"I'm gonna weed out the in-crowd, just like Carrie at the senior prom

I tell ya, I'll take a toll on the honour roll when I finally detonate my bomb."

‘Radio Central’ by Klagg.



I remember the evening of September 10th, 2001, very well. I was lounging around my place, and happened to tune in to a local rock station just after 11:00 pm. Playing on the radio at that moment was a band called Klagg.

This was the one and only time that Klagg ever received radio airplay. I can say this with some certainty because I was in the band. What amused me at the time was that the DJ chose a song called 'She's a Curler,' which featured lyrics and vocals by drummer Rob Mule. I was amused because the Mule was always a rather uncompromising guy when it came to writing and recording songs. He scorned things like airplay, much to the chagrin of Klagg's bassist, J.R. McClelland.

I can remember recording the album on which 'She's a Curler' appears. There was a bit of tension over some of Rob's lyrics; his use of the word ‘fucking’ on a porn-inspired tune called 'Suitcase Pimp,' for instance. "It might harm our chances of airplay," warned J.R., a caveat which was shot down with absolute scorn by the Mule.

All of the Mule's lyrics were particulary biting on this album. There was 'Racing to a Red Light,' a taut indictment of the idiocy of local drivers. There was 'Swinging Ronnie,' about a suicidal Gulf Island theatre troup leader.

But the most arresting of them all was 'Radio Central.'

The song was put together not long after the Columbine massacre in Colorado. Sung from the point of view a grudge-bearing student, it details the run up to an attack on a high school.

"I've got a song playing in my head, and it's telling me 'enough's enough,'" goes one of the opening lines. But it's not quite that simple. The song's vengeful protagonist has a unique weapon of choice...music. His intention is not to kill anyone, but to use the school P.A. system to assualt their preppy sensibilities with...well, knowing the Mule, I'd imagine he'd be using Danish prog-metal or some such thing.

The song was still a bit unnerving, though. Luckily Rob is a skilled writer. But the sheer horror and nihilism of the Columbine attack was not a subject to trifle with. It's one thing to be resentful of the big-shots, the in-crowd, but quite another to identify with the kind of sadism and cruelty practiced by a pack of deranged killers.

Which brings me to the morning after Sept. 10th, 2001.

"A Bully With a Bloody Nose is Still a Bully," read one of the op-ed headlines in England's Guardian newspaper in the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. It became surprisingly clear to me in the aftermath of the attacks that there were quite a few people who were not so displeased. The in-crowd, geopolitically speaking, had been weeded out a bit.

“I can see their point, I can see their point,” said a earnest female co-worker of mine. Whose point? Why, that of Mohamed Atta and his friends. (Whether Mr. Atta, in turn, would be able to see things from the perspective of an outspoken woman with an ever-evolving series of beefcake screensavers would, I assume, be another matter.)

What first repulsed me about this view was how easily the lives of those involved were written off by people who suppedly prided themselves on a more evolved concern for their fellow human beings. I kept imagining what it would be like to be a passenger on a plane that was being deliberately flown into a building. A wrenchingly cruel way to take someone’s life from them.

But for much of the political left it was ‘oh well, that’s what you get for deposing Allende in 1973.’

That’s the gist of it. America is a powerful country. It has abused that power with a sometimes brutal foreign policy, and has got its comeuppance.

But is it really that simple?

First of all, this kind of terrorism is not the work of some band of Central American peasants fighting against some propped-up dictatorship.

It has its roots in religious fundamentalism. This fundamentalism has been largely agressive in nature; in the past decade alone there have been deadly attacks in France (not exactly an anti-Arab foreign policy there), India, the Phillipines, Indonesia, parts of Africa, not to mention various parts of the Arab world.

American foreign policy has not been the issue in many of these situations. In fact, the U.S. has come down on the side of Islam (Kosovo, Afganistan in the 1980s) in some instances. And it's not simply U.S. foreign policy, or conservative political thought, that is always at the target of many acts of terror or anti-western hatred.

A female member of Canada's Al Qaeda poster family, the Kadrs, has spoken of how she doesn't want her sons raised in the west lest they become gay. This kind of hatred and contempt has nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy. It is the liberalism of the west, not any sort of conservatism, that seems most disagreeable to Mrs. Kadr.

Or consider recent events in France. In an effort to keep their public schools free of religious bias or influence, France has a long-standing policy of not allowing religious clothing or ornamentation at school. Accordingly, they introduce a ban on Muslim headscarves (as they have on the attire worn by practitioners of other religions). And almost instantly two French journalists are kidnapped by Islamic ‘militants’ and threatened with death.

