The Aesthetics of a Point of No Return
Terrorism, The Master, and Kundera’s Kitsch
Last week, I caught a cold at just about the worst possible time. I was already immobile—still recovering from my back injury, still nursing tendonitis in my rotator cuff—and I also had a job interview. Poor me, etc. Naturally, I spent most of the week on the couch with my new friend the heating pad, depressingly online and woozy from cough medicine, firmly in the throes of Twitter rants and TikTok fever dreams.
One night, while reading up on our un-payable national debt and fiscal dominance and listening to Lil Wayne’s “Right Above It,” I came across a tweet addressing a compilation of creepy TikTok reels having to do with Osama bin Laden.
Yes, that Osama, the leader of al-Qaeda who masterminded September 11th, and a year later published a manifesto explaining why he did it. It is this infamous “Letter to America” which TikTok brain glommed onto in the midst of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, as if unearthing some prophetic artifact foretelling the endtimes in which we are now collectively enmeshed.
I say creepy because the TikToks all deploy the same language and appear to read from the same script (“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now” / “I feel like I’m going through an existential crisis” / “I will never look at this country the same”).
The videos frame bin Laden as a misunderstood antihero who was ahead of his time in seeing America for what it is—an imperialist tyrant, an exploitative capitalist superpower, and an international purveyor of oppression. The videos also re-frame the very notion of “terrorism” as a kind of misnomer, an instrument of the master narrative, and yet another shibboleth of Western propaganda. Under a colonialist regime, the argument goes, the only ‘legitimate’ form of violence is violence by the state.
Not to be deterred by my impending interview, I decided to unravel the blasphemous scroll. It took me nearly an hour to find the letter, which The Guardian inexplicably had removed from its website in the aftermath of the TikTok storm. The powers that be, it seemed, did not trust us to have such dangerous agitprop in our hands.
Read it, if you must.
Personally, I found the letter, on the whole, pretty lame. A run-of-the-mill rundown of anti-American memes. Some of the talking points contain a grain of truth; the U.S. has indeed committed many horrible crimes, and we are still reckoning with the consequences. Most of the letter, however, is hysterical, and bears all the usual bells and whistles of doomsaying religious jabberwocky.
In the eyes of bin Laden, we are a nation of sinners, and we need to be cleansed. Our crimes include “fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gamblings,” and my personal favorite, “trading with interest.” All the hits.
By the time I finished, I couldn’t help but wonder why I did this to myself—why we, the people, are so ready to leap down these conspiratorial rabbit holes. Don’t even trip. Here in America, time is money, and I want my fkn money back.
“I do think we can connect novelists and terrorists here. In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that’s filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act. People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. People who are powerless make an open theater of violence. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.”
(Don DeLillo, NYT interview)
Here’s something I didn’t know: the term “meme” was created in 1976 by none other than the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, which I own but never plan to read. A meme, according to Dawkins, is a “unit of culture”—be it an idea, belief, or pattern of behavior—which is “hosted” in the minds of individuals and reproduces itself by “jumping” from the mind of one person to the mind of another.
In the early days of the Internet, the attorney Mike Godwin coined a heuristic that would become known in the field of memetics as Godwin’s Law: the longer an online discussion goes on, the probability of a comparison to the Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
In the three decades since its formulation, I think we’ve learned a lot. We’ve grown into our pseudonymous online selves, and the stretch marks are still visible.
I’d like to offer a corollary to Godwin’s Law: the rules of online engagement dictate that the hotter the take, the more likely it is to receive airtime. Under the thumb of the algorithm, cooler heads do not prevail; the most inexorable and demagogic voice will run the room. Regardless of the community, the most extreme explanation carries with it an unbeatable currency—a call for extreme action.
“I need everyone to stop what they’re doing right now, and…”
This is strong brew: the curious sign at the entrance of the rabbit hole that makes us stop whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing and say, gee, that makes me feel some type of way, I wonder what kind of crazy is on the other side.
The billboards along the interstellar highway all say the same thing: “This will change your life.” Are we surprised? There is a reason the dark corners of the social media experiment have a mad cult-like energy to them. Don’t you want to feel something? Be a force for progress? Live on the right side of history?
We all do. Our country is a paradox: born of a successful and lasting fight for freedom, and at once traumatized by foundational sins for which we have never fully atoned. And so the billboards read: You, too, can be a part of the next revolution. There is no greater impulse in American life, and now there is a market for it.
We are citizens of DeLillo’s world. Heads, shoulders, knees, and toes. You could say we are alienated in the Marxist sense, where the society in which we produce is not a home, and we labor over goods that are being sent to a parallel reality. Because so much of our workaday lives is meaning-free, we are therefore primed to receive meaning. We need to remind ourselves that we are alive, take our medicine. Most of what we need we get over-the-counter, in the form of entertainment—that ritual, as Knausgård puts it, “in which we can allow ourselves to feel the strongest emotions without obligation.” Further up the spectrum lie more drastic forms of programming, the allure of not simply consuming but serving something greater.
