"Falling Under Osama's Spell"

[Phil Wise]

Hi everyone

The following reminds me of some stuff you'll all find familiar from Vineland. I wouldn't say it necessarily adds any insights to what's in that book, but it would seem to be a similar phenomenon, anyhows...

phil


http://www.theage.com.au/news/state/2001/10/17/FFXOT6ALUSC.html

The Age
17 October 2001

[Originally from: Sunday Telegraph (UK)]

Falling under Osama's spell
By Jenny McCarthy

There are fleeting moments when I think the Taliban might actually
have a point when they say Western women are amoral. One came last
week, when all around me other women started proclaiming how much they
fancied Osama bin Laden.

I heard: "He's got beautiful, brooding eyes", "He's cool: when Bush
was getting all worked up, Osama was just sipping tea in his tent".
One woman who was in Washington when the hijacked plane struck the
Pentagon, actually said that "he has a sort of animal magnetism: you
feel that here's a man who could protect you". Another said: "He
certainly wouldn't dither."

Please don't write to tell me this is in bad taste. I already know
that, and so do they, because they often put in caveats such as,
"Although I utterly condemn what he has done", and, "Of course, if he
was in my flat I'd hand him straight over to the police".

But that's the point: inside their heads, Osama is already inside
their flat.

It isn't the shy student Osama of the '70s, in his trendy flares and
skinny-rib sweater, to whom they are attracted; it is the turbaned
Osama of today, issuing edicts of mass destruction from his
impenetrable cave. Part of bin Laden's appeal, I think, is that he
doesn't seem quite real. He has never claimed responsibility for the
US attacks, or been filmed with Western heads of state. He appears
only in his own broadcasts from distant Afghanistan, looking like a
quasi-mythological cross between a villain from a James Bond film and
a Rudolph Valentino sheik.

I don't find bin Laden in the least attractive, but even I can see
that his soulful appearance has been one of fate's little jokes. Just
as a truly gentle man can have the mug of an East End prizefighter, so
bin Laden in repose has the dignified visage of a kindly, peaceable
man: the sort from whom one would not hesitate to seek directions
after a wrong turning in Kabul. For his bashful female admirers in the
West, however, his allure is tangled up in something much deeper and
messier than that.

Plenty of women (and men, too) are viscerally attracted both to men
with good looks and those with a strong whiff of cordite. A
combination of the two creates a powerful, if indefensible, magnetism.
Che Guevara would now be remembered chiefly for his enthusiastic use
of repression and his disastrous grasp of economics, were it not for
that famous black-and-white photograph of him in a black beret,
staring moodily out from his chiselled face.

Bin Laden is not Che Guevara, but he still looks pretty sharp on a
T-shirt. In fact, he looks a bit like Che in reverse: Guevara had a
black beret, a mesmeric stare and a pale face, and bin Laden has a
white turban, a mesmeric stare and a dark face.

Quite apart from how bin Laden looks, however, is the mere fact of
what he is: a man with sufficient power to cause enormous destruction,
and continuing consternation, in the West.

There is a craven streak in the female psyche, the unspeakable bit
that Sylvia Plath meant when she wrote that "every woman adores a
Fascist / the boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute
like you". The brute doesn't even need to be handsome: look at how
Hitler, a strutting, greasy-haired creature, set silly Unity Mitford
all a-quiver: "Yesterday we had lunch with the Fuehrer," she wrote
home in 1936, "it was wonderful and he was simply heavenly."

The armchair biologists will no doubt tell us it is rooted in some
atavistic female need to ally ourselves with the fiercest and nastiest
warrior in the tribe. But the admiration for bin Laden is also tangled
up, I think, in Stockholm syndrome: the curious phenomenon whereby
people who are taken hostage end up identifying with their kidnappers.

Bin Laden and his al Qaeda network have spread an amorphous cloud of
apprehension over the West. It hangs over the Western women who fancy
bin Laden as much as everyone else: for who knows what form a
terrorist attack could take, or where it might land? In their
fantasies, however, Osama is not their persecutor, but their
protector: they are the one person he will not allow to be hurt.

Yeats once wrote that "in dreams begin responsibilities", and I think
I agree. If you allow yourself to fancy bin Laden, you've got to take
on board his penchant for mass murder.

No, no, say the others, that's precisely the wrong point. Fantasies
are where one loses all responsibility. That is why, as one nags one's
husband into doing the washing up, one can freely fantasise about a
gun-toting gangster who would rather die than put his hand into a
Westinghouse.

I don't much go for terrorists or dictators: their chosen cologne of
other people's misery is too strong, and the closer that misery comes
to home, the fouler it smells. And the truth is that such men are
usually too obsessed with their cause to have any time for women
either.

Move on, Osamaniacs. It isn't you he's interested in