The End Times Cafe: a Prophecy, Nov. 2001
It’s World Series Time. The Yankees are playing the Diamondbacks, and the festivities are grand. Tuesday evening in the Bronx, the President was on hand to throw out the first ball, an unprecedented convergence of the greatest moment in sports and the world’s pre-eminent elective office. Mr. Bush, former Managing Partner of the Texas Rangers looked snappy in his windbreaker and it’s nice to have a President who’s comfortable on a ball field. He toed the rubber in fine fashion and threw a strike, a nifty circle change. After a strenuous, off key anthem, a bald eagle swooped in from center field to its handler on the mound. This beautiful touch and the magnificent creature were featured in every game in NYC this post-season. Heaven-shaking chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A” erupted. Even if the Yankees don’t win this year, they play and plan like Champions, the way Americans are meant to do.
Nevertheless, given the living context of the moment, the deceits and cultural decline to which our dominant institutions are committed, or into which they are locked, the swooping predator put me in mind of the haunting opening verses of W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming:”
Turning and turning in a widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer. / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned…
Many Americans believe, and President Bush has said that part of what we’re fighting “terrorism” for is to protect our way of life, our freedoms and pleasures. Surely, baseball is chief among them. I felt this very strongly five or six weeks ago when an enormous surge of righteous indignation and readiness to punish the states that host the sky-jacking assailants filled America, even seeping into the media. Now, watching the parade of new sitcoms and made-for-TV dramas, I’m less sure. I marvel at the lavish if not profligate expense of capital, labor and time invested in even a single pro football game, the stadiums, the roads, the physical preparation (and salaries), the concessions and attention in the media, the vast emotional investment that probably were better directed elsewhere. Perhaps it is because modern cultural habits prevent it from being better directed that we have fallen into the trap, — so like a Venus fly-trap — of sports. And there are thousands of college football and basketball games every week with similar investments of human wealth.
Some say sports is our religion, rather as it became for the Athenians in the age of Pericles when Greece tore itself to ruins in a long civil war. “Our love of what is beautiful does not lead us to extravagance,” he said, for all his wisdom blind to coming cultural changes of the Hellenistic age, its inward-turning so like our own, its obsession with cults of diet, with androgyny and youth. The self-defining coda of the classical age was that “our adventurous spirit has forced an entry into every sea and every land. Good things from all over the world flow to us. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now.”
Pride, self-absorption, and the fear and deceits that lie within it. Honest historians and archaelogists know this about the Greeks, and about their legions of intellectual celebrants down to our day. ‘There is no culture but the Greeks’ (”we are all Greeks” wrote Shelley in the preface to his epic drama, “Hellas” 1821). ‘Everything begins with the Greeks.’ Will we inherit their fate?
The world contains a billion people that hate America and Americans for being infidels. These are people with whose tactics (terror) if not with their States (states that in most cases the West has created within the past eight decades) we are said to be at war, sort of. President Bush has aligned himself with State Department policy to create a “Palestinian” State within Israel, to divide Israel with walls and to forbid Jews from continuing to settle the Jewish heartland; so one notes the sermon of a high PLO official from the mosque atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. (Our Executive Branch does not recognize Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem and the Israelis, duly intimidated, allow Muslims to control the Mount, site of the Temples of David and Solomon, Nehemiah and Haggai).
“The attack on our Islamic allies [al Qaeda] by the heretic nations is like their First World War attack on Germany,” preached Yusuf abu Snena with a characteristic blend of rage and oddly revealing reinterpretation of history. “These dogs are again attacking us, seeking to destroy Islam. The issue today is not only Afghanistan, but also points to Europe, and those who support Europe. This is an attempt to return to the Crusades” (10-26-01); “We must give praise to Allah,” he summarized and ‘giving praise to Allah, as Al Muhajiroun explained, “means using military force, where diplomacy fails, to remove obstacles to carrying Islamic ideology to all mankind. “A true Muslim will not distance himself from Jihad” (10-26-01) as it states in the Koran. And it also states: “slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Fill your enemies with terror… those who kill in the way of Allah never die” (Surahs 9 and 44).
