketplace and dilute their art to make their films commercially viable. There's an answer to this playing to packed houses in Telluride: the smash-hit French film Amelie, Amelie, the story of an isolated girl who has always lived in her imagination until one day she starts trying to impose her startling inner reality upon the external world. The film bursts with visual inventiveness and a gently surreal cinematic wit, and its huge European success stands as a reproach to all those filmmakers who find compromise an easier option than originality. the story of an isolated girl who has always lived in her imagination until one day she starts trying to impose her startling inner reality upon the external world. The film bursts with visual inventiveness and a gently surreal cinematic wit, and its huge European success stands as a reproach to all those filmmakers who find compromise an easier option than originality.

The daring and radicalism of the feature films being financed by the cable-television channel HBO, a selection of which has been a highlight of the Telluride festival, stand as a further reproach to the pusillanimity of so much big studio fare. (Look out in particular for Agnieszka Holland's Shot in the Heart, Shot in the Heart, an adaptation of Mikal Gilmore's brilliant book about his murderer brother Gary.) And some fine films from places not thought to be at the center of world cinema offer further proof that the center does not hold. I was particularly impressed by the style and grace of Danis Tanovic's first feature, an adaptation of Mikal Gilmore's brilliant book about his murderer brother Gary.) And some fine films from places not thought to be at the center of world cinema offer further proof that the center does not hold. I was particularly impressed by the style and grace of Danis Tanovic's first feature, No Man's Land, No Man's Land, in which wounded Bosnian and Serb soldiers, caught in a trench between opposing front lines, become a vision in microcosm of their vicious, absurdist war. It's as if Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon were bleeding in a trench, and when G.o.dot comes, he turns out to be wearing the impotent blue helmet of the UNPROFOR troops. ("Here come the Smurfs!" is the movie's funniest line.) It struck me that Hollywood would have insisted that the wounded soldiers should gradually befriend each other, their common humanity overcoming the craziness of their war; and one of the most tough-minded, as well as bitterly funny, virtues of Tanovic's movie is that he makes the opposite happen, leading to a b.l.o.o.d.y climax as blackly satirical as in which wounded Bosnian and Serb soldiers, caught in a trench between opposing front lines, become a vision in microcosm of their vicious, absurdist war. It's as if Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon were bleeding in a trench, and when G.o.dot comes, he turns out to be wearing the impotent blue helmet of the UNPROFOR troops. ("Here come the Smurfs!" is the movie's funniest line.) It struck me that Hollywood would have insisted that the wounded soldiers should gradually befriend each other, their common humanity overcoming the craziness of their war; and one of the most tough-minded, as well as bitterly funny, virtues of Tanovic's movie is that he makes the opposite happen, leading to a b.l.o.o.d.y climax as blackly satirical as Catch-22 Catch-22-so "feel-bad" an ending that no L.A. producer would have tolerated it.

In Telluride, this year, we screened Andrei Tarkovsky's great movie Solaris, Solaris, to honor a sci-fi masterpiece before the contemporary plague of remakes comes to obliterate it. This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible before it's transformed by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron into what they ludicrously threaten will be " to honor a sci-fi masterpiece before the contemporary plague of remakes comes to obliterate it. This exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious, this great examination of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love, needs to be seen as widely as possible before it's transformed by Steven Soderbergh and James Cameron into what they ludicrously threaten will be "2001 meets meets Last Tango in Paris. Last Tango in Paris." What, s.e.x in s.p.a.ce with floating b.u.t.ter? Tarkovsky must be turning in his grave.

Another success from the past was Satyajit Ray's enchanting film for children, The Golden Fortress, The Golden Fortress, a film whose lack of international recognition always distressed its great director. Perhaps its huge impact here will finally earn this neglected film a release. Today Telluride, tomorrow the world? a film whose lack of international recognition always distressed its great director. Perhaps its huge impact here will finally earn this neglected film a release. Today Telluride, tomorrow the world?

There are two kinds of film festivals: there are the mega-hyped, hoopla-infested selling circuses like Cannes and even Sundance; and there is Telluride, where no prizes are given, and where, if people have come to buy and sell, they keep pretty quiet about it. It is extraordinarily exciting, in this age of the triumph of capitalism, to discover an event dedicated not to commerce but to love. And if that sounds old-fas.h.i.+oned and starry-eyed, so be it. The cinema was always in the business of gazing at the stars.

A POSTSCRIPT.

