Despite the attacks on 9/11, the Yanks are still living on another planet

After yesterday, more diary extracts. Well, diary and e-mail. This time from 2001, just over a week after the Al-Qaeda 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Monday 17th September 2001

I got an e-mail from someone I know, a Londoner with American parents:

Thankfully all my friends and family are accounted for but it took until late on Friday/ early hours of Saturday morning to get the OK from everyone I know and care about in New York and Washington. 

My Aunt is a medic and has been working flat-out to cope with the casualties and fatalities that arrive at the medical centres/ hospitals around New York. She will need post traumatic stress counselling, as will all the rescue workers and medical staff. 

I did hope that the events of last week would prompt my sisters who haven’t been speaking to one another for the past 15 months to make their peace – they haven’t. 

I replied:

It’s difficult to comprehend what effect this must have on Americans. They have never had foreigners attack them on their own soil nor been in many wars whereas, in Britain, we have been at constant war somewhere since at least 1939 and any of us could have had our legs blown off in the last 30 years by an IRA wastebin bomb while doing our shopping.

I think they’re still a bit on another planet. When a few hundred US body bags have come back from Afghanistan, they’re liable to turn insular again. It’s a sad reflection on my superficiality but the thought did flit through my mind “Well, this may help the Irish problem in the medium term because the Americans may be less prone to see the IRA as jolly little green freedom fighters.”

Tuesday 18th September 2001

A British Moslem friend of mine, who has worked in the US, spoke to her former boss in Washington this afternoon. She said he sounded angry and told her there was real anger in the US following the attacks on New York and Washington last week. Another friend of hers – a Moslem Brit in the US – said it was dangerous for her to return to the US because Moslems were being attacked. Such is American ignorance that a Sikh was killed in a racial attack.

I watched the David Letterman TV show, transmitted from New York. He gave a ten-minute opening monologue about the World Trade Center bombing, then interviewed US TV newsman Dan Rather who was there as The Man Who Knows The Real Situation.

The perspective given was that the Baddies are mad, insane and neither cause-and-effect nor logic enter into it. There is no point trying to understand their motive because there is none. They are just Pure Evil with no cause except that the Baddies see the Americans have more money and a better life than they do, so the only trigger is Envy.

Letterman asked Rather – apparently seriously – why something could not have been done in retribution last Saturday (the New York attack was on Tuesday).

When the Independent newspaper wrote a column saying to the Americans “Welcome to the real world” they got it wrong.

The Yanks are still living on another planet.

Terrorists and psychopaths: standing on the shoulders of creative giants

I was watching Penn & Teller: Fool Us on ITV last night and they did a trick in which a long ribbon-like sheet was wrapped round and round a 9-year-old boy’s neck. Penn on one side and Teller on the other then stood apart and pulled the opposite ends of the sheet tightly and… of course, the sheet unravelled and came away from the boy’s neck.

A variation on the cutting-the-knot-out-of-a-rope trick.

I was amazed this had been screened – presumably the defence is that it was after the nine o’clock watershed.

The possibility of children doing this to each other – wrapping a sheet or length of material or rope around another child’s neck and pulling it, killing the child, seems quite high to me.

I once interviewed the British Film Censor John Trevelyan. He was highly important in Britain, because he was in charge of British film censorship 1958-1971 when everything changed.

He told me that, as Secretary of the British Board of Film Classification, he had had a panel of psychologists advising him and, as a result, he had made slight cuts to the 1968 movie The Boston Stranger. He had cut the sound of ripping fabric which was heard as the leering strangler’s face was seen while attacking a victim. He had been told the sound of ripping fabric was a ‘trigger’ and a stimulant to would-be rapists.

He also cut scenes where sex acts were immediately followed – or were interrupted – by murder, especially involving knives or sharp instruments. Again, this was because he was told it was a turn-on for psychos. These scenes are now almost de rigueur in slasher movies… A teenage couple are having sex in a bunk in an isolated cabin; one or both of them are then immediately skewered by a deadly sharp implement.

Generally, though, I don’t believe that violence on the movie or TV screen really affects ordinary, non-psychopathic adults. And you can’t fully run your culture by making concessions in case a psycho gets an idea from a movie or TV show.

It is the Nature v Nurture debate.

Or, more correctly, Nutter v Nurture.

If 50 million people see a movie and one person copies it, the cause lies within the person not the movie

When news of the bomb explosion and island massacre in Norway started coming through yesterday – particularly the island massacre – a friend said to me: “It’s like some movie” and, increasingly, over the last 50 years, psycho and terrorist attacks have been getting like what you see in the movies.