The day after this sermon, Yasser Arafat gathered the chiefs of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and his own Fatah-Tanzim militia to Gaza and announced he would take a State with their help. “Anyone who doesn’t like it, can drink sea water,” he boasted, adding that it was he, not Bin Laden who was the leader of Islamic forces. Three days later, Edward Walker, State Department Chief in Syrian-occupied Beirut, told a Press Conference that his Bureau remains committed to a Palestinian State with Jerusalem as its capital (10-30-01 wafa.pna.net/Eng). Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad all agree that Israel should not exist. They all target America in sermons, school texts and active terror cells…
The games, all the beautiful, expensive, terrible games play on. America commits a tiny fraction of its immense wealth to the War on Terror; the Afghanis, Saddam Hussein and Arafat, Iran and Hezbollah give it nearly everything they’ve got. Since September 09, British intelligence officers have been stationed at European border crossings, checking for Iraqis carrying anthrax. Rolf Ekeus, former head of UNSCOM and colleague of Maj. Scott Ritter, details Saddam’s long term involvement in chemical warfare and terrorism (Milan, Il Sole 24 Ore, 10-26-01). “With every passing day he becomes more popular on the
Arab Street,” states Ekeus. “While the world is busy thinking about Bin Laden, Saddam is busy thinking about how to control the world. He who controls the [Persian] Gulf controls the oil, and he who controls the oil becomes a world power. Non-conventional weapons are a necessity for him.”
At the Donut Cafe, II, attention rests elsewhere. They’re talking about flu shots, the local election and Molly who used to work the counter. A man with a Texas drawl discusses hymnals with the lady at my right. Though the light is bad the coffee’s hot, as is the toast. The old people eat muffins. A five-year old makes a mess while his mother baby-talks him. The clock hands crawl across lunch hour.
Up June Street at Bagels & Friends there’s a strange mix of women who seem awfully friendly. A sullen, dread-locked black woman drapes a proprietary arm around the shoulders of an off-duty waitress as she engorges a plate of potatoes and eggs. A very fat blond gal gets up to hug a pretty animated thing who wants to talk about her visit to a dentist. The image of the Attorney General flickers on a small TV set high in the wall facing the counter. What is he saying? How much can it matter at this point? Beige paint peels above the kitchen ventilator. The coffee’s okay and outside, rust-colored leaves swirl through the hilly old industrial city. It’s gray and cold. Far above the noise, a red-tailed hawk is hunting.
The CIA is sharing intelligence information with Syria, Sudan and Libya. Even the State Department terms them terrorist nations, but now they’re going “to help us investigate and defeat Osama bin Laden’s network” (New York Times, 10-30-01). “They’re going to help us in ways they don’t need to acknowledge” says one official, mysteriously. Trust us.
My car-flags came last Monday. They work great. The President says Islam is not the enemy; it’s a religion of peace. Witches hang from trees and rooftops. The neighborhood’s filled with black be-hatted burlap sacks and pillowcases with painted-on faces and stuffed with dried leaves. The kids are trick or treating, adorable groups of make-believe evil doers. There’s a knock at the door.
Thirty years before the end, Pericles said, “we are free and tolerant in our private lives, but in public affairs we keep to the law” (The Peloponnesian Wars, Bk. II, 37). That’s never been an easy balance. “We rely not on secret weapons, but on our own real courage and loyalty.” What traction is there for the courage and patriotism of most Americans? To what are we loyal as a culture, through the institutions that form or deform us? Will the Yankees stage a great comeback? Like Pericles we once believed, “our system of government does not copy the institutions of our neighbors; but we are a model to others.” Is America still the unique, Scripture based nation it was? Do the forms remain after the soul expires? Into what strange beast are we being re-molded, and in whose image? Will others inherit what we and our fathers have built?