To h.e.l.l You Ride, indeed. On September 11, 2001, just eight days after the end of the film festival, two terrorist-hijacked civilian aircraft brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. A third smashed into the Pentagon. In Pennsylvania a fourth plane crashed short of its target, thanks to the selfless heroism of its pa.s.sengers, who fought the terrorists and frustrated their designs. How idyllically innocent our Telluride days at once began to seem: as if we had been cast out of Eden, holding the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in our trembling hands.

OCTOBER 2001: THE ATTACKS ON AMERICA.

In January 2000's column I wrote that "the defining struggle of the new age would be between Terrorism and Security," and fretted that to live by the security experts' worst-case scenarios might be to surrender too many of our liberties to the invisible shadow-warriors of the secret world. Democracy requires visibility, I argued, and in the struggle between security and freedom we must always err on the side of freedom. On Tuesday, September 11, however, the worst-case scenario came true.

They broke our city. I'm among the newest of New Yorkers, but even people who have never set foot in Manhattan have felt her wounds deeply, because New York in our time is the beating heart of the visible world, tough-talking, spirit-dazzling, Walt Whitman's "city of orgies, walks and joys," his "proud and pa.s.sionate city-mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!" To this bright capital of the visible, the forces of invisibility have dealt a dreadful blow. No need to say how dreadful; we all saw it, are all changed by it, and must now ensure that the wound is not mortal, that the world of what is seen triumphs over what is cloaked, what is perceptible only through the effects of its awful deeds.

In making free societies safe-safer-from terrorism, our civil liberties will inevitably be compromised. *29 *29 But in return for freedom's partial erosion, we have a right to expect that our cities, water, planes, and children really will be better protected than they have been. The West's response to the September 11 attacks will be judged in large measure by whether people begin to feel safe once again in their homes, their workplaces, their daily lives. This is the confidence we have lost and must regain. But in return for freedom's partial erosion, we have a right to expect that our cities, water, planes, and children really will be better protected than they have been. The West's response to the September 11 attacks will be judged in large measure by whether people begin to feel safe once again in their homes, their workplaces, their daily lives. This is the confidence we have lost and must regain.

Next: the question of the counterattack. Yes, we must send our shadow-warriors against theirs, and hope that ours prevail. But this secret war alone cannot bring victory. We will also need a public, political, and diplomatic offensive whose aim must be the early resolution of some of the world's th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t problems: above all the battle between Israel and the Palestinian people for s.p.a.ce, dignity, recognition, and survival. Better judgment will be required on all sides in future. No more Sudanese aspirin factories to be bombed, please. And now that wise American heads appear to have understood that it would be wrong to bomb the impoverished, oppressed Afghan people in retaliation for their tyrannous masters' misdeeds, they might apply that wisdom, retrospectively, to what was done to the impoverished, oppressed people of Iraq. It's time to stop making enemies and start making friends.

To say this is in no way to join in the savaging of America by sections of the Left that has been among the most unpleasant consequences of the terrorists' attacks on the United States. "The problem with Americans is . . ." "What America needs to understand . . ." There has been a lot of sanctimonious moral relativism around lately, usually prefaced by such phrases as these. A country that has just suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in history, a country in a state of deep mourning and horrible grief, is being told, heartlessly, that it is to blame for its own citizens' deaths. ("Did we deserve this, sir?" a bewildered worker at "ground zero" asked a visiting British journalist recently. I find the grave courtesy of that "sir" quite astonis.h.i.+ng.) Let's be clear about why this bien-pensant anti-American onslaught is such appalling rubbish. Terrorism is the murder of the innocent; this time, it was ma.s.s murder. To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions. Furthermore, terrorism is not the pursuit of legitimate complaints by illegitimate means. The terrorist wraps himself in the world's grievances to cloak his true motives. Whatever the killers were trying to achieve, it seems improbable that building a better world was part of it.

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, h.o.m.os.e.xuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, s.e.x. These are tyrants, not Muslims. (Islam is tough on suicides, who are doomed to repeat their deaths through all eternity. However, there needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains. If the West needs to understand its Unabombers and McVeighs, Islam needs to face up to its bin Ladens.) United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no-brainer. Suicidist a.s.sa.s.sins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list-yes, even the short skirts and dancing-are worth dying for?

The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his worldview, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fas.h.i.+on, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

NOVEMBER 2001: NOT ABOUT ISLAM?.

This isn't about Islam." The world's leaders have been repeating this mantra for weeks, partly in the virtuous hope of deterring reprisal attacks on innocent Muslims living in the West, partly because if the United States is to maintain its coalition against terror it can't afford to allege that Islam and terrorism are in any way related.

