Alan R.M. Jones Enough With the Candles and Tears
Either France and the rest of us can continue on as we have, with every day Ground Hog Day in Guernica and no response better than an impotent snivel, or Western civilisation can summon the righteous anger necessary to win, not merely endure.
To post that picture today would, I think, only mock the 80 Bastille Day dead.
The head of France’s security and intelligence service has warned of waves of such attacks and that the Fifth Republic is itself at risk (what could be the marginal cost in version 6.0?). President Hollande said after the last atrocity that France was at war, and he has now abandoned the White House’s pointlessly nebulous ‘violent non-state actors’ charade – are there any sentient souls left on the planet who doubt what this is about? — and is calling it a spade.
But other than a few, highly publicised bombing sorties to blow up some sand dunes, there hasn’t been much evidence of that war except for the slaughter of more innocents.
In his essay, “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell referred to Aldous Huxley’s “Dream of Phillip the Second,” in which Huxley wrote that the people in El Greco’s pictures always look as though they were in the bellies of whales:
For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The whale’s belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens… Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.
Either France and the rest of us can continue on as we have, Jonah-like, where every day is Ground Hog Day in Guernica, or Western civilisation can start getting all Sonny Corleone about it and summon the righteous anger necessary to win, not merely endure.
In his essay, “The case for rage and retribution,” penned in in the hours after the Twin Towers fell, Lance Morrow wrote,
“The worst times, as we see, separate the civilised of the world from the uncivilised. This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilised toughen up, and let the uncivilised take their chances in the game they started.”
Indeed.
So to honour Nice’s dead, I’m turning to something more martial in spirit than candles or flood-lit buildings: Connaissez-vous ces hommes.
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