In 1987, the film “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” roared into America's movie theaters. The now-classic road comedy featured Steve Martin and John Candy madly scrambling from one means of transportation to another, trying desperately to reach their homes in time for Thanksgiving. It was a blast.
Thirty years have since passed, and audiences have watched a succession of real-life sequels. All of them have been blasts, but with a tragic difference. Obscure actors use the same vehicles Martin and Candy did, but not to reach their homes. Instead, they are used to breach the homeland, turning them into weapons to kill as many civilians as possible.
In the aftermath of the terrorist truck attack in Berlin, the great question is whether these bloody-minded sequels will ever shudder to an end. Holding fast to the Hollywood analogy might help in finding an answer. Terrorism, as Brian Jenkins famously observed, is an act of theater. In order to signify, it requires viewers; in order to succeed, it requires imitators; in order to seize the imagination, it requires creativity.
This explains why you may worry, as I do while driving my children from sporting event to musical performance, about the moment we may be transformed from viewers into victims.
When terrorism specialists speak of “the theater of terrorism,” they usually mean a defined area -- a nation or region -- where such acts are frequently enacted. Iraq and Syria, Kashmir and Belfast, Sri Lanka and Algeria; the list of such theaters, some now closed, others still open, is numbingly long. But the word is rooted in the ancient Greek theatron: the place to view, say, the tragedies of Aeschylus and comedies of Aristophanes. These artists depended not just on words to impress the audience, but also on special effects, ranging from macabre masks to prosthetic penises. It was all part of the spectacle.
The spectacle of violence lives on in ways the ancients could scarcely imagine. (Well, perhaps they could imagine, given the Roman penchant for lining roads with crucified criminals, or the medieval Christian penchant for building auto-da-fés in city squares.) From al-Qaeda’s destruction of the World Trade Center in New York to Lashkar-e-Taiba’s assault on the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai, Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City to the Islamic State’s killing spree at the Bataclan theater in Paris, terrorists have sought the most spectacular of impacts.
The reason is simple: If a terrorist fells a tower, but there is no one to hear it, it doesn’t make a sound. Terrorism aims not just at a target, but also a target audience. Take a Made in America example: the Ku Klux Klan. The nearly 4,000 black victims of KKK violence between 1877 and 1950 were targets, but the target audience was much greater. Lynchings and night riders sought to instill terror among African-Americans, just as it sought to instill the KKK’s twisted conception of Christianity among white Americans.
Dozens of other efforts at spectacular terrorism litter the history of the 19th and 20th centuries. But something has changed over the last quarter-century. By and large, these earlier waves of terrorism killed relatively few people. As Brian Jenkins observed, “terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead.”
But this truism is no longer true. Less is not more; instead, more is more. Since the United States declared its so-called War on Terror (and not, significantly, on terrorism), the number of terrorism-related fatalities has ballooned. In 2015 alone, there were nearly 700 deaths in 46 terrorist attacks in Europe and the Americas. These figures, in turn, are dwarfed by the nearly 30,000 deaths in more than 2,000 terrorist attacks in the rest of the world during that same year.
And yet my daily highway commute casts these statistics in their proper context. As the body count climbs on our DOT digital signs, more people have died this year on Texas roads than all Americans have died in terrorist attacks since 9/11. In fact, lightning has killed more Texans over the last 10 years than have terrorists. But these statistical facts are swept away by terrorist acts across the globe. The world is a stage, owned no longer by Prosperos, but instead by desperadoes.
Are we, in turn, doomed to watch planes, trains, and trucks, once the props of comics, be used as the tools of terrorists? The answer depends, in part, on our governments. This entails not just the weapons of counterterrorism, but also the writing of counter-narratives. For starters, we need to watch our words. When our political leaders exaggerate the threat, they become the co-authors of terrorist scriptwriters. When they cast our response to terrorism as a “war,” the audience expects an ending. But such an expectation, as the history of terrorism reminds us, cannot be met: sequels are inevitable. A different response will not write the most satisfying of storylines, but one whose recognition would mark an important step toward our reclaiming the stage.