We can guarantee you that not a single armoured division will get done over for fifteen bob a week

What's terrorism really but one action promising another action of a similar or larger size if the demands of the perpetrators aren't met, right? It's your basic extortion scheme, not really bound by the size of the initial crime. Planes flying into buildings was bad enough, but the next one would probably be nuclear. Pearl Harbor garnered a response commensurate to a threat to our entire civilization. Whether or not any of the subsequent action ended up being justifiable or appropriate is usually left to hindsight and often debatable, but the point is, mentally, those of us who absorb the shock and casualties of the initial attack are left to make decisions about our futures in a state of rage, grief and fear, none of which should be included in any option-tracking flowchart. The results, when they are ever correct, are often so by accident, seeing as they're arrived at with three emotional states least conducive to measured action. If you're not sure what I mean, ask anyone you might know who got a post-divorce tattoo. See if they still think it was an awesome idea. Same concept.

I get the motivation for modern terrorism, though, because it seems like a no-lose situation. Well, provided the people involved don't see the prospect of getting killed as too much of a negative. Take this week's massacre at the Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine in Paris. Not a lot of immediate risk or downside to walking into an office of unarmed people and shooting them, so long as you've gotten yourself to the point where the killing part seems OK and doable, but more on that in a second. And maybe you (dear reader) are thinking "but you're just going to make things worse for Muslims in western countries," which is already true, but if your (the terrorist's) narrative is about the clash of civilizations anyway, anything that makes Islam and the Eurocentric cultures of the west seem incompatible, that's only going to keep recruiting steady. The tricky bits have to do with the deaths--the targets' and the perpetrators' eventually, most likely--involved, but aha, look how neatly your fucked-up reading of religion provides for both those things! The very sensitive feelings of your god-friend are way more important than the physical wellbeing of boring flesh-men, so that part's OK. And if you happen to get killed afterward in a hail of bullets along with the people shielding you and, traditionally probably, also a random child or three, well, there's always paradise with the 72 virgins.

Just a question though: if you get 72 virgins in heaven, do you then get to fuck the virgins? It's pretty heavily implied, right? It's not just me, that's the idea, yes? OK, so after you bang away at the virgins, they're no longer virgins, unless there's some kind of version of paradise in Islam that includes spontaneous hymen regeneration. I haven't read the Quran, so I don't know. The point is, if that's not the case, you're either not fucking the virgins, in which case they stay virgins and you're just hanging out in the eternal Friend Zone with these bunch of ladies you know or it's only a matter of time before you fuck all of the virgins and there are no virgins left and... then what? Do they swap in fresh virgins to keep topping up your number to 72? Or are you now living in the same space for all of the rest of forever with essentially one chick and 71 ex-girlfriends? And without the promise of the release of sweet death anywhere in sight? Somebody didn't think this through is all I'm saying.

In the short term, there are the demonstrations and (now anyway) the hashtags and the defiance. Seems bad for the cause of terror. But remember, we did all that after 9/11 too. And now, 13+ years on, if you want to see an example of what a country that's been successfully terrorized, look at this one. The airport security stuff is too facile, I mean, it would have been dumb not to do anything in that direction. But I think, if we go back, remember in the 2000 election, the main complaint going in was that it didn't matter who you voted for, not really. The economy was smoking along, communism was dead. The only real threats left to fight were boy bands and nu-metal. Yeah, one candidate was more religious-y than the other one, but what did the president do anymore anyway? The fact that the last one took the time to fuck an intern was just evidence of his personal initiative to accomplish something--like manufacturing a whole impeachment trial, to the delight of civics teachers everywhere--instead of idly running out the clock on his term.

Think ahead then to the 2004 election, especially the Republican National Convention, where the theme basically was: Democrats are terrorist-loving pussies who hate our country and want us to be bombed again. Dick Cheney, a physical and moral coward and by far the most successfully terrorized person in the history of terrorism, even came out and said during that cycle that a vote for John Kerry was to invite death into your homes, America. The polarization in this country, I would argue, has come directly from this single issue and its follow-on symptom issues, like the Iraq War and the fact that Barack Obama is a black guy. OK, there may be some independent cultural factors at work in one of those scenarios, but the point is the panic of 9/11 has been baked in. That impressive unity in the months after the attacks, in retrospect, were a kind of breakup sex--with long, slow strokes and a lot of eye contact--right before the Right and the Left each got separate apartments and started trying to buy the affections of the children.

We'll see what France does. Maybe they'll blunder into trying to fix it with electoral politics as well, voting with their frightened hearts as we did in '04, leaving themselves prone to the same ideological damage. Or maybe they'll just carry on, put out the magazine again and really honor the sense of cultural defiance that periodical seems to have stood for even before this.

Contrast that to our own response--automatic capitulation, the panicked turtling of a successfully cowed people*--with The Interview a couple of weeks ago. Which may or may not have actually been North Korea. I'd hate to see France become us. But I guess we won't know for sure until 2017 when we see if they've invaded Iraq or not.


--

*Two animals-as-verbs in one sentence! It's been a goal for a long time, everyone.