I’m reminded of the Cause in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master (2012), in which a charismatic philosopher-firebrand (Philip Seymour Hoffman) exploits the wartime traumas of his followers in order to break down their sense of self-identity and bolster his own celebrity. In a gripping scene, we witness Hoffman’s leader submit the volatile war vet Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) to processing. Most people won’t see themselves in Freddie; he seems to be capable of anything, and guilty of far more than the usual transgressions. Still, we might see flashes of ourselves in the answers he gives, in the face of questions we are all asked.
Terrorism is the darkest of mirrors. It is “meaning” in its most absolute, horrifying, and apocalyptic form—a belief so strong that someone would kill indiscriminately to prove its point. To commit an act of terror is not only to believe that God or truth or the state is on one’s side, but to decide one has no recourse to do anything but murder civilians.
I never thought I’d have to say this, but these beliefs in concurrence deserve universal condemnation.
Watching these reaction videos, I now realize some people do not agree. Perhaps they see more to gain from platforming these opinions than they have to lose. They are part of something they see as new and transformational; they feel alive.
Here is the problem: there is no way to morally justify terrorism in any instance without admitting the possibility of it in every instance. In a world run by Godwin’s Law, the stakes are always high; the ends always “appear” to justify the means. For this reason, no act of terror can or ever should be contextualized. It is a complete and total denial of the human capacity to imagine a better world.
Has terrorism itself become a meme?
“Some of you are artists. All of you are gamblers. But we have forgotten, I think, that there exists a third and final form of speculation to capture mankind’s imagination.” St. John’s shoulders tense as he sweeps a hand toward the path snaking up into the forest like an arroyo. “Prophesy. The aesthetics of a point of no return. Terror, mass death, extinction.”
He leans down to pick the book up off the ground and, straining to overcome his breathlessness, begins to rip out the rest of its contents, shifting the V of his chest to look on as page after page is lifted up by the gale and atomized, pausing intermittently to mop the sweat from his eyes, the hair from his brow, only to throw himself back into his task, a show of expulsion somewhere between striptease and flagellation, the reviled texts sailing twenty, thirty, forty yards over the water’s surface, turning curlicues in the violence of air, looking at times like they might blow back, back into his arms, before at last surrendering themselves, like negated tears, to the crackling maw of the sea.
(“The Pirates of Sucuraj”)
In my last piece, I wrote about the character Sabina in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Sabina is both irresistible and too transient to ever pin down. In some ways, she is the more sophisticated version of Freddie. Together, they wander the smoke-filled rooms of 20th century America, in search of a Cause that never seems to last for long.
In a chapter titled “The Grand March,” Kundera traces the origins of the word “kitsch” from Nazi Germany through the arc of Sabina’s life under Soviet Communism.
Kitsch, according to Kundera, is the “beautiful lie,” the recycled “images, metaphors, and vocabulary” through which authoritarianism sustains itself. Importantly, kitsch is language and art that feeds entirely upon feeling: “When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.”
This is the Grand March—the totalitarian state’s conversion of all media into mass programming, a kind of serialized truth religion which rejects everything but the existence of the ideal. For Sabina, totalitarian kitsch is her life’s enemy, the world of nods and “grinning idiots” from which she cannot help but outrun.
Where does she go?
America, baby.
In the U.S., of course, kitsch hits different. If the Grand March made war on freedom of thought and the consumer, here we experience its inversion: the extreme foregrounding of the individual as an agent of change.
We fight two flows of propaganda—1) the polemics of government representatives and their special-interest overlords, and 2) the soul-fracking of an attention economy ruled by influencers hawking ever stronger ideological medicine. Content is designed to be picked up, put down, scrubbed through, in quick succession. Everything is dialed up to an 11, eminently digestible, but nothing sticks.
In America, kitsch is commerce.
What does commerce reject? Whatever doesn’t sell.
“The ‘end of storytelling’ was graphically predicted by Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher who warned that an impending monopoly of the technological media would replace the authentic ‘aura’ of imagination with the anonymous techniques of information. We had now entered an ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, he observed, where humanity was becoming so familiarized with electronic images of sensational horror that we would soon be able to contemplate our own destruction with a certain voyeuristic frisson.”
(Richard Kearney, “Rushdie, Kundera, Wolfe”)
Terrorism is not kitsch. Kitsch is fascination with terrorism.
This is precisely what makes bin Laden’s “Letter to America” the chilling piece of propaganda that it is. It plays upon the collective guilt and shame we as Americans know all too well. There is a piece of us that does believe ourselves to be sinners, that does believe we need to pay the price. And so “A Letter to America” provides us—not unlike Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho or William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops—with an image of our own destruction.
And yet… we transcend! The best part about America is we get to choose what we buy, what we believe, whom we serve. Life doesn’t have to be a parade of psy-ops. If art is failing us and books aren’t being read and the prevailing kitsch is narcissistic horror, we have the option to buck the trend. Culture is fluid in the U.S.A. We have never lost the ability to choose where we locate meaning. The decisive moment is always in the future.
In another scene from The Master, Hoffman and Phoenix convene on a dry lake bed in the Nevadan desert to race an old motorbike.
“The game is called Pick-A-Point. You pick a point, drive straight at it, and you go as fast as you can.”
In America, the choice is yours. You can change your life. You just have to put your wallet away, and let your imagination run.