here is a chilling moment at the end of David Lean’s classic, The Bridge On The River Kwai, when the prison-camp doctor (James Donald) surveying the carnage in the river bed below him, moans breathlessly: “Madness......... Madness!” The dark, frozen look in his eyes says it all. And in the ruins of the past few weeks, those words of the screenwriters (the blacklisted Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson) ... says it all!

Madness fueled by hypocrisy. Americans are terrorized, outraged, enraged. This from a society that slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent Hiroshima and Nagasaki civilians for reasons that are murky at best. Only to repeat the horror 25 years later with the murder of hundreds of thousands, millions of Vietnamese people in the name of Americanocracy, in a toilet of self-righteous lies. With insane irony, worthy of the truth of Lenny Bruce, there is a scene in New York on September 12th, broadcast on all the television networks – a bewildered, horrified, tearful Fire Captain says to the camera that he served three tours of duty in Vietnam, but he never saw anything as horrible as this. Did he not see the city of Hue?

To be sure, what happened in New York and Washington was terrible, painful, a ghastly nightmare. It shook the security that is the peace and beauty of America like an earthquake. And it shook the love and the guilt-ridden hate of people all over the world because, after all, America is the Promised Land, the epitome of civilized evolution, the best we have to date for individual freedom.

To be sure, there has been worse. The Nazi Holocaust is still unfathomable and may remain so as a portrait of a civilized species thrilled with its own terror.  It continues… the roots of the Nazi disease that spread into the Middle East during and after World War II as it spurred, supported and nurtured Middle Eastern violence. It continues, today. But what makes September 11th so deafening, so sleepless… is the sudden awareness of people, thousands of people who are willing to destroy their lives to destroy what they fear, what they don't understand. Not true in Nazi Germany, or Japan, or ancient Rome.

As America's jaunty president, Harry Truman, once said: it is almost impossible to stop anyone who is willing to give up their life to kill you. It's that frightening thought that sits on the horizon.

So what must we do? The challenge of True Believers, of Fundamentalism, all Fundamentalism, Christian, Jewish, Islamic… is its mindless, degrading nostalgia for the "better" way that things were. The Islamic fundamentalists, in particular, raise the challenge of turning the clock back a thousand years, of wiping out Da Vinci and algebra and Shakespeare and cyberspace and women and baseball. So it is time… for America to manifest its destiny, to roll its epitomized culture over the surface of this planet and say: you want our hope, our medicine, our jazz, our rock&roll, our Walt Disney, our hope… then join our democracy and live by it. It is, after all, the best that has ever been.

I am a fundamentalist. I have a mindless, degrading nostalgia for the way things never were but could be. My "prophet" lives in the mind but no longer the body of Gerard K. O'Neill, a brilliant, important, pragmatic scientist, theorist, visionary, a writer of exceptional sensitivity and clarity. He not only showed us what we must do, he showed us how to do it. He said – and I paraphrase as crudely as possible – It is time to get the hell off this planet!

© 2001 Arthur Meiselman

Arthur Meiselman is a writer,
telomeres hunter, and zingaro.
He’s also the director of the Talos Ensemble

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