(2 of 2)
There's also a kind of vicious innocence at work. The evildoers in the video seem to ask themselves, Who would have thunk??!! They are like nasty children who set a fire in the basement of the school...and cannot believe their luck when they succeed in burning the entire building down. Allahu akbar! The jihadniks burble about it in a wide-eyed way. To the evil imagination, this great, unlooked-for destruction is a miracle--all the more astonishing because it seems to accomplish, in this violent and profane world, a transformation of the same amazing order as that dream of paradise, with its 72 virgins, that existed only in the faith or dirty fantasies of the saps with the box cutters.
More than a half-century ago, in the shadow of Stalin and Auschwitz, the critic Lionel Trilling spoke of "the fatuity that does not know the evil of the world." The other night in Boston, a group of American college students declared that 9/11 and all that has followed are "media hype." Such sinister obtuseness is not typical of their age group, even on college campuses. Still, anytime before Sept. 11, most 19- or 20-year-old students, if asked to name the most dramatic-traumatic public event of their lives, invariably remembered the explosion of the Challenger. Evil, in the prosperous and peaceful America they grew up in under Reagan and Clinton, was a mechanical failure--something wrong with the O rings.
What will be the consequence of such innocence? Baudelaire said evil's shrewdest trick is to persuade us that it does not exist. Does bin Laden confirm the existence of evil? Or the stupid ordinariness of awfulness? Both, I'd say. One of the consequences of 9/11 has been to revive, so to speak, the belief in evil. Evil is hard to define, but it's there all right. It's like pornography: you know it when you see it.