82 Flag

My friend John was devastated.

Distraught.

For nine months we quarreled by email and ultimately we could not remain friends. One week after the terrorist attacks John explained in an email to me that he now considered himself a patriot engaged in a holy war.

"Between Islam and all that is not Islam," he said.

John interpreted the struggle in apocalyptic terms. The enemy, he explained, was humorless, merciless, and evil and must be resisted and defeated by all who valued tolerance and freedom.

"This means," John said, "that we must rally round the flag."

Rally round the flag?

Ugh.

"Will there be slogans?" I asked.

At this point in my life I believed I was far beyond framing any conflict in terms of a holy war between good and evil, and such a formulation—given my lifelong commitment to nonviolence—seemed foolish, dangerous, and wrong. From our opposing points of view John and I both employed the language of Buddhism in the effort to persuade the other. I had long ago relinquished the word "evil"—once and for all I thought—and I had adopted the word "delusion" in its stead.

For me the word "evil," applied to human beings, stopped thinking.

The word "delusion" invited it.

Deluded why?

Deluded how?

But John urged me to see things—as he put it—"as they really are." Islam could not survive western capitalism, John explained, and that was why the war would be a fight to the death. It was capitalism that had corrupted Christianity and it would be capitalism that corrupted Islam. The fundamentalists saw and understood this, John said, and that knowledge was the origin of their fanaticism. Yes, he acknowledged, capitalism was immoral.

But capitalism was the lesser immorality.

Number two.

For months John and I argued and debated and forwarded one another articles of the right and the left. I found his materials unreadable; likewise he mine. Some of the materials he sent me, I explained to John, seemed to imply that I and others like me simply did not understand what was really happening, that I had been duped by socialists and liberals, that I was not alarmed enough, not angry enough, not patriotic enough, not brave enough, that I did not care enough, and that I was not doing nearly enough of what had to be done.

"Well, yes," John responded, "that is pretty much what I'm saying."