Social Matter

My wife and I took a vacation a few weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings back in 2013. On the flight home to Tennessee, I sat across the aisle from a younger fellow wearing a Boston Strong t-shirt. He was mostly unremarkable—skinny, mop of hair, maybe twenty five and travelling with a artfully distressed leather messenger bag—but I had occasion during the flight to contemplate that shirt at length whenever I wasn’t trying to figure out how a guy my height is supposed to fit into an airplane seat. The lack of leg room might have been coloring my perceptions of him, though, because neither he nor his shirt made a particularly favorable impression on me. I remember wondering if someone somewhere was already making a buck off of Boston Strong merchandise. Could they sleep at night if they were? I remember wondering what would possess someone to run twenty-six miles at a stretch. I’ve always hated jogging.

As we were stepping off the plane, that young man was in front of me and the pilot noticed his shirt. The pilot left off his farewells for a second to ask him if he had been at the marathon that year. The kid replied somewhat solemnly that he hadn’t. Then he added, “But I will be next year.” Suddenly I was thinking dark thoughts again.

Of course you’ll be there next year. Everyone who’s anyone will be there next year and they’ll be posting selfies to Facebook the whole damn time. You couldn’t imagine a safer venue on the entire face of the earth than the 2014 Boston Marathon. Even if some jihadist decided to strike the same place twice, it wouldn’t matter. The whole apparatus of America’s intelligence and homeland security agencies would be fixed on that event and ready to spring into action. They’d be analyzing wiretapped communications months in advance. They’d be monitoring nearby cellphone conversations. They’d be staking out perimeters and checking bags and “maintaining a presence” and walking their bomb dogs over to every suspicious package or suspiciously parked car near the route.

But you could still feel Boston Strong™ for showing up. Despite all of the security. Despite that exquisitely safe and supervised environment, you could still get credit for “carrying on” in the face of the terrorists’ attempts to attack “our way of life.” You’d get moral brownie points just for being there. That’s how you win the war on terror, after all, you just maintain the status quo. And so you could attend the marathon with the same seriousness and sense of purpose that in previous times might have been reserved for genuine acts of resistance.

I never flew prior to 9/11. (I’ve only flown a few times after it. You might have gathered that I don’t particularly enjoy it.) But I can recall the media messaging after the Twin Towers attacks. Our politicians and the television talking heads stressed repeatedly that throttling back on air travel would be “letting the terrorists win.” And so I guess we didn’t give up on air travel for the most part. But we did certainly change our lifestyles, whether we admitted it or not. We did acquiesce to gross violations of our privacy and persons by the TSA in order to punch those tickets that we had purchased in defiance of Bin Laden. We acquiesced to the groping of our children and our grandmothers, to bodyscans, to stripsearches, the whole nine yards. And nowadays Americans are routinely subjected to Kafkaesque nightmares in our airports whenever some minor functionary at the X-ray machine t takes issue with them—on grounds real or imagined. Some of us still fly, though, so the terrorists haven’t won.

This is a pattern with us Americans (and, if #illridewithyou or the Paris marches are any indication, with Westerners as a whole). A recent pattern as far as I can tell. A terrorist murders some of our fellow citizens in our own streets, and in response we do two things: 1) conduct increasingly mawkish memorial services and 2) cede more authority to the state to police and surveil and interfere with our comings and goings in the name of security. We sloganeer; we posture; and we assure the world that we won’t allow hatred and violence to change us, even as mundane activities like traveling by plane or attending an annual race take on police details and military-style checkpoints and atmospheres that would have been alien to the typical American even a few short decades ago.

Part of the problem, of course, I alluded to earlier. We conceive of terrorism in unrealistic terms. We say that “radical Islam” hates us for our freedoms or our tolerant and open society or the liberties we afford our women. Like they’re bulls who can’t resist charging at the sight of red. It’s an infantile conception, and it leads to infantile responses like singing Lennon’s Imagine in the streets of Paris. Truly Care-Bear-inspired geopolitics, but understandable I suppose if you really think that to beat terrorism all you have to do is carry on exactly as you were before they declared war on you. (And also tolerate a surveillance state.)

In reality, though, they hate us for all sorts of concrete reasons that even a non-expert like yours truly can ascertain. They hate us for our economic and political meddling in the Middle East. They hate us for our military interventionism. They hate us for our non-military interventionism, like Arab Spring. They hate us for our support of Israel. They hate us for drone strikes. Ironically it’s the one’s we’ve actively imported who probably come closest to hating us for our lifestyles, face to face as they are with an ugly culture of consumption and empty hedonism. But even they aren’t going to be converted on account of our bravery in wearing feelgood slogans and hosting well-policed marathons despite all that unpleasantness the last time. That sort of theater seems significant only to the most sentimental of eyes, the kind of eyes through which we refuse to stop viewing our war with Islam and its jihadists.

We could take steps to address the actual sources of this conflict. We could work to get out of their countries and to get them out of ours. Or we could continue to dutifully attend our candlelight vigils and dutifully submit to the cavity searches that ensure we’ll be safe from explosions while we do so.