As my mother was frying up the karela today, she mentioned that the London bombers all appear to be British men of Pakistani origin. One of them, as she said, had an eight-month-old child. Another, who killed seven people, came from a family that owned a fish-and-chip shop. A third, who killed thirteen people, told his parents that he was going to London to attend a religious studies seminar. When they couldn't contact him after the bombings, they called police to report him missing.
There's a tendency to see our current struggles against terrorism as partof some great clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, inwhich two civilizations go in and only one will come out alive. It's manifest,explicitly or implicitly, in almost everything Tacitus writes --
Perhaps the villains' expectation is that the Briton will quail as theSpaniard, reacting to massacre with headlong flight from foreignfields. I think not. About me, I see older Scots with a steely flintin their eyes. The reckoning will come.
Can you hear how the names of ancient Western nations are invoked? Can you see the Scots' claymores gleaming? It's understandable that many people in the West would see a war between two civilizations here. After all, it's how anybody willing to commit terrorism against us would see it, and it might seem that the only way to take a terrorist act seriously is to endow it with the greatest significance possible -- often, the same grand significance that its perpetrators give it. And so the frame is built. George Lakoff may talk a lot about framing, but Osama Bin Laden is actually good at it. The War on Terror isn't first Bush's frame, it's the other half of Osama's, and it's the one that Tacitus now operates in. Of course, Tacitus is right in defending the West as a morally better civilization than much of the Islamic world -- something for which we have feminists, antislavery crusaders, and others in the liberal tradition to thank. But the way Tacitus conceives of the relation between these two unequal civilizations is parallel to the way Bin Laden conceives of it -- a war between two civilizations, only one of whom will survive.