The trouble with this necessary disclaimer is that it isn't true. If this isn't about Islam, why the worldwide Muslim demonstrations in support of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida? Why did those ten thousand men armed with swords and axes ma.s.s on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, answering some mullah's call to jihad? Why are the war's first British casualties three Muslim men who died fighting on the Taliban side?

Why the routine anti-Semitism of the much-repeated Islamic slander that "the Jews" arranged the hits on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, with the oddly self-deprecating explanation offered by the Taliban leaders.h.i.+p among others: that Muslims could not have the technological know-how or organizational sophistication to pull off such a feat? Why does Imran Khan, the Pakistani exsports star turned politician, demand to be shown the evidence of Al-Qaida's guilt while apparently turning a deaf ear to the self-incriminating statements of Al-Qaida's own spokesmen (there will be a rain of aircraft from the skies, Muslims in the West are warned not to live or work in tall buildings, et cetera)? Why all the talk about U.S. military infidels desecrating the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, if some sort of definition of what is sacred is not at the heart of the present discontents?

Let's start calling a spade a spade. Of course this is "about Islam." The question is, what exactly does that mean? After all, most religious belief isn't very theological. Most Muslims are not profound Quranic a.n.a.lysts. For a vast number of "believing" Muslim men, "Islam" stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of G.o.d-the fear more than the love, one suspects-but also for a cl.u.s.ter of customs, opinions, and prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of "their" women; the sermons delivered by their mullah of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, G.o.dlessness, and s.e.x; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over-"Westoxicated"-by the liberal Western-style way of life.

Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged, over the last thirty years or so, on growing radical political movements out of this mulch of "belief." These Islamists-we must get used to this word, "Islamists," meaning those who are engaged upon such political projects, and learn to distinguish it from the more general and politically neutral "Muslim"-include the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the FIS and GIA in Algeria, the s.h.i.+a revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia. This paranoid Islam, which blames outsiders, "infidels," for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest-growing version of Islam in the world.

This is not really to go along with Samuel Huntington's thesis about the "clash of civilizations," for the simple reason that the Islamists' project is turned not only against the West and "the Jews" but also against their fellow-Islamists. Whatever the public rhetoric, there's little love lost between the Taliban and Iranian regimes. Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep as, if not deeper than, those nations' resentment of the West. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to deny that this self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with widespread appeal.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing a novel about power struggles in a fictionalized Pakistan, it was already de rigueur in the Muslim world to blame all its troubles on the West and, in particular, the United States. Then as now, some of these criticisms were well-founded; no room here to rehea.r.s.e the geopolitics of the Cold War, and America's frequently damaging foreign policy "tilts," to use the Kissinger term, toward (or away from) this or that temporarily useful (or disapproved-of) nation-state, or America's role in the installation and deposition of sundry unsavory leaders and regimes. But I wanted then to ask a question which is no less important now: suppose we say that the ills of our societies are not primarily America's fault-that we are to blame for our own failings? How would we understand them then? Might we not, by accepting our own responsibility for our problems, begin to learn to solve them for ourselves?

It is interesting that many Muslims, as well as secularist a.n.a.lysts with roots in the Muslim world, are beginning to ask such questions now. In recent weeks Muslim voices have everywhere been raised against the obscurantist "hijack" of their religion. Yesterday's hotheads (among them Yusuf Islam, a.k.a. Cat Stevens) are improbably repackaging themselves as today's p.u.s.s.ycats. An Iraqi writer quotes an earlier Iraqi satirist: "The disease that is in us, is from us." A British Muslim writes that "Islam has become its own enemy." A Lebanese writer friend, returning from Beirut, tells me that, in the aftermath of September 11, public criticism of Islamism has become much more outspoken. Many commentators have spoken of the need for a Reformation in the Muslim world. I'm reminded of the way non-communist socialists used to distance themselves from the tyrannous "actually existing" socialism of the Soviets; nevertheless, the first stirrings of this counterproject are of great significance. If Islam is to be reconciled with modernity, these voices must be encouraged until they swell into a roar.

Many of them speak of another Islam, their personal, private faith, and the restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticization, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern. The only aspect of modernity in which the terrorists are interested is technology, which they see as a weapon that can be turned against its makers. If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which their countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.

FEBRUARY 2002: ANTI-AMERICANISM.

They told us it would be a long, ugly struggle, and so it is. America's war against terror has entered its second phase, a phase characterized by the storm over the condition, status, and human rights of the prisoners held at Camp X-Ray; by the frustrating failure of the United States to find Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar; and by growing opposition to the continued bombing in Afghanistan. Additionally, if America now attacks other countries suspected of harboring terrorists, it will almost certainly do so alone, without the backing of the coalition that supported the action in Afghanistan. The reason is that America finds itself facing an ideological enemy that may turn out to be harder to defeat than militant Islam: that is to say, anti-Americanism, which is presently taking the world by storm.

