There is something similar between the current recession and terrorism. Besides the fact that both things screw our lives, everyday and especially at airports, I think there is something fundamentally similar in how both came into being and the people behind both of them.
By and large, this recession is believed to be a by-product of the reckless habits of the Wall-Street bankers. Their practices were in some way so complicated that they didn’t see this one coming. The common excuse is that basically no one knows economics well enough to know that this one was coming. Hence, although the bankers were getting into this, somehow no one in the system actually knew this was going on. To some extent, this myth has been blown apart by Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. There are still others who write articles about how top business schools didn’t see the calamity coming. About how they didn’t do their job well or they just aren’t that good at it. I don’t think that is the case. Every single person in the picture here knew this was coming. I don’t want to give the benefit of dumbness to those guys. They knew very well what was going to happen, and frankly, by all estimates, almost everyone on Wall-Street has made shit loads of money and waiting for the government to pick up the tab for the losses. It is only a matter of time before the economy recovers, and there will be another theory with a loop-hole which will be put forward, and adopted and profiteered from by the bankers.
The sophistication of the bankers is in stark contrast to the terrorists who come with a crude plan of blowing things up. At least, that’s what we have been led to believe. The terrorist organizations are supposedly motivated by purely religious considerations, and nothing else. The heads of these organizations strongly believe in the “radical” version of their religion, and that leads them to act the way they do. However, I think this is a load of BS. The leaders of these organizations don’t believe in the extremist views at all. They just convince the poor souls around them that they do. They would clear any Hollywood audition without much problem. I think they are as human and as normal as we all are. It is just that they realized that they can con other poor souls into believing them, and make their living by getting their followers to do jobs they would never do themselves.
The power of nightmares is a wonderful documentary on how the neo-conservatives screwed our lives. A part of the documentary shows a professor at a university as the proponent of terrorism as we know it today. The person in question is quite educated, and will easily be one of the smartest guys in any class. He had no regrets of his own, and his life was as normal as most of ours. According to the documentary, he was disturbed by the increasingly materialistic nature of the western society, and its influence on the societies in the Middle East. He set about to restore the place of God in the society. This professor was educated thanks to a materialistic society. He drove a car made by the same materialistic society. He reaped all the benefits of the society and probably his only shortcoming was his extreme greed for fame. Besides that, there is no reason why he wouldn’t want the same benefits of the western society trickle down to his own home country. It seems preposterous to me that someone who has a good life here would actually go bonkers and think that the society which made him what he is is actually flawed. And someone of his academic caliber would definitely know that his opinion is just one view, and one person or a small group of people thinking that the society is “going wrong” doesn’t justify doing what he did.
The bankers and the people involved in the top echelons are no dumb ones either. They knew exactly the course of events that would take place. For god sakes, they are the ones orchestrating the current set of “reforms”. It seems ridiculous that there is a recession every few years, and a boom that follows it, and we are always told nobody knew that it was coming. And almost all the time, it’s a fixed set of people who are making more and more money. In this case, we are basically paying their salaries, which they have already drawn, and broke the bank in the process.
I think we would be fooling ourselves if we say that the guy at the head of the terrorist organization does actually believe in the BS, or when we say that no one saw this recession coming. This world’s a stage alright. The producer, director and the actors are the smart guys. The common man is the audience which gets robbed each time he enters the theater.
