1 - Terror and the sense sublime

Summary

We live in apocalyptic times; apparently. Ours is a terrifying age, or so we are told, time and again. In his State of the Union address in January 2002, President George W. Bush sagely advised his awed audience that:

Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spreading throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning.

We should be troubled by this; not by the thought that there are thousands of these killers wandering the streets, but by the presumption that we should believe such nonsense. As Benjamin Barber argues, the pressing of a ‘war on terror’, and the myriad imperial jaunts that it entails, depends upon embedding a sense of ‘fear’ in the collective mind of America and its allies.

Bush's observations, raising images of streets packed with explosive-carrying terrorists, resonate with the closing passages of Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent; a novel to which we shall return in Chapter 5. At the close of his novel, Conrad leaves his reader with the image of a demented professor busy making bombs and scurrying round the streets of London with them strapped to his person, ‘like a pest in the street full of men’. Conrad, as we shall see, wanted his audience to be troubled. But he also knew that he was fantasising. Bush, however, was not speaking in a spirit of irony. He believed it.

We have, of course, come across this kind of rhetoric before.