The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader Book

I've been an atheist as long as i can remember and my life, in part, has been a feigned attempt toward belief. i will never believe and know this, so i scramble toward god as a tightrope walker over a net of godlessness. the point, i guess, is to get as close as possible to something i know i'll never reach; a more sophisticated (or not) form of a kid throwing a fit after having learned that santa claus is just some miserable minimum wage worker with a fake white beard and boozy breath.

radical islam is particularly fascinating to me as it's all about the endgame -- in the form, of course, of a global caliphate or orgying it up with a bunch of virgins. i remember when the nytimes printed the first pictures of the hijackers, i'd stare into the printed eyes of mohammad atta… he seemed pure evil, of course, but also imbued with some kind of secret. but that's bullshit - a variation of the kuleshov effect.

nonetheless, one wonders what it takes to be able to sit in a cockpit watching the towers grow larger and larger as you push that plane harder and harder, knowing you're minutes, now seconds, now miliseconds, from being totally vaporized. the 9/11 hijackers are repellent, naturally, but in some kind of way one is almost enviably curious. to believe in something, anything, with such furious attachment, is attractive.

i'm intensely curius about these people with such courage to die in the name of their cause. with these pure islamic warriors so critical of america's excesses… who spent the night before their death at a strip club*.

so i read all i could about the hijackers and bin laden and zawahiri and sayyid qtub (who is credited as the father of modern radical islam) to try and understand the world around me, but also to understand why and how these people came to believe so strongly in all this bullshit. and, of course, lots of this shit is political and historical and they stoke the fires of religion to keep the drums of war going… but lots of 'em are true-blue nutball koran-thumping maniacs.

paul berman wrote eloquently and with tremendous insight about sayyid qtub in his great book terror and liberalism. as did lawrence wright in, perhaps the best book on the subject, the looming tower. as did martin amis. and the shit is just weird. it's weird with all these guys, but qtub seems the weirdest. and i'm pretty certain qtub gets the award for the single most self-loathing homosexual in the history of planet earth (and, who knows, maybe paradise). as with most religious zealots, qtub hated women. and his writings about his time in america (he went to college here) are fantastic! he writes in detail about american women's sluttishness in dress and speech and action (this is the 1950s!). he recounts stories about big-breasted blondes coming on to him (um… okaaaay) and him being repulsed. and, of course, there are the stories about mohammad atta dressing in drag in order to go into an office and receive a grant or his leaving explicit instructions not to allow his mother to attend his funeral as a women would sully the scene. nice. anyway, all these stories are wildly fascinating. incredibly. with all that eros and thanos and suicide and repression and self-loathing homosexuality and just utter fucking strangeness, how could it not be? it seems that only hollywood could make that kinda shit boring.

guess not. updike tells the story of ahmed ashmawy, half egyptian, half irish, growing up and radicalized by shaikh rashid in new jersey. and here's the thing: the book is not as bad as they made it out to be. but in a way it's worse. it's just dull and incredibly unimaginative. and kind of pointless. it doesn't make sense as updike's made a career of probing the american psyche and exploring the countless ways americans fill that god-shaped hole. he's written good and great books about people so desperate for existential recognition they sell it all and move to an ashram, they attempt to use mathematics to prove the existence of god, they bury themselves in sex and bad behavior, they run away from their families, etc…

look. my own lack of interest doesn't permit me to further describe the character of ahmad (or the ridiculous plotting)... he really is that dull. and not as a person (i'm sure many suicide bombers are less fun that the keynote speaker at an insurance seminar), but as a character. he's just there. and one doesn't give a fuck or get anything other than hollow islamic platitudes that could've been picked up from a week's worth of scouring american newsrags in the few months following 9/11.

maybe it's because updike fell out of touch with the world? perhaps he didn't do the research (but his earlier novel the coup nailed a marxist islamic dictator pretty damn well)? or was he just burnt after so many decades of novel writing? or maybe the cancer that killed him two years later was hard at work. but in all of terrorist i found not one passage that spoke to the angst and existential panic that a radicalized terrorist must feel (or an interesting take on the lack thereof) that i find on nearly every page of a story or novel updike writes about boring new england middle-class schlubs. i guess updike finds transcendence in the mundane, yet creates something mundane out of the transcendent?


* is this true? it sounds in line with the typical repressed (homo)sexuality and hypocracy of these wicked assholes, but if it's true how come we haven't seen candi and scarlet describing those lapdances to leslie stahl?