(Sorry for all the technical problems today; even my blogging software, it seems, didn't want to hear what it is that I have to say in this entry. You can reach me starting next week care of the Guantanamo Bay "patriot retraining center," everyone!)

On Wednesday I was talking here about the Bush administration, including a throwaway line about how I consider terrorism a "complex" subject, and how frustrating it is to see the current administration paint it to the American public in simple terms, in order to justify morally-ambiguous actions done for personal gain (like invading countries, repealing environmental laws, quashing critical opinions, etc). And now here it is, not even 72 hours later, and we have a new major terrorist attack to report; dozens dead in London, hundreds more injured, including (statistically-speaking, that is) what has to be at least a couple of readers of this journal. And it almost sounds like an empty cliche at this point in history, to say that one's heart goes out to those in London dealing with the whole mess right now, but mine really does - and especially being here in Chicago, which relies on its public transit just as much as London does, and is the city that London Guardian readers chose a couple of years ago as the one city they'd most move to, if they were no longer allowed to live in London. None of this, however, changes my opinion that terrorism is a complex subject, a much more complex one than either Bush or Blair want to admit; and that attacks like this recent one in London are just going to get more regular and more deadly, as long as we continue as a society to treat terrorism in the simple way we currently are. And since this is a rather strong statement that deserves a longer explanation, I thought I'd take a few minutes today and do so.

I in particular, and many others around the world as well, consider terrorism to be an issue - just like poverty is an issue, just like pollution is an issue, just like the economy is an issue. Like poverty and pollution and the economy, terrorism is a dangerous issue, and one that causes legitimate deaths on a regular basis. Like poverty and pollution and the economy, terrorism is a global issue, one that affects all of us as human beings no matter where we live, no matter what form of government under which we live. And like poverty and pollution and the economy, terorrism is a multifaceted issue, with its causes laying in a whole host of topics that may not even seem related at first - consumerism, the world's diminishing supply of fossil fuels, religious radicalism inspired by a lack of basic infrastructure in a country, lack of modern education, outdated monarchies that are supported by the rest of the industrialized world when it suits their purposes, etc.

What terrorism is not, however, is a traditional "enemy," like the Soviet Union was our enemy, like Nazi Germany was our enemy. Unlike the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, terrorism does not have a central public leader, nor proscribed physical boundaries. (Kill Hitler, in other words, and Nazi Germany is in serious trouble; kill Osama bin Laden, on the other hand, and not a damn thing about terrorism changes.) Unlike the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, terrorism does not have a standing military, with uniforms and officers, a way to surrender during a battle, a way to claim victory if they win. There is no civilian populace that officially considers itself followers of that ideology in order to be a member of that populace. There is no government, no politicians, no constitution, no laws, no infrastructure. There is no flag, no taxes, no public opinion influencing what it does, no official representatives to which to open negotiations or speak on its behalf at the UN.

This is, in fact, probably the most frustrating thing of all about the Bush/Blair Cabal, and their insistence that terrorism is a traditional enemy against which we can fight a traditional war - namely, they don't follow their own false metaphor through, when it comes to the actual war they want to fight and what the actual aims of a traditional war are. If you stop and think about it, really, the goal of us fighting the Nazis during WWII was not to simply kill every German on the face of the planet; the goal of any traditional war, in fact, is to knock out so much of your enemy's military that they can no longer wage a war against you. And this can only happen if you have an inherent organizational structure that can make such a decision, and have a public represenative who can actually stand up and declare this to the rest of the world. World War II didn't end by the death count reaching a certain number; it ended by the official representatives of Nazi Germany declaring in public that the war was over, and signing a treaty attesting to such a thing.

The only way to truly fight terrorism is to fight it like we fight poverty, and pollution, and a bad economy - as an issue , a complex and multifacted one, which requires a complex and multifacted response on our part in order to succeed. Yes, we need to be arresting prominent leaders of terrorist organizations; but has anyone bothered asking why there are so many people in the Middle East right now who see suicide as an attractive alternative to living in the Middle East? Maybe we need to acknowledge that when you have no water, when you have no electricity, when you have no education, when you have no roads, life really doesn't seem worth living. Maybe if we provide some of the basic necessities of life that we take so much for granted in industrialized nations, potential terrorists will start understanding why it's better to live to fight another day - 'cause let me tell ya, 100 miles of unpaved desert ending in a McDonald's ain't seeming to do the fucking trick.

Ultimately the best way I can describe what I'm talking about is to relate it to my own life, which of course is what I frequently do here. And the fact of the matter is that I've often gotten just as angry in my own life about the things going on around me as terrorists do - I can't even begin to tell you, for example, how many times I have fantasized about going down to the post office with a gun, and just killing all those lazy, fatass, rude, incompetent fucks down there who are always losing my mail, never seeming to care, accountable to fucking no one about it.