The good news is that these post-Taliban days are bad times for Islamist fanatics. Dead or alive, bin Laden and Omar look like yesterday's men, unholy warriors who forced martyrdom on others while running for the hills themselves. Also, if the persistent rumors are to be believed, the fall of the terrorist axis in Afghanistan may well have prevented an Islamist coup against Musharraf in Pakistan, led by the more Taliban-like elements in the armed forces and intelligence services-people like the terrifying General Hamid Gul. And President Musharraf, no angel himself, has been pushed into arresting the leaders of the Kashmiri terrorist groups he used to encourage. (It's just two and a quarter years since he unleashed the same groups against India and engineered the last Kashmir crisis.) Around the world, the lessons of the American action in Afghanistan are being learned. Jihad is no longer quite as cool an idea as it was last fall. States under suspicion of giving succor to terrorism have suddenly been trying to make nice, even going so far as to round up a few bad guys. Iran has accepted the legitimacy of the new Afghan government. Even Britain, a state that has been more tolerant of Islamist fanaticism than most, is beginning to see the difference between resisting "Islamophobia" and providing a safe haven for some of the worst people in the world.

America did, in Afghanistan, what had to be done, and did it well. The bad news, however, is that none of these successes have won friends for the United States. In fact, the effectiveness of the American campaign may paradoxically have made the world hate America more than it did before. Western critics of America's Afghan campaign are enraged because they have been shown to be not only spineless but wrong at every step: no, U.S. forces weren't humiliated the way the Russians had been; and yes, the air strikes did work; and no, the Northern Alliance didn't ma.s.sacre people in Kabul; and yes, the Taliban did crumble away like the hated tyrants they were, even in their southern strongholds; and no, it wasn't that difficult to get the militants out of their cave fortresses; and yes, the various factions succeeded in putting together a new government that is surprising people by functioning pretty well.

Meanwhile, those elements in the Arab and Muslim world who blame America for their own feelings of political impotence are feeling more impotent than ever. As always, anti-U.S. radicalism feeds off the widespread anger over the plight of the Palestinians, and it remains true that nothing would undermine the fanatics' propaganda more comprehensively than an acceptable settlement in the Middle East. However, even if that settlement were arrived at tomorrow, anti-Americanism would probably not abate. It has become too useful a smoke screen for Muslim nations' many defects-their corruption, their incompetence, their oppression of their own citizens, their economic, scientific, and cultural stagnation. America-hating has become a badge of ident.i.ty, making possible a chest-beating, flag-burning rhetoric of word and deed that makes men feel good. It contains a strong streak of hypocrisy, hating most what it desires most, and elements of self-loathing ("we hate America because it has made of itself what we cannot make of ourselves"). What America is accused of-closed-mindedness, stereotyping, ignorance-is also what its accusers would see if they looked into a mirror.

Anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population, as well as the news media. Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart and, oddly, far more personalized. Muslim countries don't like America's power, its "arrogance," its success; in the non-American West, the main objection seems to be to American people. people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted ("Americans care only about their own dead"). American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted ("Americans care only about their own dead"). American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues.

It would be easy for America, in the present climate of hostility, to fail to respond to constructive criticism. The treatment of the Camp X-Ray detainees is a case in point. Colin Powell's reported desire to grant these persons POW status and Geneva Convention rights was a statesmanlike response to global pressure; his apparent failure to persuade President Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld to accept his recommendations is a worrying sign. The Bush administration has come a long way from its treaty-canceling beginnings. It should not retreat from consensus-building now. Great power and great wealth are perhaps never popular. And yet, more than ever, we need the United States to exercise its power and economic might responsibly. This is not the time to ignore the rest of the world and decide to go it alone. To do so would be to risk losing after you've won.

MARCH 2002: G.o.d IN GUJARAT.

The defining image of the week is of a small child's burned and blackened arm, its tiny fingers curled into a fist, protruding from the remains of a human bonfire in Ahmadabad, Gujarat. The murder of children is something of an Indian specialty. The routine daily killings of unwanted girl babies, the ma.s.sacre of innocents in Nellie, a.s.sam, in the 1980s, and of Sikh children in Delhi during the horrifying reprisal murders that followed Mrs. Gandhi's a.s.sa.s.sination bear witness to our particular gift, always most dazzlingly in evidence at times of religious unrest, for dousing our children in kerosene and setting them alight, or cutting their throats, or smothering them, or just clubbing them to death with a good strong length of wood. I say "our" because I write as an Indian man born and bred, who loves India deeply and knows that what one of us does today, any of us is potentially capable of doing tomorrow. If I take pride in India's strengths, then India's sins must be mine as well.

