As the U.S. Senate prepares to take up the nuclear option, as the U.S. steps gingerly toward a trade confrontation with China, as pensions and real estate hang as if on a precipice, I'm not worried.
My saintly wife will tell you how I do sometimes rant-and-rail, about this-or-that, how I promise to pull up stakes and move to, say, South Africa. But I never do. Because at the end of the day, I believe, we'll muddle through. Americans have seen worse and gotten by, I tell myself. The system is resilient. This too shall pass.
Not necessarily. I have spent the last few weeks reading Salman Rushdie's most recent masterwork, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The Earth is constantly shaking, people are always dying, nothing is permanent in this book. Everything and everyone around the narrator is subject to sudden disaster and destruction. The survivor's job is to witness, then tell the tale.
In many ways 9-11 was a visit from Rushdie World. Rushdie himself had moved to New York by then, trading in his beloved Tottenham Hotspur for a New York Yankee cap. And the tragedy is a sub-text to the book. It can happen here. It does. It will. Think of it as evolution in action. Too many people are just no darned good. Their greed, their causes, their passions make them all like nitroglycerin. And the Earth itself is no better.
Yet Rushdie is still here. And I'm still here. And you're still here. For how long we can't know. And we all seem fairly prosperous. Those with talent, and those who are willing to change themselves, may witness more, may survive longer, and may (like Rushdie) leave a mark.
After all, Salman Rushdie survived the fatwa, he survived a life in hiding, he even survived 9/11, and eventually he got the girl, beautiful, charming, splendiferous (she even cooks like angel), why would she marry an old codger with depression and typing skills?
Yet when the beauty of Padma Lakshmi had faded into dust, when all the works of this time have vanished into dust, there will still be the words Rushdie wrote, like those of Shakespeare in that, the way he played with language, the way he brought East and West together, Islam and Europe together, yin and yang together in an explosion of prose never before seen, and never to be seen again. She's the lucky one.
You don't believe me?
Read him. Try hard not to be changed by it. You will fail. Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Tariq Mustafa on May 18, 2005 11:37 AM writes...
Hi Dana,
One logical question, if you can answer: Why do controvercial figures always must write a 'masterpiece'? Doesn't that smack of an non-intellegent quickly-thrown clapping? The guy wrote something (that he had to try hard to prove it is not what it is) that enraged a billion ordinary people across the globe -- I repeat 'one billion ordinary people' - not a handful of bigots. He was insulting one of the most respected personalities of the world. And that probably made him the darling of the west overnight. Unbiased? Hardly.
I bet if we were at a global connectivity level that we are today and he were to do that evil piece of 'masterpiece' again, the world could have seen many, not just one 9/11s. The level of connectivity that we have now, is changing the way we react to happenings around the world. One right or wrong reporting by Newsweek can take 9 lives and countless riots across the globe.
The West needs to have what is called a jury - someone to tell the judge where he is focusing too much on the written law and too little on the human aspect of the case. If you look things by the fixed Western standards, you might be ignoring the billions of (now more connected) people who might not share the Western ethics and lo and behold you've more of Khatamshuds coming up, one after the other.
- Tariq
Permalink to Comment2. bobby on May 18, 2005 12:54 PM writes...
Tariq, do I have you right here.. you are saying that Rushdie's book, published on the net (with the nets exposure level) would inspire more 9/11 episodes?? & the blame would be Salmans?? Strange..
Let me quote the words of another great writer.. Mrk Twain aka Samuel Clemens.. "Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform".. Is it so hard to realize that there can be a billion bigots?
In the words of the man know as christ, "if your eye offends you, pluck it out". or, to (further) paraphrase, "the offense is in the offended, not the act percieved." If you wish to not see.. don't look.
Salman was/is trying to point out the presence of blinders (very simplistic interpretation) on most people. Instead of opening their eyes, they wish to kill the messenger, which, it seems, is a fairly common response.
Permalink to Comment3. Tariq Mustafa on May 20, 2005 03:22 PM writes...
Seems like Dana and you both didn't get me quite. Surely it is because of my inability to express myself clearly.
I meant a few things, which I will repeat here again:
a. The world is more connected now than what it used to be.
b. Making of a genius (in West) seems to be an easy job - just do/write something that hit a billion people. Your later works will automatically qualify for being masterpieces. You will get protection (and fame).
c. Newseek didn't kill anyone. The news of the incident happening at Gutenama Bay spread wildly and resulted in killing of 19 people. The more world is now a more volatile space. Send out a correct or incorrect news that hit a billion people out there and wierd things will happen. More resolves will be made to take revenge against an imaginative enemy resulting in episodes like 9/11.
d. Send out the right messages and it can/will defintly help clean the rot that makes terrorism grow. The 'right' does not necessarily means 'right by Western standards' rather 'right by the newer global situation'.
Permalink to Comment4. Jesse Kopelman on May 20, 2005 05:19 PM writes...
I've never read Rushdie's books, so I have no opinion on whether they are great Literature or not. Dana has read them and thinks they are. Tariq, have you actually read the books or are you judging them solely on the offense they gave? I would note that, as in most cases like this, the billion enraged ordinary people were not enraged by the book but because their religious leaders told them to be enraged. I'd be surprised if the billion, have read the entire Qur'an let alone the entire Satanic Verses.
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