Incompetent Terrorists

Examining the Glasgow terrorist attempt, Tim Harford speculates on why terrorists may be so incompetent. On first blush, his question seems all too sensible. I mean, we’ve been hearing “chatter” since before 9/11, have seen or read about multiple “just released” videos (so much so that it’s practically become a genre!), in the States have measured our lives in shades of yellow, orange, and red, but have not, for all this, been subject to another 9/11. Indeed, the closest we have come was the latest steam explosion in New York, tragic but hardly terrorist.

Harford’s larger point is that terrorist attacks are not simple. They require strategic planning and precise implementation. They are more apt to go wrong than right.

But I find myself a little baffled by his sense that terrorists may be incompetent. That assessment only works if we describe terrorism as loud bangs and many deaths—a not unrealistic description. Focusing less on noise and death, we might be able to understand the psychic afterlife of terrorism.

For, to be sure, 9/11 changed the U.S. psyche. Terrorism means that we live in a state of what Mad Moody calls “Constant Vigilance!” Even those who consider themselves to be fairly rational and unflappable (though, to be fair, my sample population are academics and we’re all a bit paranoid anyway), have a heightened awareness of vulnerability. It is to be found in the small starts and jumps that demonstrate our changed relationships to space and sound. Even those who dismiss 9/11 as a government conspiracy have a relationship to terrorism, the only question being the source of danger.

I find it premature, if not foolhardy, to conclude that most terrorists have failed. Indeed, their greatest success may not lie in body counts, but in the psychic atmosphere they have helped create.

Bob & Flo

He knows her white name. Is charmed by its association with the Nightingale. Her father’s choice, deliberate, imbued with destiny.

In the early 1970s, my father was a medical resident in Wales. Blinded by our colonial legacy, we have always said he was in England. Wales had no connotations, no meaning beyond that attached to people (Prince of Wales) and colonial schools (Prince of Wales). In Wales, he was Bob.

Bob and Flo. Pub names.

* * *
My dearest darling:

I have met a few chaps here.
I don’t understand what the Welsh say, but they are so much warmer than the English.
We have Indians, Chinese, Jamaicans, Nigerians, English, Irish, Ghanaians, Goans.
Some of the fellows are awfully nice.

* * *
His diction, at times affected, other times merely awkward, strains to express what might be called a colonial sensibility. He is all commonwealth, chap, fellow, gels, and betrays the middle-class aspirations of his type.

My father’s generation of students aspired to be like their mentors: priests, pastors, teachers, nurses, doctors, the often insipid middle classes, secure in their middle-class morality. While they tittered at D.H Lawrence, had some acquaintance with Wilde and Waugh, perhaps even enjoyed Firbank, they were anchored in a denuded Dickens, wedded to the banality of a cliff-note Austen. Shakespeare was to be admired for his “characteristic excellences.”

Bob craves the ordinariness promised by his name.

* * *
Bob and Flo
Sitting on the grass
k-i-s-s-i-n-g

* * *
He takes her photograph in London. She leans against a fountain oh-so-casually.

Flo exudes charm. Her surroundings accommodate her. She has mastered the calculated precision of familiarity, never a smidge over. She knows more secrets than her abandoned laugh reveals. In plain sight. Hiding.

* * *
-remember to visit my parents. After all, they are your parents also.
-please send panties for the children
-life is cheap here so I can save up
-when will you come home?
-when will I come home?

“Enforcing” Heteronormativity

A quick take in Slate’s Human Nature column provides an apt demonstration of how sexuality is constructed.

Provocatively titled “Hunk Like a Horse: Why women prefer men with muscles,” the brief paragraph summarizes the results of a new study conducted among 240 college students (of course, the most reliable group, uninfluenced by culture in any way). According to the study, women prefer muscular men; they report that their most recent “short-term” partners were muscular men; muscular men claim to have more lifetime sex partners and affairs with mated women. So far so good.

Now the theory kicks in: Muscles “are cues of genes that increase offspring viability or reproductive success.”

How did we get from short-term partners, sexual satisfaction, indeed, promiscuity on the part of men, to “offspring viability and reproductive success?” Why should sexual pleasure be wedded to an “instinct” that must be normative, or at least framed through normativity?

Is it so impossible to believe we might live at a time when “reproductive instincts” vie with what Foucault termed “bodies and pleasures?” Or must hetero-attraction always be framed in terms of “reproductive success?”

Carapace

Increasingly, I am drawn to the seduction of being “provincial.” Provincial functions improperly here, as a catachresis. But it approaches, as an asymptote might, the kind of indifference I find useful, and necessary, as one type of model for being.

I have crawled into many sticky webs with benign intentions, drawn by a certain curiosity, the kind that wants to know how neighbors cook their githeri. Webs let go reluctantly and there is pleasure in crawling through the stick(iness). But one grows tired of being sticky and longs for a simpler way to navigate: one hopes to avoid the pheromone-strewn trail of predecessors. (I watched many hours of TV on bugs.)

Pheromone-strewn trails lead to guaranteed sources of food and new homes, but I often wonder about antinomian ants. Scale is important. Some graduate students will understand.

I return every so often to the image of my grandmother, the woman who, in the parlance of contemporary western kinship, might be termed my mother’s stepmother, not as a replacement for her biological mother, but as a co-mother in a polygamous household. That I need so much language to describe her suggests something about the power of English to sunder “traditional” modes of understanding kinship.

In my undoubtedly romantic memories of her, she always seemed a little distant, not mean, just removed. Over the years, as I have learned about the “impact” of colonialism and the “new” imperialism, I have returned to this image to question many of the rhetorics of influence. How do we deal with the “indifferent” individual? Indifferent is, of course, yet another catachresis.

The question has become more urgent and appealing as I try to disentangle the relationship between “home” and “diaspora,” in what might be termed the “colonial diaspora,” the black students and scholars who traveled to colonial centers from the late nineteenth to the eve of independence, especially during the interwar period. Of course, juxtaposing “colonial diaspora” and “interwar period” troubles periodization in all sorts of ways. How to read the period from the Morant Bay uprising to the Mau Mau insurgency alongside World War I and II?

Aside from the problem of periodization, yet another sticky web, I want to consider indifference as a useful, necessary, and often occupied position. At the moment, there’s not much I can do with it—which might be its defining feature. But it might be a useful bridge between postcolonial and queer modes of thinking and living.