When the Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11 everyone was saying, “Ooh – It’s just like a disaster movie.”

Maybe psychos and terrorists are being made more creative by access to other, more creative minds.

Novels, movies and sometimes even episodic TV series are written by more-than-averagely-creative minds. To get a movie script, a novel or a TV series made and out there and available to a mass market, you often – well, sometimes – have to have a spark, perhaps even a giant flame, of originality.

Rod Serling, who created The Twilight Zone, reportedly died still blaming himself for writing a 1966 TV movie called The Doomsday Flight which was a then-highly-original story about a bomb on board an airliner which has an altitude-sensitive trigger device. Unless a ransom is paid, the bomb will explode when the plane descends to land.

Apparently Serling blamed himself because, after this TV movie was screened, the PLO and others started a spate of airliner hijackings and bombings. He blamed himself because he thought they might have seen or heard of the plot and decided to target planes.

To me, this does not sound likely – the plot is too far removed from what became an ordinary terrorist attack – though it does make me wonder where the idea for the 1994 movie Speed may have come from.

But creative thinkers have always driven reality. The skylines of modern cities were clearly inspired by decades of science fiction films dating back to Metropolis and beyond. We are now building what we were once told would be our future. The fictional thought of flat screen TVs has been around for maybe 50 years. The concept of the hovercraft was surely partly inspired by endless hovercraft in sci-fi comics and novels. And famously, of course, sci-fi novelist Arthur C Clarke wrote an article in Wireless World in 1945 proposing the concept of communication satellites.

Martin Cooper, who developed the first hand-held mobile phone, said that he had been inspired to do it by seeing the hand-held communicators on Star Trek.

Irish novelist Robert Cromie’s 1895 book The Crack of Doom described a bomb which used the energy from an atom. I do not know if anyone on the Manhattan Project had ever read it – perhaps the idea would have come about anyway – but the idea of an atomic bomb was around for 50 years before it became a reality.

Of course, conspiracy theory thinking and making links where none exist is always a dangerous temptation.

Iconic international terrorist Carlos The Jackal was given that nickname by the press after a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal was found in a London flat he had rented. It was said he had copied details from the book. In fact, it later turned out it was not his book and he had never read it.

But the cliché nutter is a loner with a grudge against something or someone. By definition, a loner – “Ooh, he was a quiet one,” neighbours traditionally tell newspaper reporters – has access only to his own deluded psychopathic ideas. Over the course of the 20th century, though, nutters had increasing access through books, TV, movies, DVDs etc to the more creative ideas of other, better minds. Now, in the 21st century, almost all human knowledge and the creativity of the best of human brains past and present is a mere click away on the internet.

On Friday night, as first reports of events in Norway were still coming in, one commentator on the BBC News channel said that, if the Oslo bombing and the island shootings turned out to be linked, that would point to al-Queda because they had a track record of linked attacks. As it turned out, he was wrong. But presumably the Norwegian killer was ‘inspired’ by al-Queda’s publicity-seeking methodology.

When I first heard details of the 9/11 terrorist attacks back in 2001, I thought to myself, “I’ve heard this before. I read about this maybe a year ago in the Sunday Times.”

I can’t find the relevant article now but it turned out I had read about it before. Because the 9/11 attacks were based on someone else’s much better idea – the Bojinka plot which was conceived in Indonesia and suggested to al-Queda, who adapted and downgraded it.

The Indonesian-originated plan was a three-tiered concept.

1) assassinate the Pope

2) blow up at least 11 passenger jets simultaneously over the Pacific

3) fly a single light aircraft laden with explosives into the CIA headquarters or several aircraft into buildings across the US, including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon

The 9/11 attacks were not an original idea. They were inspired by someone else’s idea.

I imagine the lone Norwegian nutter was inspired by the methods of al-Queda.

I suspect we will get increasingly creative and increasingly paranoia-inducing terrorist attacks.

The internet allows even nutters to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Let me tell you a joke about Jade Goody, the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuke and the 9/11 attacks…

British so-called ‘reality star’ Jade Goody died two years ago on Tuesday. She’s gone and largely forgotten.

Can I tell you a joke about her being a racist? People reviled her before her death and said she was racist. And they made jokes about it.

She’s been dead for two years now, so I can certainly make jokes about her, can’t I? No-one can possibly say it’s ‘too soon’, can they?

