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Saturday, 22 September 2001  
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Odds and Ends: It was on fire...

by Hana Ibrahim

Pondering the incongruity of a bunch of fanatics, guided by nothing more than unmitigated odium and indomitable resolve, not just striking, but annihilating the sum and substance of the US of A, I am reminded of a weird newspaper headline, I read awhile ago.

'It was on fire when I lay down on it'

The article, originating from some boondocks town in Milwaukee had nothing to do with fanatical zeal, sanguinary intent or unimaginable destruction of what seemed to be an indestructible landmark.

On the contrary, the story was about a small town emergency squad, who when summoned to a house where smoke was pouring from an upstairs window, found a man in a smouldering bed. After the man was rescued and the mattress doused, the obligatory question was asked.

"How did it happen?"

"I don't know. It was on fire when I lay down on it," he is reported to have claimed.

The veracity of the article is moot. As is its significance to us here, where the fires of daily living burn far stronger than a peewee flame under a bed. But pondering the headline, I can't help looking for a corollary between. 'It was on fire when I lay down' and, the low-tech, high-resolve destruction of the Twin Towers, adroitly termed 'America Under Attack' by the CNN. Not so much in the literal sense, as at a metaphorical level.

The man lying in a burning bed is the literal action. Why he did it is again moot. May be he was drunk. Ill. Suicidal. Blind. Cold. Dumb. May he just had a weird sense of humour and wanted to test just how prompt and valiant the fire fighters were.

But the deeper metaphorical connotation.... Filleting the 'It was on fire....' headline to its bare essential is to get to an oft repeated aphorism.

As you make you bed, so you must lie in it. Comeuppance, in words familiar to you and me.

Of course this in no way condones the attack on America's citadel of power and glory and everything else that went into make life just yanekke doodle dandy? It was too dastardly an act to receive any approbation. And calling it comeuppance would be too harsh a term, considering the audacity of the attack and the magnitude of death and destruction.

But looking back at America's covert foreign policy, in terms in its unsavoury habit of arming one faction to fight or dispose of the other, one can't help but wonder... Was the attack totally unexpected? Wasn't there even smidgen of thought, when doing what they did, that some day, some how, some way, retribution may be forced on their innocents?

Comeuppance is all to do with Einstein's theory of relativity - what's goes around must come around, or some such thing, which the Aborigines were very familiar with. After all they created the boomerang.

Recent world events teem with tales of comeuppance, where two-bit hoodlums shaped and nurtured into forces of significance by thrice esteemed leaders have turned around the wrecked vengeance on the very force that propelled them into positions of power.

The assassinations of Egypt's Anwar Sadat and India's Indira Gandhi are classic cases in point. Both were slain by fanatic fundamentalists they helped create. But more telling is the ascent of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Propelled into power to counter the growing potency of Iranian fundamentalism, he went on to conquer a nation, massacre a few thousand Kurds, wage two wars.... He continues to torment not only his Arab neighbours, but also his American benefactors who armed him and helped him to his seat of command.

So, if, as all America and a better part of the world believes, Osama bin Laden is the monster responsible for the attack, shouldn't there be some soul searching? After all America did use him to rid Afghanistan of the former USSR forces. And if it turns out to be some other Arab, doesn't that too require some soul searching? About the boomerang... Of American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes, US shells crashing into a villages in Qana, US led sanctions that destroyed the lives of half a million children in Iraq, America bankrolling Israel's numerous wars...

Isn't the attack on America a metaphorical 'It was on fire...? Connecting the headline with the destruction of the World Trade Centre, reminds me of a phrase by Horace, "Why do you laugh? Change the name and the story is told of you." Rephrase it to cry, and it is a story told of Americans today.

'It was on fire when I lay down on it'. This could well be the epithet on the tombstones of America's worst ever disaster. Skewered foreign policy in a sentence.

And one more thing.

About the literal sense of the headline and the man in the burning bed. He is not alone. The tale of doing something knowing full well that common sense would deem that you not do it, lying in a burning bed or its figurative equal is repeated in almost time and time again through history and in literature.

We've got some fine old company in this deal.

Saint Paul bemoaned the fact that "I cannot understand my own behaviour.

I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate."

And the Greek dramatist Euripides puts these words in Medea's mouth just before she murders her own children. "I know what evil I am about to do. My irrational self is stronger than any resolution."

God, it is written, warned his first children, Adam and Eve. He made it clear. Don't eat that piece of fruit - it will lead to trouble. You know the rest of the story.

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