Terrorism

The 20th anniversary of 9/11 will come in a matter of days. It will be marked by the victory of the Taliban in Kabul and the humiliation of America. The war in Afghanistan was one of the largest-ever undertakings of any major country, in any era. Adjusted for inflation, the Apollo Moon landing program cost the United States close to $300 billion. The Manhattan Project cost $30 billion. The Interstate Highway System, about $500 billion. Those three mammoth projects are dwarfed by the cost of 20 years fighting in Afghanistan, which will well exceed a trillion dollars when all is said and done. The amount spent on Afghan nation-building surpassed the cost of the Marshall Plan in 2014 and kept rising inexorably for seven years more.

A few days ago, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq rubbished the idea that the world would change after the pandemic. He wrote: ‘We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse.’ The virus, according to him, was ‘normal’, even ‘banal’. As always with Houellebecq, his brand of pessimistic candor made a change from the rolling stream of predictions issued by pundits and academics, who’ve glimpsed in this virus the dawn of everything from renewed hope for a Green New Deal, to the onset of neo-feudalism.Still, it is worth thinking about what a ‘bit’ worse means.

The Texas Department of Public Safety has designated incels, or ‘involuntary celibates’, as an ‘emerging domestic terror threat’. What began online with what the Department’s report calls a ‘a personal grievance due to perceived rejection by women’ may already, the report claims, have morphed into ‘allegiance to, and attempts to further, an Incel Rebellion’.Incels have quickly become one of the few groups whose mockery and derision is deemed universally acceptable. The term has become a go-to insult for men who are merely undesirable or unpopular. The idea that some men are misogynists, embittered because they can’t get women’s attention, is now used to explain all manner of male behavior.

You may be thinking, at this particular moment, about narwhals. It’s unlikely, but it’s more probable than it would have been a week ago, given the improbable insertion of the toothed whale species known as Monodon monoceros into the current news cycle. In a horrific incident that left two dead, a knife-wielding terrorist on London Bridge was stopped from further destruction in part by a man brandishing a five-foot-long narwhal tusk. (They’re not cheap weapons, on that note.)This opened up a litany of confessions on Twitter in which plenty of otherwise sane adults admitted they didn’t think the narwhal actually existed.