Do I sound angry? Good. Ashamed and disgusted? I certainly hope so. Because, as India undergoes its worst bout of Hindu-Muslim bloodletting in over a decade, many people have not been sounding anything like angry, ashamed, or disgusted enough. Police chiefs have been excusing their men's unwillingness to defend the citizens of India without regard to religion, by saying that these men have feelings too, and are subject to the same sentiments as the nation in general.

Meanwhile, India's political masters have been tut-tutting and offering the usual soothing lies about the situation being brought under control. (It has escaped n.o.body's notice that the ruling BJP-the Bharatiya Janata Party or Indian People's Party-and the Hindu extremists of the VHP-the Vishwa Hindu Parishad or World Hindu Council-are sister organizations, offshoots of the same parent body.) Even some international commentators, like Britain's Independent Independent newspaper, urge us to "beware excess pessimism." The horrible truth about communal slaughter in India is that we're used to it. It happens every so often; then it dies down. That's how life is, folks. Most of the time, India is the world's largest secular democracy; and if, once in a while, it lets off a little crazy-religious steam, we mustn't let that distort the picture. newspaper, urge us to "beware excess pessimism." The horrible truth about communal slaughter in India is that we're used to it. It happens every so often; then it dies down. That's how life is, folks. Most of the time, India is the world's largest secular democracy; and if, once in a while, it lets off a little crazy-religious steam, we mustn't let that distort the picture.

Of course there are political explanations. Ever since December 1992, when a VHP mob demolished a four-hundred-year-old Muslim mosque, the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which they claim was built on the sacred birthplace of the G.o.d Ram, Hindu fanatics have been looking for this fight. The pity of it is that some Muslims were ready to give it to them. The murderous attack on the trainload of VHP activists at G.o.dhra (with its awful, atavistic echoes of the killings of Hindus and Muslims by the trainload during the Part.i.tion riots of 1947) played right into the Hindu extremists' hands.

The VHP has evidently tired of what it sees as the equivocations and insufficient radicalism of the BJP government. Prime Minister Vajpayee is more moderate than his party; he also heads a coalition government, and has been obliged to abandon much of the BJP's more extreme Hindu-nationalist rhetoric to hold the coalition together. But it isn't working anymore. In state elections across the country, the BJP is being trounced. This may have been the last straw for the VHP firebrands. Why put up with the government's betrayal of their fascistic agenda when that betrayal doesn't even result in electoral success?

The electoral failure of the BJP (used by the let's-not-get-carried-away gang to show that India is turning away from communalist politics) is thus, in all probability, the spark that lit the fire. The VHP is determined to build a Hindu temple on the site of the demolished Ayodhya mosque-that's where the G.o.dhra dead were coming from-and there are, reprehensibly, idiotically, tragically, Muslims in India equally determined to resist them. Vajpayee has insisted that the notoriously slow Indian courts must decide the rights and wrongs of the Ayodhya issue. The VHP is no longer prepared to wait.

The distinguished Indian writer Mahasveta Devi, in a letter to the Indian president, K. R. Narayanan, blames the Gujarat government (led by a BJP hard-liner) as well as the central government for doing "too little too late," and pins the blame firmly on the "motivated, well-planned out and provocative actions" of the Hindu nationalists. However, another writer, the n.o.bel laureate V. S. Naipaul, speaking in India just a week before the violence erupted, denounced India's Muslims en ma.s.se and praised the nationalist movement. The murderers of G.o.dhra must indeed be denounced, and Mahasveta Devi in her letter demands "stern legal action" against them. But the VHP and its other related organization, the equally sinister RSS (Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh, or a.s.sociation of National Volunteers, from which both the BJP and the VHP take inspiration), are determined to destroy that secular democracy in which India takes such public pride and which it does so little to protect; and by supporting them, V. S. Naipaul makes himself a fellow-traveler of fascism and disgraces the n.o.bel award.

The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But there's something beneath it, something we don't want to look in the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fas.h.i.+onable language of "respect." What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of affect that results makes it easier to do it again.

So India's problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in India, happened in G.o.d's name. The problem's name is G.o.d.

PART IV.

