Boredom and Terrorism
I've been thinking about boredom and terrorism - the way that terrorist acts both prey on and disrupt the everyday. This thinking leads to a construction of the everyday as something near sacred. It's the basic system we depend on when we open our eyes in the morning. We rely on things like water coming out of the tap and lights coming on when we flip on a switch. We trust in this standard of the ordinary - we come to expect its consistency - to the point which we take it for granted. This waking sleep became the perfect opportunity for a handful of men with destruction on their mind.
William Langewiesche, a journalist who has written extensively for the Atlantic Monthly, penned a three part piece on 9/11. The first opens with:
The dread that Americans felt during the weeks following the September 11 attacks stemmed less from the fear of death than from a collective loss of control - a sense of being dragged headlong into an apocalyptic future for which society seemed unprepared.
He goes on to describe what it was like the morning of September 11th at an air traffic control center in Massachusetts:
The routine held at Boston Center for eleven long minutes after the hijacking began. The weather was known to be bright, smooth, and dear. Air traffic was light. For the controller who had lost radio contact with American 11 there really wasn't much to do. The airplane tracked steadily westward across the radar screen. The controller assumed that its continuing silence amounted to a simple communication failure - a relatively common occurrence - and he tried to re-establish radio contact, but without undue concern.
As Susan said the other night that terrorism feeds on the everyday - "the little times [or things] you don't think are anything" as Warhol puts it. The 9/11 attacks went off nearly without a hitch because because the group of terrorists snuck in through the back door of the everyday. Muhammad Atta's routine airport check-in that Martin Amis describes is tellingly boring, "Oh, the misery of recurrence, like the hotel elevator doing its ancient curtsy on every floor, like the alien hair on the soap changing its shape through a succession alphabets, like the (necessary) monotonous gonging inside his head" (Courseware 239).
We become immune to these "alien" things once they become repetitive. Our instincts are dulled by monotony and we become passive participants dependant on the consistency of everydayness.
Langewiesche, William. AMERICAN GROUND: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. Atlantic Monthly, Sep2002, Vol. 290 Issue 2, p46, 28p
William Langewiesche, a journalist who has written extensively for the Atlantic Monthly, penned a three part piece on 9/11. The first opens with:
The dread that Americans felt during the weeks following the September 11 attacks stemmed less from the fear of death than from a collective loss of control - a sense of being dragged headlong into an apocalyptic future for which society seemed unprepared.
He goes on to describe what it was like the morning of September 11th at an air traffic control center in Massachusetts:
The routine held at Boston Center for eleven long minutes after the hijacking began. The weather was known to be bright, smooth, and dear. Air traffic was light. For the controller who had lost radio contact with American 11 there really wasn't much to do. The airplane tracked steadily westward across the radar screen. The controller assumed that its continuing silence amounted to a simple communication failure - a relatively common occurrence - and he tried to re-establish radio contact, but without undue concern.
As Susan said the other night that terrorism feeds on the everyday - "the little times [or things] you don't think are anything" as Warhol puts it. The 9/11 attacks went off nearly without a hitch because because the group of terrorists snuck in through the back door of the everyday. Muhammad Atta's routine airport check-in that Martin Amis describes is tellingly boring, "Oh, the misery of recurrence, like the hotel elevator doing its ancient curtsy on every floor, like the alien hair on the soap changing its shape through a succession alphabets, like the (necessary) monotonous gonging inside his head" (Courseware 239).
We become immune to these "alien" things once they become repetitive. Our instincts are dulled by monotony and we become passive participants dependant on the consistency of everydayness.
Langewiesche, William. AMERICAN GROUND: Unbuilding the World Trade Center. Atlantic Monthly, Sep2002, Vol. 290 Issue 2, p46, 28p
posted by pigeon at 9:36 PM
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