This is about a blog I wrote a couple of days ago in which I mentioned a friend’s criticisms of Japan but, first, let me repeat an arguably sexist and allegedly true story about the playwright George Bernard Shaw. As is the way with such stories, it is not necessarily true; it has also been attributed to Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, W.C.Fields and even the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Anyway…

The great man was at a dinner party with some very lah-di-dah people. Somehow, the conversation turned to slack sexual morals (in the George Bernard Shaw version, this was in the 1930s). He asked one of the ladies present:

“Madam, would you sleep with me for one million pounds?”

“Well, for a million pounds, Mr Shaw,” the lady replied, “perhaps I would.”

She and the other guests laughed.

The conversation turned to other topics and, later, George Bernard Shaw whispered to the lady: “Madam, would you sleep with me tonight if I gave you £10?”

“Mr Shaw!” replied the woman, deeply offended: “What sort of woman do you think I am?”

“Madam,” Shaw said, “we have established what sort of woman you are. We are merely haggling over the price.”

Which brings us back to the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown.

I wrote a blog in which I quoted the opinions of a friend of mine who had been to Japan last October. She was not impressed. Her image of an efficient, futuristic country were confounded.

In light of the still ongoing disasters and 10,000+ deaths in Japan, several people – mostly stand-up comics – found my initial blog and a follow-up blog in bad taste, although they were non-comedic blogs.

I know that one of the comics who found my non-comedic blog to be ‘too soon’ had, in fact, made jokes about the death of Jade Goody just a few days after her death from cancer.

I have no problem with that, but it does beg the question When is ‘too soon’ too soon? and why.

American comic Gilbert Gottfried was dropped last week as the voice of a giant US insurance company because he made jokes about the Japanese earthquake.

I don’t think him being dropped was unreasonable, as insurance companies should perhaps not be seen to make light of disasters. But the criticism was not that he made the jokes but that he had made the jokes ‘too soon’. He had similar problems when he made jokes ‘too soon’ about the 9/11 terrorist attacks (as seen in Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette’s comedy documentary The Aristocrats).

Why would a joke made a few days after the 9/11 attacks be any less in bad taste than exactly the same joke made ten years after the 9/11 attacks? Why – and when – would it become acceptable?

Why would a joke about Jade Goody be funny only two years after her death but be in bad taste two days or two weeks after her death? What could have changed to make the joke become acceptable?

If the argument is that someone who personally know Jade Goody or personally knew a victim of the 9/11 attacks could hear the joke and be hurt… then that argument holds just as strongly 2 days or 2 weeks or 20 years after the event. The emotional pain caused would, in all honesty, be much the same.

Surely if a joke is in unacceptably bad taste, then it is unacceptable, full stop.

So why would someone’s non-funny criticisms of Japan (correct or incorrect) be in bad taste – specifically because they are ‘too soon’ – a few days after an appalling triple disaster – earthquake/tsunami/nuclear problem? At what point would those same comments (correct or incorrect) become more acceptable?

I have genuinely never understood the concept of ‘too soon’.

If  joke is in bad taste, it is in bad taste. If an observation is unacceptable, it is unacceptable.

To return to George Bernard Shaw:

We have established what sort of observation we have here. We are merely haggling over the timing.

Why?

What’s all this ‘too soon’ shit about 9/11, about Jade Goody – or about Japan?

If it’s bad taste, it’s bad taste. But at some point, bad taste apparently becomes acceptable.

When?

World War 3, dead Australians, America’s wars, Randy Newman and God’s plan

Because the world, like the cafe in the famous Monty Python sketch, is full of spam, my preferences on this blog are set up so that I have to approve all comments before they appear.

When I woke up this morning, I was notified of a new comment on my blog of yesterday about Painting a New York fart, Tony Blair and Jo Brand. I would have approved the new comment this morning, but it seems to have been un-submitted. This is very sad. It told me:

“The crazy part is, World War 3 is not the most Earth shaking event to come within the next 4 years, The Pole Shift will cause even more damage and destruction, but in the case of the Pole Shift it will be for a Good cause with Divine purpose and for humankind to experience the 1,000 years of peace it has been promised for decades.”

Now, I watch the BBC News channel, Sky News and Al Jazeera regularly, some might say addictively, but this particular news had passed me by and I’m all for learning about new things and hearing original thought.

The comment came with a link to a webpage and perhaps may not be unconnected to the fact my Twitter account is now being followed by @ProjectJesus, the “Global Christian Community Appeal” which is “seeking one million fellow Christians to join (them) in a 21st century pilgrimage for Jesus.”

I presume @ProjectJesus is the same as www.projectjesus.com unless there are two competing projects – always a possibility as divine multi-tasking is not unknown.

