No, that's not me in the picture. It's some writer named Juan Villoros, ruminating at a sidewalk cafe in Mexico City. I just thought it was an apropos photo, evoking a mood conducive to my posting today.
The first thing that comes to mind as I ponder the whole damned mess is the old cliché, that rhetorical question, Where do I begin...?
I could begin at our 0 A.D., the Ground Zero of 911.
And of course the blessed time before that watershed -- in the halcyon years "B.G.Z." when in our relative ignorance of the extent of Islam all we had to worry about was what Seinfeld's Kramer was up to (before Michael Richards' career was ruined by our escalating mass neurosis over "racism") and whether "Y2K" was going to cause general blackouts and ruin our quaintly primitive "World Wide Web" -- contained our ignorance of the assiduously army-ant formication of Muslims in their perpetually expanding diaspora patiently, fanatically weaving the networking tapestry of their global revival of jihad, like grapevining termites burrowing their meticulously diverse voracity into the foundational timber of our civilization.
At the turn of the previous century, some time in the early 1900s I believe (though it could have been as late as the Nineteen Teens or even Twenties), the great (though largely unknown) Dutch scholar of Islam, Snouck Hurgronje -- who studied Arabic, helped administer the Dutch colony of Indonesia, and even disguised himself as a Muslim to go on the Hajj -- wrote that the days of Islam's greatness were long past and that nowadays (in his time, early 20th century), it perdured only as a quaint Orientalist relic of a bygone era; but that, should Muslims ever renew their militant ethos, the world would once again have reason to fear.
Well, guess what: Those Mohammedan army ants (or
jihad ants) had been busy as beavers (to mix metaphors) planning all along "under our very noses", as the 20th century unfolded, to get their ducks in a row (still with the mixing of metaphors) for doing what it takes to re-ignite their perennial war against humanity -- which hadn't really ceased in modern times but had only been put on the back burner while Islam since the 18th century had collapsed in internal decadence & corruption relative to a stupendously expanding and progressing West.
And so, while the West was busy frenetically progressing, and its vanguard America was undergoing one of its rhythmic vacillations of power (shifting from the Clinton Years of the 90s to the Bush Years of the New Millennium), Muslims had been assiduously planning to announce their return: Like Jack Nicholson in
The Shining, hacking his way with an axe through the bathroom door to get at his terrified wife and kids, on that brilliantly sunny day in September, 2001, they massacred over 3,000 Americans -- their way of saying:
"You thought we'd gone away? Well, here we are again! Here's Johnny!!!"
Then we have the years A.G.Z. (the "post-911" era we still live in), characterized chiefly by a semi-incoherent mélange of different styles & degrees of denial -- whose only partial coherence lies in the tortured twin fears that drive all our Western denial, whether it be the denial of the broader Western Mainstream, or of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream: the twin fears being
1) fear of Muslims exploding
2) fear of ourselves succumbing to our own innate white Western "racism" against Brown People.
Over the years, I've slowly come to realize, as my protracted ennui ebbs and flows, that the vast majority "in the Counter-Jihad" are motivated by these twin fears as much as is the broader Western Mainstream. The only difference is that the former are in a more complicated, tortured double-helix of denial generated by their double-virtue-signalling, whereby they are simultaneously anxious about maintaining their counter-jihad cred while also maintaining their virtue of not being "racist" against Muslims -- all the while, of course, denying they are maintaining this double life.
So that's essentially what these past 19 years have been; with a tangential diversity of sociopolitical distractions swirling all around this core of denial.
Now, while the Two Denials of the Two Mainstreams are substantially the same Denial, they are (as I noted in part above) different in form. Another way to put their difference is that the Denial cultivated by the Counter-Jihad Mainstream is
dynamic; whereas the Denial of the Other Mainstream is static. What makes the former denial dynamic is its denial about its own denial, which is joined at the hip to its own retention of the post-modern anxiety about being "racist" and thus worrying about being too anti-Muslim (and, as part of this, conflating a general condemnation of all Muslims with some kind of inexorable slippery slope toward genocide, as if the one automatically entails the other). This anxiety coupled with the counter-jihad's own propensity to learn more about the horrors of Islam (with a self-congratulatory sense of being free of the "political correctness" that characterizes the broader Western Mainstream) creates a spiraling tension that is dynamic, insofar as it
could lead to the position of Zero Tolerance against All Muslims, and often
seems like it's getting closer to that logical point, but never actually does. Hence, the "asymptotic" nature of it I have spoken of over the years.
So, at the beginning of my musing posting here I asked "Where do I begin?" And now as I wind to a close, I may ask, "Where do we go from here?"
As I have surmised with the battle fatigue of years of butting my head against both Mainstreams -- ever since 2015, when I "snapped" and morphed from being
The Hesperado to The Desperado -- those of us who are worried about Islam (never mind that there prevails no coherent unanimity about what precisely we are worried about Islam doing) are increasingly hoping for what might be called the "Grim Pleasure" (sort of a "black humor" take on the "guilty pleasure", with humor itself being the blackly comedic underside of this tragic-comic farce we suffer through in these years A.G.Z.) of an attack (if not a concatenation of attacks) by Muslims worse than 911. Why, the reader might ask, would you ever hope for
that...? It's obviously not something one desires to hope for; and if deep down inside we do, it's not our fault, but entirely the fault of Muslims and all those PC MCs who dominate our culture around us here in the West, who continue this increasingly surreal charade of denial about the danger of Islam.
That's likely the best case scenario, and doesn't necessarily portend any comprehensive awakening -- at least not one in time to reverse our eventual doom at the hands of Muslims pursuing their revival of jihad as this 21st century devolves.
Meanwhile, I think I'll enjoy another cappuccino with a lemonade chaser as I sit here not far from the shade of white cedar trees whose yellowed leaves ruffle only slightly in the lightsome breeze of an idle afternoon...
