Yes, they are cowards

Every couch potato in America would off himself instantly and painlessly if he thought he'd wake up in a Budweiser commercial on the other side.

By Norah Vincent

Oct 18, 2001 | Much to the delight, I'm sure, of semioticians everywhere, the American media's response to the Sept. 11 disaster is devolving, more or less, into a war of words. Stanley Fish's recent New York Times op-ed, "Condemnation Without Absolutes," is perhaps the best single example of this. Any sensible person who has read it readily admits that it is time -- actually, well beyond time -- that we, the doltish absolutists of the lollipop guild, clarified our terms. And, while we're at it, a couple of darling dean Fish's terms as well.

1) Cowardly

Here is Fish: "Bill Maher, Dinesh D'Souza and Susan Sontag have gotten into trouble by pointing out that 'cowardly' is not the word to describe men who sacrifice themselves for a cause they believe in."

Indeed, it's true that during the last five weeks much has been made of one of President Bush's early remarks about the catastrophe. "Today," he said in his first address to the nation on the subject, "America was attacked by a faceless coward."

Now Fish, like so many of his fashionably iconoclastic cohorts in academe and elsewhere, along with Maher, D'Souza and Sontag, insists that "coward" is the wrong word here.

He's mistaken.

First of all, his backhanded definition of what cowardice is NOT (which is really just a wormy way of saying that the terrorists were brave) is flimsy. A person who kills himself for a cause, while he may not be a coward, is certainly not brave or in any way laudable either. He's a nut. No sane person, or truly self-sacrificing person, just outright kills himself for a cause. He may fight for it. He may even fight for it like the soldiers who stormed the beaches in Normandy, with the knowledge that he is likely to die. But living, not dying, is the goal, and this wish to live, as opposed to the wish to die, is what makes putting himself in harm's way so hard and so frightening. He doesn't want to do it, and therein lies the sacrifice. People who want to die, or who believe they'll be met by a pack of willing virgins in paradise if they die in service of their ideal, have resigned themselves and their will to live either to despair or fanaticism, both of which have the effect of numbing the lamb into an automaton. Death isn't frightening when you're too hypnotized or narcotized to know what's happening, or care.

What's more, no truly brave person ever submits himself to death for a reward. Where's the sacrifice in that? Every couch potato in America would off himself instantly and painlessly -- which is in itself no small enticement to commit suicide -- if he thought he'd wake up in a Budweiser commercial on the other side. No suffering, and a chance to finally get your rocks off for eternity with no mullah lurking in the closet? Hell, I'd do it, too. Mass murder/suicide under these mercenary circumstances is cowardice, as well as lack of sincere conviction, defined.

But most importantly, and this is a point Sontag and Fish and others have willfully overlooked, these hijackers were cowards not so much because of what they did, but because of how they did it -- that is, anonymously. As Bush so appositely put it, they were cowards because they were "faceless." A coward is someone who won't stand up to a fight, and that is exactly what al-Qaida won't do. It's the warfare equivalent of a hit and run. Blow up thousands of unsuspecting noncombatants, who are utterly unable to defend themselves, and then take off for la-la land, or deny all responsibility, and then hide in a cave, letting your fellow faithful die on your behalf, because you're too much of a coward to make an appearance.

If Osama bin Laden's cause is so just, and he's so brave, then why doesn't he stand up and claim the carnage? Why doesn't he lead his armies into a bona fide battle, instead of ranting by videotape, refusing, exactly like Hitler, to emerge from his bunker, and insuring thereby that innocent Afghans will die? It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that if Osama bin Laden were truly a martyr dying for a cause, he'd have come out of hiding to save his people. Had he done so, no bombs would have fallen on them. But instead, he prefers to officiate from afar a war of attrition that inflicts death randomly, and to no ultimate avail.

And the fact that there is no avail, no actual cause except petty revenge and gross nihilism behind al-Qaida's murders brings us to our next embattled term.

Next Page: Lesson No. 2: A terrorist is not a freedom fighter

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