Step Across This Line The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale, 2002

Part One

The first frontier was the water's edge, and there was a first moment, because how could there not have been such a moment, when a living thing came up from the ocean, crossed that boundary, and found that it could breathe. Before that first creature drew that first breath there would have been other moments when other creatures made the same attempt and fell fainting back into the waves, or else suffocated, flopping fis.h.i.+ly from side to side, on the same seash.o.r.e and another, and another. There were perhaps millions of these unrecorded retreats, these anonymous deaths, before the first successful step across the waterline. As we imagine the scene of that triumphant crossing-our volcanic young planet, the smoky, sulfurous air, the hot sea, the red glow in the sky, the exhausted ent.i.ty gasping on the unfamiliar, inhospitable sh.o.r.e-we can't help wondering about those proto-creatures. What motivated them? Why did the sea so thoroughly lose its appeal that they risked everything to migrate from the old into the new? What urge was born in them that overpowered even the survival instinct? How did they intuit that air could be breathed-and how, living underwater as they did, could they begin to grow the lungs that allowed them to breathe it?

But our extremely pre-human ancestors did not have "motives" in the sense that we understand the term, the scientist in the room protests. The sea neither appealed to them, nor did it disappoint. They had no intuitions, but were driven by the imperatives hidden in their uncracked genetic codes. There was no daring here, no heroism, no adventurous, transgressive spirit. These beach-crawlers did not travel from water to air because they were curious, or in search of jobs. They neither chose nor willed their deeds. Random mutation and natural selection were their mighty, impersonal driving forces. They were just fish who by chance learned how to crawl.

But so, in a way, are we. Our own births mirror that first crossing of the frontier between the elements. As we emerge from amniotic fluid, from the liquid universe of the womb, we, too, discover that we can breathe; we, too, leave behind a kind of waterworld to become denizens of earth and air. Unsurprisingly, then, imagination defies science and sees that first, ancient, successful half-and-halfer as our spiritual ancestor, ascribing to that strange metamorph the will to change its world. In its victorious transition we recognize and celebrate the prototype of our own literal, moral, and metaphorical frontier crossings, applauding the same drive that made Columbus's s.h.i.+ps head for the edge of the world, or the pioneers take to their covered wagons. The image of Armstrong taking his first moonwalk echoes the first movements of life on earth. In our deepest natures, we are frontier-crossing beings. We know this by the stories we tell ourselves; for we are storytelling animals, too. There is a story about a mermaid, a half-and-half creature, who gave up her fishy half for the love of a man. Was that it, then, we allow ourselves to wonder. Was that the primal urge? Did we come questing out of the waters for love?

Once upon a time the birds held a conference. The great bird-G.o.d, the Simurgh, had sent a messenger, a hoopoe, to summon them to his legendary home far away atop the circular mountain of Qaf, which girdled the earth. The birds weren't particularly keen on the idea of this dangerous-sounding quest. They tried to make excuses-a previous engagement, urgent business elsewhere. Just thirty birds embarked on the pilgrimage. Leaving home, crossing the frontier of their land, stepping across that line, was in this story a religious act, their adventure a divine requirement rather than a response to an ornithological need. Love drove these birds as it drove the mermaid, but it was the love of G.o.d. On the road there were obstacles to overcome, dreadful mountains, fearsome chasms, allegories and challenges. In all quests the voyager is confronted by terrifying guardians of territory, an ogre here, a dragon there. So far and no farther, the guardian commands. But the voyager must refuse the other's definition of the boundary, must transgress against the limits of what fear prescribes. He steps across that line. The defeat of the ogre is an opening in the self, an increase in what it is possible for the voyager to be.

So it was with the thirty birds. At the end of the story, after all their vicissitudes and overcomings, they reached the summit of the mountain of Qaf, and discovered that they were alone. The Simurgh wasn't there. After all they had endured, this was a displeasing discovery. They made their feelings known to the hoopoe who had started the whole thing off, whereupon the hoopoe explained to them the punning etymology that revealed their journey's secret meaning. The name of the G.o.d broke down into two parts: "si," meaning "thirty," and "murgh," which is to say "birds." By crossing those frontiers, conquering those terrors and reaching their goal, they themselves were now what they were looking for. They had become the G.o.d they sought.

Once upon a time-"a long time ago," perhaps, "in a galaxy far, far away"-there was an advanced civilization, free, liberal, individualistic, on a planet whose ice caps began to grow. All the civilization in the world could not halt the march of the ice. The citizens of that ideal state built a mighty wall, which would resist the glaciers for a time but not forever. The time came when the ice, uncaring, implacable, stepped across their lines and crushed them. Their last act was to choose a group of men and women to travel across the ice sheet to the far side of the planet, to bring news of their civilization's death, and to preserve, in some small way, the meaning of what that civilization had been: to be its representatives. On their difficult journey across the ice cap, the group learned that, in order to survive, they would need to change. Their several individualisms had to be merged into a collectivity, and it was this collective ent.i.ty-the Representative-that made it to the far side of the planet. What it represented, however, was not what it had set out to represent. The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross.

