© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 130
This is the first column of 2007. Happy New Year. I hope it is different from the last year. There’s nothing quite as depressing as endless rehashes of the same theme. But somehow I doubt it.
An early night a few days ago found me amongst the pages of the late Hunter S. Thompson. One of the items of interest was an admission in an interview that he was far less drug-raddled than most people believed. No surprise there. You have to have your head together to wield words that cut like a scalpel.
The second item, of somewhat more interest, was a piece of writing from September 11 and 12, 2001. There wasn’t much prescience involved. Everything that followed was depressingly predictable. The difference was that Hunter S. Thompson put his mind to use and had the courage to write his thoughts down, and publish.
Perhaps he got away with that particular piece of writing due to his status as Dr Gonzo. But more likely, it had something to do with recognition of the truth on the part of his readers, albeit without the rapturous acclaim that greeted much of his other, more ebullient writing. Hunter S. Thompson did not name an enemy. He named an impending state of mind: the austerity and paranoia of a time of war.
The Berlin Wall came down in the last few days of the Eighties, at about the same time as the Iron Curtain was parting. The Nineties were optimistic. ‘No commies. No problem.’ But it was short lived, and the rumbling began again, first slightly subdued, later with increasing stridency.
For a while, my money for the next big war was on the Chinese. If you take the approach that enemies need to be clearly defined and easy to divide into camps, China made sense on a global scale, albeit with a lot of paranoia on my side. After all, war with a nation that has the potential to repopulate a standing army that well is not a pretty picture. Perhaps, precisely for that reason, China was never a serious contender.
Then along came the radical elements of fundamentalist Islam, a curve ball from some strange corner of the outfield, at least in my reality. First there was Beirut, then there was the barrack bombing and then World Trade Centre 1: the Garage. After that, it all stepped up.
I know what moves the Christian right: fear, paranoia, hatred and a deep-seated insecurity about the love of God. After all, it’s hard to know if you are right, when God does not smite those who are so different it’s hard to call them ‘neighbour’. Under these circumstances, food on a plate gets prodded to see if it moves, and the basic precepts of Christianity – a non-judgmental approach, mutual respect and tolerance – go straight out the window along with a significant number of ‘thou-shall-nots’.
I cannot put myself in the shoes of Islam. My knowledge of the religion consists of scattered gleanings and a few short, aborted forays into the difficult pages of the Koran. But there must be something amongst the broader group of people who practice the religion that approximates the Christian right.
One of my least favourite clichés reads ‘you are defined by your enemies’. No doubt this works well for both sides of the religious equation. ‘Islam is our enemy, so we must be Christian’. And vice versa. If you accept that the mutual hatred is driven by insecurity of belief on both sides, then this new war will have a very, very long duration.
As it all boils down to internal insecurity on the part of the individual, at its very root the combatants are fighting themselves, so even a defeat of one of the sides will not be a victory on the other side. It’s a war in which the very last man standing will be crippled by self-doubt and the desperate need to concoct new enemies.
For now, there is comfort in the status quo. As long as the battle is viable, man is proving his love of God with a willingness to fight a war and lay down his life.
So in a very demented way, as 2007 begins, all is well in the world. We have our insecurity. We have our anger. We have our enemies.
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