And frankly, in many cases the only single thing that has stopped me from putting such a plan into motion is by thinking of all the opportunities I'll lose by doing so - the opportunity to open my arts center, the opportunity to find a sane woman to love me, the opportunity to bike down well-paved streets in a clean, safe city, and to eventually end up at an air-conditioned cafe with working toilets and cheap coffee. Now, remove the opportunity to open an arts center; remove the well-paved streets, the women who won't go out with terrorists, the air-conditioning and the working toilets and all the rest. With all of these gone, what then becomes my motivation for not going to the post office and shooting it up? Why NOT take matters into my own hands, when there really isn't anything to be gained by keeping quiet, or by complaining through proper channels?

This is the question I think we all need to be asking ourselves these days, and which so few Americans and others are - with things in the Middle East the way they are, can anyone really come up with a reason why someone there SHOULDN'T be a terrorist? And let's not forget, those of you who want to call me a traitor right now and ship me off to Guantanamo, that it was an American military general who first came up with this idea. Specifically it was General Marshall, whose post-WWII "Marshall Plan" was not only one of the most radical military ideas in modern history, but also historically one of the most sound - that if a victorious conquerer really wants its vanquished foe to change, it is the conquerer's moral and legal obligation to spend billions of dollars of their own money, getting that vanquished foe's society up to the same standards as the conquerers.

For fuck's sake, I thought we all learned this lesson already, at the end of World War I! In that case the victorious allies did to Germany pretty much exactly what Bush and Blair are doing right now to the Middle East; that is, continuing to punish them after the war is over, letting the vanquished country lie in ruin, seizing a majority of that country's natural resources as "spoils of war" to pay for the cost of having the war to begin with. We did all this already with Germany a hundred years ago, and look what happened - it pissed off all these Germans, to be precise, to the point that a dangerous conservative religious radical was able to stand up in public and say, "Look, we've really got nothing else to lose at this point. Why not form an army again and go take back what's ours? So what if you die in the process? It's better than living in this hellhole we call Germany these days."

Nothing in Germany got better, in fact, until the Marshall Plan after WWII started; when suddenly billions upon billions of allied dollars started getting pumped into Germany's economy, to do things like build roads, put up electrical lines, found schools, create jobs, provide things to do (cafes, museums, bands, etc) besides sitting in your destroyed home and crying yourself to sleep. It was only then, and not UNTIL then, that millions of Germans realized that there a lot better things they could be doing with their time besides supporting a fascist regime. (And let's also not forget that from its founding in 1871 until 1946, Germany had been ruled throughout its entire official history under a series of fascist regimes, with those crazy ol' Kaisers in many ways even worse than the fuckin' Nazis.)

Now, let's not forget the point of today's entry, which is that the Marshall Plan wasn't the only thing done to produce the remarkable turnaround we saw in Germany after the war - we did still arrest and jail Nazi troublemakers, did keep American troops there for 60 years (and still counting), did engage in a certain amount of bloodshed. My point, though, is that these are the only things the Bush/Blair Cabal are doing in the Middle East these days, without anything even resembling a Marshall Plan in place or even being considered; and we will never solve the issue of terrorism as long as we are approaching it in this manner.

Ultimately what Bush and Blair and others are doing is what's exactly seen in the infamous George Orwell novel 1984, which is the ultimate example of fascists having their cake and eating it too; they're creating in the public mind a traditional enemy that can't be quantified in any traditional way, and asking the public to support a traditional war against this enemy that can't be quantified in any traditional way either. And so it allows these people to fight the "war" in any way they want, without having to offer any documentation of how the "war" is going - how do you document something like the "war on terrorism" anyway, when your enemy doesn't have uniforms, doesn't keep records, doesn't even have an official number of how many people fight for it? Like Big Brother and Eurasia, instead we just get these hazy reports about how a couple of insurgents were arrested here, and a couple of suicide bombers killed there, with an unnamed and unexpected attack on our soil always a future possibility, just in case morale about the war gets down and they need to whip the public back into a frothing anger.

I don't believe that we'll ever be able to get completely rid of terrorism, just like I don't believe that we'll ever be able to get completely rid of poverty, or pollution, or economic downturns. I do believe, however, that if we approach the subject with the complexity and realistic expectations it deserves, we can certainly reduce terrorism a lot more than it currently is, just as we can severely reduce poverty, and pollution, and economic downtimes. It starts with how we as a society are going to define such a thing as terrorism, and define the steps needed to realistically combat such a thing as terrorism. It starts with us demanding leaders who understand this complexity as much as we do, and refusing to let them do things for personal fascist gain that they justify by invoking the name of a shadowy "enemy." It starts by all of us - yes, you and me - getting a whole lot smarter about what's going on around us, and acknowledging that a terrorist is a much more complicated thing than the dirty, unthinking towel-wearing animal with a bomb strapped to his godless chest, as Bush wants us all to think when hearing the word. It starts with us, not with the government, which I'm convinced is a big reason things went so horribly wrong here during the 2004 election. It starts with you, and whether you're going to consider terrorism an issue to be tackled in the same complex way all issues are handled, or an "enemy" to be tackled by simply shooting as many people as humanly possible in the face, and hoping that the survivors will eventually get the hint and become the docile little sheep so many of us in America have become. How are you going to consider it? What is your response going to be?