I’m saddened this morning’s new comment was un-submitted not just because I enjoy original thinking, but because the concept of World War 3 is quite interesting. I think we may not know it has started until after it has finished.

The 1914-1918 war was originally called The Great War. (Note to Americans: that’s the 1917-1918 War, as far as you are concerned.)

So at what point did The Great War start being called World War 1?

Was it before or after the 1939-1945 war started? (Note to Americans: that’s the 1941-1945 War, as far as you are concerned.)

Surely you could not have had a so-called World War 1 until you had a World War 2… and it is only journalists, historians or political speechwriters who can declare World War 3 has started or happened.

Perhaps World War 3 started on 11th September 2001 when the World Trade Center was attacked. Good ol’ George W Bush (never primarily known as a great linguist) decided that this had precipitated what he called The War on Terror. He could just as easily have said it had started World War 3, though the economic effect of that name on stock markets around the world might not have been too good.

The so-called War on Terror and its ramifications and outbursts over the last ten years have definitely been worldwide. We may already be living through the mid-point of World War 3. Perhaps we won’t know until some clever historian or influential TV pundit  decides to re-name The War on Terror as World War 3, just as The Great War was re-named World War 1.

But, getting back to World War 3 Predictions, the web page says – without explanation – that World War 3 “would result in countries like Australia almost getting wiped out from the face of the Earth”.

This seems a little harsh. Even Randy Newman in his wonderful song Political Science in which he wants to nuke all countries which hate America, writes:

We’ll save Australia
Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo
We’ll build an All American amusement park there
They got surfin’ too

What has poor Australia done to get wiped off the map in World War 3?

I think we should be told.

I want to hear more.

The World Trade Center terrorist attack and the 9/11 compensation scam

Yesterday, I was talking to someone about urban myths surrounding the Al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, particularly the story that, under the rubble of the second tower to fall, a crushed fire engine was found containing hundreds of neatly-stacked Gap or Structure brand jeans apparently looted from a shop in the first tower to fall. There is an interesting site debunking 9/11 myths, which does not include that story.

But there is another story not on that site which I understand is true…

I am told there was extensive building work going on at the Twin Towers before the attack and this involved some Irish-origined workers.

As soon as possible after the attack happened, some of the workers flew to Ireland. Their wives claimed they were missing and waited around until they eventually got compensation for their husbands’ deaths. According to Wikipedia (never necessarily accurate) the average individual payout to 9/11 relatives was $1.8 million. After receiving the money, the wives rejoined their husbands in Ireland. Some, I’m told, even stayed in the US where their ‘dead’ husbands rejoined them after a respectable time had elapsed.

If true (and I understand it is), as scams go, this was a very clever one and required quick thinking at the time.

A death in Scotland yesterday, Albert Einstein and the legend of the horsemen of Central Asia

Yesterday morning, the morning of Christmas Eve, my mother’s cousin died at home in Scotland.

Here is the closing passage from a book I almost wrote: the biography of an Italian archaeologist. There were personality problems. It may still get written…

***

“One of the most famous legends of Central Asia tells of a horseman,” he told me as we sat in his book-lined room in Rome. “The horseman is the standard-bearer of the great Khan. As the Khan’s army are entering a city after a glorious victory, the standard-bearer sees a dark lady looking at him. The dark lady has fearsome eyes, as if she is looking right inside him. He becomes scared that this woman is a witch and she has put the Evil Eye on him, so he goes to the great Khan and tells him his fears and says he wants to go to another city.

“Of course! says the great Khan. Give him the finest horse we have! Let him escape!

“So the standard-bearer takes the fastest horse in the Great Khan’s army, rides off across the desert and, in record time, arrives at the other city. Then he sees the dark lady standing by the city gates, waiting for him. She looks at him, smiles and says:

“I was so worried. I knew I was due to meet you here today but, when I saw you in that other city so very far away, I was worried that you would not reach here in time for our appointment.

“And the standard-bearer realises that the dark lady with the eyes that look right inside him is Death. I always feel I am running like the standard bearer,  that there is never enough time and I know I will never complete what I should do.

“Another Central Asian legend tells of a horseman who rides alone across the desert but, when he looks at the shadow he casts, he sees that Death is riding behind him. The shadow of her long scythe is touching his shadow as she swings it backwards and forwards. At any time, she may strike the final fatal blow but, until then, he only sees the shadow.

