The Sphinx

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes.
Instantly the whole previous picture vanished.
I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam.
Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny
at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches
of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun.
--Reflections in a Toolshed, C. S. Lewis

Think from outside the box;
collapse the box and take a fucking knife to it
--Bansky

His richly philosophical intellect was not
at any time affected by unrealities.
To the substances of terror he was sufficiently alive,
but of its shadows he had no apprehension
--The Sphinx, Edgar Allen Poe
________________

Reader Terrible recently brought the Edgar Allen Poe story The Sphinx to my attention as an analog to the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©). In that this 165 year old story succeeds so well it should be noted.

Much as the pre-Socratic Heraclitus reckoned the sun must measure about the size of his foot, as he reckoned the latter spanned its circumference, so the spooked protagonist in The Sphinx apprehends a terrible menace (not this Terrible) through his window. It is only when his rational house mate explains to him the source of his fright that he is able to release his fixation and see the apparition for the benign thing it is.

So Islam is now an idee fixe for those who would support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Over lunch I met with an otherwise well-educated friend, a college instructor. Realizing of course that this is the Deep South and he is a Christian, but this Navy veteran is convinced -- on the basis of "testimony" he has heard from "recovering" Muslims -- that Islam is the devil's creed, and that all Islamic people are bent on killing Americans.

He confuses their dogma and prayers with their potentiality, and sees their doctrine as a pathological thing to be exterminated, a la Spengler. "They want to kill YOU -- they pray 5 times a day to kill you!" he told me in all sincerity. "That's fine," said I, "as long as they must then go about their day herding their goats, making their yogurt and so on." I asked him if he thought his country willing to go door-to-door and kill every heathen Muslim. He agreed that is what it would take.

He has been made so fearful -- so repelled -- by this group of people, that he and his fellows see that as a reasonable objective. As with the protagonist in Poe's story, he is possessed of an "abnormal gloom" and fixation on "omens" (the Book of Revelations being one of their guides.)

Of course, if they were true students of the Good Book, they would understand the proscriptions against the hastening of the End Times. Instead, their loyalty goes to the false prophets who look like them on FOX news.

They are prey to the age-old xenophobic fear of The Other, The Infidel. They do not realize that they are also The Other.