That's Why They Call Them Terrorists, Kent

I've been doing a little bit of thinking about terrorists and terrorism lately.

Thinking about terrorism makes me feel queasy inside, like when I contemplate the idea that people who look perfectly normal -- people who look just like me -- are pedophiles, and could be in contact with my child every day. It turns my stomach, and I don't want to even acknowledge that such things exist. Yet I think that I have to think about it, because its part of my world and my child's world.

Terrorism is the same thing. I don't want to think about it, don't want to acknowledge that it exists, and not even just exists, but exists in a particularly vile way. Its almost as if I can accept it, distastefully, if it only touches people that I really don't care about, but when it starts to touch people that I do care about, people like Ken Bigley and the woman who was just kidnapped who is the directory of CARE in Iraq, then I have to start thinking about it, trying to grapple with the idea of terrorism. Because as long as it is this amorphous blob, it's the bogeyman inside my bedroom closet, and there is no way to defend against it, let alone defuse it.

Not that I think I can do anything about it -- I doubt that I can. But its part of me to think that if I at least understand it, or have the beginnings of an understanding about it, then I will be able to begin to deal with it, in my own small way. In a way, it makes terrorism less emotional and more susceptible to analysis and attack.

To that end, I picked up a small volume titled Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction, by Charles Townshend, and published by Oxford Press.

It is not fun reading. Although written in dry, lucid prose, it is difficult for me to be relaxed when I am reading it. My reading speed goes way the hell down, and I find myself going back to earlier paragraphs again and again, trying to remember the key points, the structure that the author is building to understand the origin and structure of terrorism. But although I am only a little bit of the way through this thin book, I have to say that he is doing a good job in providing the history of the concept, and in providing a method of analysis and explanation for what is still -- at least to me -- a difficult and inexplicable phenomenon. It helps me understand why these people do what they do, much as reading about how a pedophile or a serial killer views the world.

I resent having to know this terrible kind of thing, but I believe that it's necessary.

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