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Turning us against each other. Making us spill each other’s blood. Just like the British.” “Mom.” “Taking what we have. Oil, land. Treating us like animals.” “Mom.” “He’s right. They deserve what they got. And what they’re going to get.” These last words were the lines that would end up in my play. The man she was referring to being right was, of course, bin Laden. Later, after the attacks in 2001, she would never admit to having said anything of the kind. Understandably. I think most of the Muslim world could not have imagined how terrible redress would feel, when it came. Not only to Americans but to those in the Muslim world as well. For despite our ill usage at the hands of the American empire, the defiling of America-as-symbol enacted on that fateful Tuesday in September would only bring home anew to all the profundity of that symbol’s power. Despite the predations on which it was predicated, the symbol sustained us, too. Many have disdained the American response to the attacks as childish, have seen these years of vengeful war as the murderous tantrums of a country too young, too protected from the world, too immature to understand the inevitability of death. But I think the matter is more complicated. The world looked to us—and now I speak as an American—to uphold a holy image, or as holy as it gets in this age of enlightenment. We have been the earthly garden, the abundant idyll, the productive Arcadia of the world’s pastoral dream. Between our shores has gleamed a realm of refuge and renewal—in short, the only reliable escape from history itself. It’s always been a myth, of course, and one destined for rupture sooner or later. Yet what an irony: when history finally caught up to us, it wasn’t just we Americans—or even mainly we Americans—who would suffer the disastrous consequences.
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