The Terrorist in Us

By Crispin Sartwell

Just after John Ashcroft announced the first indictment for the 9.11 attacks, CNN picked out a telling detail. Zacarias Moussaoui, they said, had been very polite as he applied for flight lessons and bought knives. He called women "ma'am."

The anchor seemed to find it hard to believe that a monster of evil would say "ma'am." Or perhaps he just thought that we, his viewers, would be surprised by that.

One disturbing feature of the video tape in which bin Laden and friends celebrate the terror they've wreaked is the normalcy of the conversation, as if it was a bunch of guys talking about the Eagles game over beer rather than killers talking about their atrocity.

Calling women "ma'am" and talking about the Eagles game will get you a long way out here in Glen Rock, PA.

In many cultures, moral concepts are extremely close to concepts of normalcy: people who are inconspicuous or typical are regarded as good.

In our culture, this amounts to a moral endorsement of the whiteish suburban householder and his family, and moral goodness is often established for everyday purposes by factors such as lawn care and SUV ownership.

The folks who fit this description (and I include myself) recognize one another as decent Americans. We've got our problems with the kids and the job, perhaps, but we acknowledge one another at the video store or the high school sports event with a recognition that is a form of moral approval.

And this approval is of course largely based on appearance: the lawn, the hair, the clothing, the car, the makeup, and so on. If you maintain that appearance then you are presumed good until proven guilty.

If normalcy is good, then evil is abnormal. The first thought we have when the evil and bizarre explodes into our lives is that the people who did it had better turn out to be weird, which is equivalent to saying that they had better turn out to not be us, which is to say that we had better turn out to be good.

The real shock of the Columbine killings, for example, was largely due to the fact that the killers emerged from well-tended suburban homes. When the Murrah building was blown up, people initially assumed that the terrorists were foreigners, then reacted in shock when McVeigh was arrested. After that, a lot of media time was spent demonstrating for us his abnormality: his involvement with fringe groups and crazy beliefs, his wanderings: his distance from the home and family of his American origin.

In the case of the 9.11 attacks, the foreignness of the perpetrators - their origin in the Middle East, their Islamic fundamentalism - has been experienced both as a threat and a comfort. We are threatened by what is alien, and are at war with it. But we are comforted by the notion that the killers are not us, or that we are not them.

But maybe, just maybe, the locus of evil is not only out there, but in ourselves as well. Maybe we know more than we think we know about rage, fanaticism, suicide, killing.

The concept of original sin traces evil not to the incomprehensible workings of an alien force, but to the complexities, contradictions, pain, and self-loathing in our own hearts. When I subject myself to a withering self-scrutiny, I see the truth in that.

And the terrorist in ourselves, the destruction we can want and can wreak, is perfectly compatible with good lawn care. It's not that we're all morally equivalent, or that we're all murderers; it's that our ideas about who is a murderer can aid us in self-deception.

And self-deception can, in turn, lead to the most real evil. Bin Laden and the minions who said "ma'am" are thoroughly self-deceived; they believe themselves to be acting for purity and goodness and truth and God. And the real horror is: they are a lot like us.

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