Jihadi Chic
In a world where being “bad” is good, indeed a world where good and bad are seen as a distinction without a difference, it should come as no surprise that the concepts of heroism and villany would fair no better. Looking at the comics of the day, perhaps not the most effete sources of insight, but certainly one of the rawest, one gets a sense that the only real good seen by the fashionable world is that which goes furthest in violating what is deemed right and proper by the most number of people.
It’s like a hunger, on the part of our intellectual and artistic aristocracy, to continually find and conquer new territory in the collective moral conscience of everyday people. A “go west young man” mentality effuses among these, the wise and prudent, where each new mountain range of mores on the horizon sprouts entire movements of literature, dance and music, and the indigenous folkways are corralled in reservations meant not to preserve, but to placate with the eventual goal of forced assimilation. The engine of this progress, as the process of destruction is usually called, is deconstruction. By taking the highest conceptions of man and deconstructing them, a power is granted that allows these conceptions to be made base, ostensibly so that they can be “more human” and therefore more endearing. Of course, after this high concept is made more human and satisfying to the artist and his audience, what remains is only a shell, a husk whose insides have been devoured, which is promptly cast away. The Madonna is made a whore, and the artist searches for his next virgin landscape. Conversely, the least is made higher than the best, though certainly not in the sense Jesus meant when speaking of the “least of the kingdom.” In this case, the mean, nasty and spiteful are put upon pedestals next to the kind and productive as a matter of course; the former painted in his best possible light with the latter his worst, all so that the two are seen as equal or inverted.
This rapacious desire has been making strange bedfellows of artists and tyrants for some time. Where before artists’ relationships to autocrats were generally bound up in the stale and at times contentious contract of patronage, the current model is one of a strange mutual admiration society. From the 60s onward, there has a real affection on the part of artists and intellectuals for some of the most vile, most bloody thugs and dictators of the 20th century. Note the godlike status of Che, enshrined on numerous t-shirts at rock concerts and gallery openings in the West. Note the warm sentiments expressed by the intelligentsia for Castro and Hugo Chavez. The men of the 20th century best known for their open disregard for the unalienable rights of man are treasured and adored by those that depend wholly, for both their lives and their livelihood, on those very same rights. You’d would think they would take stock of the fate of one Maxim Gorky, a brilliant writer turned Bolshevik, forced out of Russia by Lenin, then lured back to Stalinist Russia with the promise of fame and artistic freedom, only to be forced into the role of mouthpiece for the regime and eventually poisoned along with his son.
So, today, the post-modern man searches the landscape for heroes to deconstruct and villains to glorify. Where do his eyes rest? The old guard of Soviet Marxism is gone, though their lesser satellite lackeys and ideological descendants still remain. The Western world has for the most part given up the threadbare trappings of revolution and replaced it with the sometimes temperamental rotary engine of free market capitalism and democracy, a satisfying enough target of deconstruction, though ultimately too pragmatic and worldly to be as rich a vein as the rigid Victorian autocracy of the nascent 20th century or even the childlike innocence of the 1950s born of a generation seeking comfort for their souls weary of war. What vile thing then is left for the enlightened man to put on the pedestal and praise, to the approbation of his enlightened peers?
Enter September 11, 2001 and the emergence of Islamic radicalism. Violent jihad set to destroy not only the artist’s highest and most delicious target of deconstruction, America and its consumerist economy, but Western civilization itself in fire and screaming chaos. This wasn’t a Fascist Hitler that wished to save Western civilization from its money-grubbers and lesser men and elevate it to a new Roman glory, free of defect; it wasn’t even a Soviet Stalin that wished to remake the West into a socialist Utopia under world-wide Communism. This was a mad beast, completely free of reason and prideful in its lack thereof, that wanted nothing less than complete annihilation of the West and everything it has ever stood for. As was put into stark, clear language by Hussein Massawi, formerly part of the Hezballah leadership:
“We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”
This statement was nominally made regarding the Jews of Israel, but it clearly applies to that which created Israel and has provided a haven for the Jews for 2000 years, the West, as evidenced by the events in New York and elsewhere in the world over the past 15 years.
What could possibly be more enticing to post-modern Man? Here is an object so vile, so antithetical to our collective conscience, that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the post-modernist to imagine something more satisfying to his refined concupiscence. If aligning oneself with Soviet Russia with its gulags and mass purges was thrilling to the academic encrusted with idle boredom, then putting on the mantle of the jihadi would be positively rapturous. To preach the elimination of Western civilization while comfortably situated among the fineries bought with and protected by the laborious centuries-long application of its principles is to finally and gloriously cross that asymptotic boundary beyond which exists no light or good thing. Mathematicians have long insisted that it is impossible to divide by zero, but artists and academics have been struggling for decades now to do precisely that, and may have finally found their divisor.