“Since Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, we know that time and space cannot be separated: if you travel across physical space, you are travelling through time as well. When I was given that bouquet of flowers in Iran, the past caught up with me. I had been running, turned round and saw a shadow. I realised I had managed to destroy my life piece by piece. I destroyed almost everything. Lovers, career, options, the potential for wealth, peace of mind, success.  I somehow managed to throw away all the possibilities. My failure at the Burnt City was too great to recover from. When I saw the site for the first time, remember I shit in my pants? When I sat in that tent and saw the sunlight coming through the flap and saw the desert, boundless and bare, stretching beyond. I couldn’t deal with it. I could feel the ground starting to go down and down in a spiral under my feet. I could see and feel Time sucking me in. But the irony is that, as an archaeologist, I don’t feel I’m dealing in dead and destroyed things. I feel the continuity and the importance of what has survived, lasted and developed. Archaeologists don’t uncover dead civilizations. They uncover the interplay between events and people.

“I know I was close to death in Kurdistan when the young boy shot me in the arm; I still bear the physical scar.

“I know I was closer to death when I was in Haiti and faced the Tonton Macoutes. That was really very close.

“But the effect of imminent physical death was much less on me than the effect of those events way back in my childhood. Those scars stay with you through time and they never heal. The first five years of your life are what is important because you are so receptive and the scale of importance given to each event is so gigantic. When I was about three, my father came and told me that, if I didn’t do some little unimportant thing he was going to beat me. I was three years old, looking up at this overwhelmingly strong adult who was looking down at me with a very serious face. I felt so helpless and in such immediate danger. But my father was just joking. Joking! The result was that all the insecurities started to take hold of my mind and, later in life, I wanted to either control my insecurities or run away from them or both. I never wanted to feel that helpless again. My father doesn’t even remember it happening. But I remember it vividly 51 years later. The scars have travelled through time like the bullet wound on my arm.

“Maybe you are even affected before you are born. The foetus is receptive to light and sound and voices and pressures and pains and chemical variations in the body of your mother…..and your individual mind – your unique neural map – is formed at the same time your brain is formed. By the time you are five years old, maybe 80%, 90% of your future is already within you?

“People tell me I have a good memory for dates, but even I am still surprised how vivid something that happened 51 years ago can be in my mind. Things that happened 10 years ago are as vivid as the present. I remember my days with Wendy the Wessex Bird so vividly. The feeling of her body; the first time I penetrated her. Just a week ago, I saw Ingrid crossing a street in Rome to avoid meeting me. She is now 48 and still looks lovely; I could vividly remember her coming through a door thirty years ago. As vivid as yesterday. The past is not the past; it is still living today, travelling with you in your memory.

“If I find a ruined building, I need to know what happened inside the building: the forces that co-operated to make it what it was. The energy and social inter-action. About 5,000 years ago, the Arabian civilization was created. But it is not a distant planet. Those ‘dead’ things and ‘dead’ people’s actions are alive because of the long-term effects of their existence and their actions. That is the psychology of archaeology. It is like a giant meteor falling on Earth; it creates all kinds of changes and has all kinds of after-effects. When you watch a stone thrown into a pool, the effects ripple out and eventually disappear but, with events in history everything is linked. In order to understand the Arabian civilization of 3,000 BC, you have to go back to what was happening between 5,000 BC and 4,000 BC. Ruins don’t talk; what talks is the actions of people and you can only judge people by their actions.

“At the end of the Don Juan story, as I remember it, he is having dinner with Doña Aminta who is a depressed, boring, unhappy woman. But he has also invited the Stone Guest to dinner – the ghost of Don Gonzalo, whom he killed. While Doña Aminta is praying, the hellish Stone Guest invites Don Juan to follow him to Hell. He is not dragged or kidnapped…he has a free choice between life with a depressive, unhappy woman and the road to Hell. And Don Juan chooses to go to Hell. That’s my choice too. I want to be engulfed in the flames.

“I don’t want any name on my grave, because I have never had a name of my own,” he told me. “I only want those two lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.”

For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

“Do you remember the four lines before that quote?” I asked.

“I forget,” he said unconvincingly.

“The full quote is better,” I suggested.

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

But, when he died at the very start of the 21st century, it was suddenly and violently and there was no tombstone because there was no body. He had gone to talk to an acquauintance in the New World. The acquaintance’s office was high atop a tower which looked down on the rest of the world as if from heaven. I checked which side of the building the office was on. He must have have stood high up in the financial district of New York early on that bright, clear September morning and seen the plane coming straight at the building. He was consumed in the flames when that first airliner hit the World Trade Center on Tuesday 11th September 2001.