The first of these stories is medieval: the "Conference of the Birds" by the Sufi Muslim poet Fariduddin Attar. The second is an account of Doris Lessing's science-fiction novel The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, itself inspired by the doomed journey toward the South Pole of Scott of the Antarctic and his companions-but also by Lessing's own long-standing interest in Sufi mysticism. The idea of overcoming, of breaking down the boundaries that hold us in and surpa.s.sing the limits of our own natures, is central to all the stories of the quest. The Grail is a chimera. The quest for the Grail is the Grail. Or, as C. P. Cavafy suggests in his poem "Ithaka," the point of an Odyssey is the Odyssey: itself inspired by the doomed journey toward the South Pole of Scott of the Antarctic and his companions-but also by Lessing's own long-standing interest in Sufi mysticism. The idea of overcoming, of breaking down the boundaries that hold us in and surpa.s.sing the limits of our own natures, is central to all the stories of the quest. The Grail is a chimera. The quest for the Grail is the Grail. Or, as C. P. Cavafy suggests in his poem "Ithaka," the point of an Odyssey is the Odyssey: Setting out on the voyage to IthakaYou must pray that the way be long,Full of adventures and experiences.. . .Be quite old when you anchor at the island,Rich with all you have gained on the way,Not expecting Ithaka to give you riches.Ithaka has given you your lovely journey.Without Ithaka you would not have set out.Ithaka has no more to give you now.Poor though you find it, Ithaka has not cheated you.Wise as you have become, with all your experience,You will have understood the meaning of an Ithaka. *30 *30 The frontier is an elusive line, visible and invisible, physical and metaphorical, amoral and moral. The wizard Merlin is responsible for the education of a boy called Arthur, who will one day draw a sword from a stone and become king of England. (The wizard, who is living backward through time, knows this, although the boy does not.) One day Merlin changes the boy into a bird, and as they fly over the countryside he asks Arthur what he sees. Arthur notices the usual things, but Merlin is talking about a thing that can't be seen, asking Arthur to see an absence: From the air, there are no frontiers. From the air, there are no frontiers. *31 *31 Later, when Arthur has possessed Excalibur and his kingdom, he will learn that wizards are not always wise, and the view from the air isn't much use on earth. He will fight his share of frontier wars, and he will also find that there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind. Later, when Arthur has possessed Excalibur and his kingdom, he will learn that wizards are not always wise, and the view from the air isn't much use on earth. He will fight his share of frontier wars, and he will also find that there are frontiers which, being invisible, are more dangerous to cross than the physical kind.

When the king's best friend, the king's champion, falls in love with the king's wife, when Lancelot of the Lake trespa.s.ses on the territory of the king's happiness, a line has been crossed that will destroy the world. In fact the collection of tales known as the Matter of Britain Matter of Britain have, at their heart, not one but two illicit, transgressive loves: that of Lancelot for Guinevere, and its occult mirror-image, the incestuous love of Arthur and Morgan le Fay. Against the power of these line-crossing lovers, the Round Table cannot stand. The quest for the Grail cannot cleanse the world. Not even Excalibur can prevent the return of darkness. And in the end the sword must be returned to water, and vanish beneath the waves. But wounded Arthur on his way to Avalon is crossing yet another line. He's being transformed, becoming one of the great sleepers who will return when the right moment comes. Barbarossa in his cave, Finn MacCool in the Irish hills, the Australian have, at their heart, not one but two illicit, transgressive loves: that of Lancelot for Guinevere, and its occult mirror-image, the incestuous love of Arthur and Morgan le Fay. Against the power of these line-crossing lovers, the Round Table cannot stand. The quest for the Grail cannot cleanse the world. Not even Excalibur can prevent the return of darkness. And in the end the sword must be returned to water, and vanish beneath the waves. But wounded Arthur on his way to Avalon is crossing yet another line. He's being transformed, becoming one of the great sleepers who will return when the right moment comes. Barbarossa in his cave, Finn MacCool in the Irish hills, the Australian wandjina wandjina or ancestors in their subterranean resting places, and Arthur in Avalon: these are our once and future kings, and the final frontier they are fated to cross is not s.p.a.ce but time. or ancestors in their subterranean resting places, and Arthur in Avalon: these are our once and future kings, and the final frontier they are fated to cross is not s.p.a.ce but time.