Again, this has nothing to do with American foreign policy, or even French foreign policy. It has to do with a particularly liberal, secular element of French domestic policy, which is evidently deemed by some Muslims in a competely different part of the world to be just as much of a threat to them.

Remember the price the ayatollahs put on Salman Rushdie's head years ago? For what? Writing a book, published in the west, that contained a bit of cheek about Islam. Imagine if the Christian leadership of some country had put a one million dollar bounty on John Cleese's head after 'The Life of Brian' came out. Would you make excuses for them? Would you identify with them? Would you be able to see their point?

The U.S.-as-international bully argument can be an enticing one, but it’s a bit of a red herring in this instance. If every nation that has lorded it over others is due for a terrorist wipeout, then most of Western Europe’s countries, colonial bullies for much of the past 500 years, should be well ahead of the U.S.A. in the line.

Or let’s look at our own country. Consider our native indians. They had the run of the place for a thousand years, now they wade through endless court challenges to reclaim a parcel here and there. Think of their kids, confiscated and abused in religious schools as recently as a generation ago. Surely they have more of a greivance than a handful of high-society Saudi highjackers.

And yet if one of them planted a bomb in Vancouver, maybe taking out someone you knew, would you smugly assert that the victims had it coming to them?

It says something about how detached Canadians are from reality that we are so quick to resent the powerful United States, and yet not grasp that in the overall scheme of things, we are at least as priviledged in this world as they are. Thirty-two million of us on a huge land mass, eating up more energy per capita than any country on earth. Wasting water by the lakefull while others around the world can't wash or drink or irrigate their land. Decrying American defense spending while our auto workers, in our biggest industry, make good money putting together amoured military vehicles for U.S. companies.

The fact is, we are as much a part of the in-crowd as our friends down south, and if this terrorist weeding-out is a reaction against greed, consumption, and indifference to global problems, we’ll end up on the compost right along side them.

Here are the basic facts concerning the kind of Islamist terrorism we saw three years ago:

-It is based on a fundamentalist strain of Islam, it is violently evangelical in nature, and it is not by a long stretch soley reacting to, or directed at, America or U.S. foreign policy.

-Sept. 11, 2001 demonstrates that there are essentially no limits to how far its adherents will go. You can dismiss it as rhetoric if you want, but if these guys got hold of an nuclear weapon they'd likely use it.

I’m being too hard on Islam, you think? Well, no. If it were a band of Christian fundamentalists flying planes into buildings I’d resent them for it as well. Christian history has a pretty bloody side to it, the worst of it, fortunately, taking place in a pre-nuclear era. Shall we stand by and let another religion rehash the same series of tyrannies, with more lethal weapons at their disposal, in the name of ‘balance’ or political correctness?

What's that? You say you don't like George W. Bush? Well, fine. I'm not fond of the guy either. But it's not about him. It started before him, it will continue after him. The planning for the 2001 attacks was under way well before he took office. Whether his way of dealing with the issue is helping or hurting is a serious question, but to say that he is the cause of the problem is simple ignorance.

You say there’s something more? You think the C.I.A. was in on the whole September 11th operation? Well, okay. I can see you have more important things to deal with, like the fact that all your relatives’ bodies have been taken over by aliens and your television is sending you coded instructions from outer space.

Let’s be serious.

Recently there was an attack in Jakarta, Indonesia; the Australian embassy was hit by a bomb. It was supposed to be about Australia's support for the Iraq war. The thing is, though, no Australians were killed, just a bunch of Indonesian passers-by, office workers, and security guards.

(Incidentally, this attack has some noteworthy lessons for Canadians, for it shows you that in the terrorist mindset, a secondary target will do in a pinch. You want to blow up some Aussies, but can't get into Australia? Well, take the next best option and blow up a bunch of Jakartans in the vicinity of the Australian embassy instead.)

"This is not about Australia," said one Indonesian citizen. "We are all potential victims."

Which brings me back to Columbine.

What has always struck me about the Columbine killings was the diversity of the victims. If you believe a lot of the media reports, it was supposed to be about getting the big shots, but if you look at who the victims were, the nice-guy nerds seem to have gotten hit just as bad.

And that's the point.

When it comes to the kind of terrorism we saw on September 11, 2001, and that we continue to see, one thing is certain. Whether you like it or not, or want to admit it or not, we all ultimately look the same to the guys pulling the trigger.

And you have a lot more in common with the 'bully' beside you than you do with the killers coming down the hall.





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