Domesticity

Sez the Times, in a locution as well-worn as the glans of a virginal adolescent boy:

Mr. Shahzad, now 30, appeared to be tracing a familiar arc of frustration, increasing religiosity and, finally, violence.

The familiarity of this "arc" is the tell. Lives are not actually lived in arcs, and where they are, you can be certain that there is either a wannabe novelist or a political agenda lurking in the mental shallows. Or both. If you take a few painful moments to peruse the Times' own archives, you will see ample evidence of all manner of misshapen pegs being pounded into this perfectly round hole with the monstrous dedication of a monstrously strong mutant toddler. Because it is taboo to suggest that a person would become radicalized through politics, which is to say, because it is taboo to suggest that a person might become so disturbed and offended by the carnage of war that he would respond to violence with violence, it is therefore necessary to haul out the hoariest sub-Freudian psychoanalyses of distraught spirits at ill odds with the ordinary world.

These prefabricated biographical sketches of our various and sundry domestic terrorists read as remarkably similar whether they are talking about a supposed "Islmaist" or a self-styled patriot like McVeigh, and I am reminded of an excellent bit of literary-criticism criticism Edmond Caldwell (via my friend Richard Crary) in which Caldwell puts that big bore, James Woods in the juicer to extract his syrupy essence. A few relevant excerpts:

In several earlier posts I have been developing the argument that James Wood’s reviewing often works by domesticating novels that are not examples of domestic fiction to begin with, and that is certainly the case in his review of Savage Detectives. It is almost as if Wood needs to respond, not to Bolaño’s work, but rather to his reputation, his growing popularity.

[...]

This is where professional domesticators such as James Wood come in. If there’s no way to stem the burgeoning Bolaño tide, then the effort must be made to direct it into the proper – safer – channels.

We’ve seen how Wood, in his review of Death with Interruptions, turned the long-time communist Saramago into an advocate of Original Sin and ‘fallen’ human nature. It’s in a similar spirit that Wood transforms The Savage Detectives into a story about growing into an adult ‘maturity’ after being disabused of adolescent enthusiasms such as aesthetic and political radicalism. Bolaño in the 1970s was “an avant-garde poet bristling with mad agendas,” and so are the characters who make up the narrative’s “gang of literary guerillas,” says Wood in his summary of the novel. Yet Savage Detectives, he goes on to affirm, “is both melancholy and fortifying; and it is both narrowly about poetry and broadly about the difficulty of sustaining the hopes of youth.” In other words, zany antics involving things like avant-garde agendas and guerilla gangs are fine as long as they are seen (or can be portrayed) as properly childish preoccupations; a book is “good” and merits a positive review to the extent that its pretty sentences are “about” the putting away of childish things. Wood, you see, likes a book with a healthy “message” – it needs to be “about” something that will keep children and servants in line with middle-class morality. And if the book is not really “about” that at all, then like any good media pundit he will spin it, cherry-picking the two or three examples that might best support his thesis.

[...]

Wood’s ideological biases will not allow him to read the novel that is actually in front of him. Instead, ever the Restorationist, he must turn Savage Detectives into one more accommodation with existing “reality,” a specific social arrangement that he wishes his readers to take for a metaphysical absolute. Think of it as another sortie of James Wood’s arrière-garde literary movement, Gutless Realism.

Earlier in the review, in a brief biographical sketch of Bolaño, Wood writes, “Returning to Chile in 1973 to help with the socialist revolution as he saw it, he was caught in the Pinochet coup and briefly arrested.” “As he saw it”– in a single, sniffy phrase, Wood dispenses with Bolaño’s leftism as if it were a dirty old sock found among his freshly laundered and triple-starched tighty-whities (he’ll have to have a word with Consuela, the housekeeper, about that sock!). But his refuse is our rose, so we’ll tarry for another whiff: “The socialist revolution as he saw it.” This means, of course, that Wood himself doesn’t see “it” – the whole social process unfolding around the embattled leftist government of Salvador Allende – “that” way. Somehow I doubt that Wood is criticizing the Allende government from the left, for its reformist timidity and half-measures. No, that phrase – “as he saw it” – is Wood’s way of distancing himself from any of that leftist taint, that socialist stink. “Yes,” he’s telling his readers (and employers), “I’m about to give this seedy punk’s book a good review, but don’t think for a minute that it means I’m no longer clubbable” (likewise he would never put “U.S.-backed” in front of “the Pinochet coup”).

The desire for domestication that Caldwell identifies in our sniffy Anglo critic may be the most fundamental failure of the mainstream American intellect, the Timeses and Postseses, the newsweeklies and much of cable and network news. Despite living in a world totally awash in political violence, it remains inconceivable that political violence could exist.

I would like to give some credit to America's yowling Rightist commentariat here. Although their own cultural phobias and America-first jingoism blind them to the actual political motives behind much anti-American militarism, they are nonetheless capable of understanding, albeit in an elementary and misguided way, that those who commit, or attempt to commit, acts of so-called terrorism are motivated by deep personal, religious, political, and ideological convictions. They misidentify these convictions, and their insistence on American purity and non-complicity in the political makeup of the world as we know it is obviously a crippling blindspot. Nonetheless, you will not find our nation's Michael Savages laboring under the impression that Faisal Shahzad traced a neat, psychological, MFA-workshopped narrative path from bourgeois family man through financial setback through descent into depression and thus onward to Act of Desperation.

As America's military is killing hundreds of innocent people every week--at least!--in the ordinary course of business, it stands to reason that at some point, somewhere, someone is going to try to kill some Americans in return. The only real surprise is that it happens so rarely. Shahzad was, among other things, wholly incompetent. Any good ol' boy from Fayette County, PA could do better with a trip to the Tractor Supply Company and one jaunt over the Ohio border to Phantom Fireworks. Regardless, the fact remains. A person doesn't build a bomb because he's mopey. He builds it because he's mad.