To cross a frontier is to be transformed. Alice at the gates of Wonderland, the key to that miniature world in her grasp, cannot pa.s.s through the tiny door beyond which she can glimpse marvelous things until she has altered herself to fit into her new world. But the successful frontierswoman is also, inevitably, in the business of surpa.s.sing. She changes the rules of her newfound land: Alice in Wonderland, shape-s.h.i.+fting Alice, terrifies the locals by growing too big to be housed. She argues with Mad Hatters and talks back to Caterpillars and, in the end, loses her fear of an execution-hungry Queen when she, so to speak, grows up. You're nothing but a house of cards You're nothing but a house of cards-Alice the migrant at last sees through the charade of power, is no longer impressed, calls Wonderland's bluff, and by unmaking it finds herself again. She wakes up.

The frontier is a wake-up call. At the frontier we can't avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world's harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier's windowless halls, we see things as they are. The frontier is the physical proof of the human race's divided self, the proof that Merlin's utopian sky-vision is a lie. Here is the truth: this line, at which we must stand until we are allowed to walk across and give our papers to be examined by an officer who is ent.i.tled to ask us more or less anything. At the frontier our liberty is stripped away-we hope temporarily-and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people and things come in, where only the right things and people must go in and out. Here, at the edge, we submit to scrutiny, to inspection, to judgment. These people, guarding these lines, must tell us who we are. We must be pa.s.sive, docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect, and at the frontier to come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes. We stand at what Graham Greene thought of as the dangerous edge of things. This is where we must present ourselves as simple, as obvious: I am coming home. I am on a business trip. I am visiting my girlfriend. In each case, what we mean when we reduce ourselves to these simple statements is, I'm not anything you need to bother about, really I'm not: not the fellow who voted against the government, not the woman who is looking forward to smoking a little dope with her friends tonight, not the person you fear, whose shoe may be about to explode. I am one-dimensional. Truly. I am simple. Let me pa.s.s.

Across the frontier the world's secret truths move unhindered every day. Inspectors doze or pocket dirty money, and the world's narcotics and armaments, its dangerous ideas, all the contrabandits of the age, the wanted ones, those who do have something to declare but do not declare it, slip by; while we, who have nothing much to declare, dress ourselves in nervous declarations of simplicity, openness, loyalty. The declarations of the innocent fill the air, while the others, who are not innocent, pa.s.s through the crowded, imperfect borders, or make their crossings where frontiers are hard to police, along deep ravines, down smugglers' trails, across undefended wastelands, waging their undeclared war. The wake-up call of the frontier is also a call to arms.

This is how we are thinking now, because these are fearful days. There is a photograph by Sebastio Salgado that shows the wall between the United States and Mexico snaking over the crests of hills, running away into the distance, as far as the eye can see, part Great Wall of China, part gulag. There is a kind of brutal beauty here, the beauty of starkness. At intervals along the wall there are watchtowers, and these so-called sky-towers are manned by armed men. In the photograph we can see the tiny, silhouetted figure of a running man, an illegal immigrant, being chased by other men in cars. The strange thing about the picture is that, although the running man is clearly on the American side, he is running toward the wall, not away from it. He has been spotted, and is more afraid of the men bearing down on him in cars than of the impoverished life he thought he had left behind. He's trying to get back, to unmake his bid for freedom. So freedom is now to be defended against those too poor to deserve its benefits by the edifices and procedures of totalitarianism. What kind of freedom is it, then, that we enjoy in the countries of the West-these exclusive, increasingly well-guarded enclaves of ours? That is the question the photograph asks, and before September 11, 2001, many of us-many more, I suspect, than today-would have been on the running man's side.

Even before the recent atrocities, however, the citizens of Douglas, Arizona, were happy to protect America from what they called "invaders." In October 2000 the British journalist Duncan Campbell met Roger Barnett, who runs a towing and propane business near Douglas but also organizes wetback hunting parties. *32 *32 Tourists can sign up for a weekend hunting human beings. "Stop the invasion," the billboards in Douglas say. According to Campbell, Barnett is a legendary character in these parts. He thinks it would be a "h.e.l.l of an idea" for the United States to invade Mexico in return. "There's a lot of mines and great beaches there, there's farming and resources. Think of what the United States could do there-gee whiz, they wouldn't have to come up here anymore." Tourists can sign up for a weekend hunting human beings. "Stop the invasion," the billboards in Douglas say. According to Campbell, Barnett is a legendary character in these parts. He thinks it would be a "h.e.l.l of an idea" for the United States to invade Mexico in return. "There's a lot of mines and great beaches there, there's farming and resources. Think of what the United States could do there-gee whiz, they wouldn't have to come up here anymore."

Another citizen