A Few Thoughts...

-A short one: why, oh why, would people ever complain about having to throw out $35 worth of makeup when the possible alternative is death by incineration at 32,000 feet? If you're flying, you're already part of the rich, white, privileged world. Give it a rest and throw out your makeup already.

-A shorter one: Canada does not need a colour-coded terror level assessment device. In my view, all these crayon step-ladders do is inspire endemic fear and paranoia — precisely what a terrorist wants to inspire if he or she can't produce any dead bodies for CNN. The importance in a terror alert is that the people who work in targeted industries — transportation, government, law enforcement — understand that they should be on guard. I don’t think we need a kaleidoscopic public alarm to make that happen.

-And a long one: my friend Riley Hennessey often tries to convince me that we're in a World War III, of sorts, that has indeterminate sides (although they can be drafted loosely around 'terrorists' and 'the free world') and indeterminate battlegrounds — although yesterday that battleground was most certainly the Western airport.

Until now, I've been fairly resistant to his argument for a few reasons: to me, casting the contemporary world in a "war" with "two sides" seems to be an awfully simplistic lighting scheme, particularly when you think about what's actually going on -- a struggle with an 'ism' that neither has geographic boundaries nor aspires to have them. I may be completely misinterpreting Riley's argument, of course. But I have my reasons for skepticism. For one, a tiny minority of the Islamic civilization, not the whole thing, perpetrates terrorism. For two, if you will, more people die in intra-civilizational strife each year than do in terrorist attacks. In fact, domestic violence in Sub-Saharan African countries and even Latin America's favelas account for the vast majority of the world’s combat deaths. So much for the Clash of Civilizations.

In light of the recent plane explosion bust, however, I’m willing to give Riley’s World War thesis a chance. I've cleared out my ears, put on a new thinking cap, and I've come to the conclusion that we are in war.

And it's "us" against "them."

The problem is I’m not sure if anyone knows precisely what that means.

As Riley has noted, the international community seems to be "mobilizing" against something: there are more books about intrastate/transnational conflict than ever before; there is more talk about personal security than ever before; and there is more money being spent on conflict prevention than ever before.

And so on.

As we mobilize to face Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-Il or whomever, though, I am tempted to ask a question whose answer may be absolutely vital to our survival. It is:

Are we doing precisely what the French did in the last World War — mobilizing antiquated technology against a threat that will come from an entirely different direction?

I bring this up only because media coverage of the "foiled" airplane explosion plot seems to be missing a major point: we can never win a war against terrorism simply by foiling plots and killing terrorists. "Terrorism" is not a nation or even a group of people -- it is an idea, just like fascism, communism, capitalism, and commercialism. And, like some of those ideas, it can only really be defeated once it has been discredited to the point where it no longer carries such an appeal that persons, here or there, actually want to become terrorists.

Instead of dealing with governmental models, or financial systems, or the arrangement of the human soul, terrorism instead concerns itself with death, terror, and the achievement of social psychological ends. By this account, a "foiled" terrorism plot isn't necessary an unsuccessful one. After all, such a “foiled plot” puts us in the West on edge, does it not?

Dreams of death in airplanes make us yearn for larger defence budgets. They make us want to increase security, exponentially. They give us brief reprieve when they are foiled, of course -- but they then reminds us that we cannot take afford reprieve while on the terrorism watch.

Yesterday, my TV broadcast images of guns with people attached to them marching around in airports and barking orders at unarmed civilians. I was glad a terrorist plot had been prevented before taking its gruesome course. But the images also reminded me of something more stark than an exploding airplane: the paranoid police state in Orwell's 1984. "Foiled" terrorism plots, you see, may eventually reduce us to a paranoid, security-driven police state if we let them. And it seems like, slowly but surely, we are.

Here's a novelty: we're actually in a war of ideas, not sides. We’re in, as Benjamin Barber once said on the cover a book, a Jihad vs. McWorld; a conflict of the tribal versus the global. The inevitable result of Rosenau's fragmegration — the simultaneous regionalization, decentralization, globalization and centralization of the power structures of global finance, culture, society, and thought — is the need for ideational coexistence.

Some ideas, it seems, do not want to coexist with ours.

Hence our war.

Here's another novelty: has anyone out there bothered to think beyond the barrel of the gun and find out how we can mobilize in a war of ideas? Or how we can even combat an idea that isn’t tied to economic prowess?

If someone has, I certainly haven't heard it spoken loud enough. Ralston Saul, Said, Friedman, Ignatieff; plenty of public intellectuals have explored this territory. But academic exploration and public policy don’t seem to be friends. And at the rate we’re going I get the feeling they’ll both be up shit creek — or on an exploding airplane — before they get a chance to share candy.

The sheer simplicity of the latest plot — 200ml of liquid explosives plus a disposable camera — reminds us that no matter how tight our security, terrorists will finds ways around it. We have two moves available to us: play turtle, protect the King and lock Western society up into a tight little nightmarish dystopia, or take terrorism head on, recognizing it as an idea that, much like fascism, communism and other fanaticisms, must not survive the coming global dawn.