The Satanic Chorus

Five months after the initial publication of The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah Khomeini put a bounty on Salman Rushdie’s head, for defaming Islam. (It shouldn’t be lost to view, as the author John Crowley points out, that The Satanic Verses also lampoons Khomeini.)

In the thirty-odd years since, the novel has been burned, bookstores have been fire-bombed, riots have killed dozens. A guy blows himself up in London when he prematurely sets off an explosive device; the book’s Japanese translator is found murdered; thirty-seven people die at a Turkish literary conference when the hotel is burned down. And in August of this year, a fanatic finally caught up with Salman Rushdie himself, and stabbed him multiple times, putting Rushdie in critical. He survived the attack, probably losing an eye.

Meanwhile, down in Albuquerque, there’ve been a series of ambush killings, targeting Muslim men. The first was back in November of last year, and police regarded it as an isolated incident. Then there were three more recent murders, in July and August, over a span of two weeks, and that put the focus back on the earlier homicide. Was there a pattern, and were they hate crimes?

Each of the victims had been Muslim, and of South Asian descent. The community was alarmed, unsurprisingly. In this actively malignant age, was somebody with an imagined grudge trawling for towelheads? New Mexico isn’t particularly homogenous: the grievances at issue between the native Indian population, and the Hispanic conquerors, and the Anglos – late arrivals, a mere three centuries of self-importance and privilege – are as close to surface as a bruise. For the relatively small and contained Islamic social and religiou fabric, how could this not be a threat?

“I believe in America,” the undertaker tells Don Vito, the opening line of The Godfather. The immigrant American experience has always been about promise, about a new world both literally and metaphorically. It hasn’t worked out all that well for the indigenous people who were here first, but for the huddled masses, yearning to be free, the shtetl Jews on the Lower East Side, the refugee Cubans in Miami, the Irish and the Italians - even the Africans brought chained in the holds of slave ships from the Bight of Benin, who came north between the wars, to the Great Lakes steel towns, to Ohio and Chicago, and New York.

They brought their labor and their industry, and their energy. Jazz, and fashion, and the Harlem Renaissance. America is about reinvention. What was Greektown, in Baltimore, two generations ago, is now Syrians, and Vietnamese, and Salvadoran groceries. How not? There are two hundred languages spoken in Queens. My cousin Peter, born and bred in New York, in some ways the archetypal WASP, goes to Queens to eat. Instead of hunkering down inside a fortress of white privilege, he’s excited to find something new.

Immigrants and exiles are borne up by hope.

It comes as no sad surprise that the guy APD arrested as their primary suspect for the killings in the Islamic community turns out not to be some white supremacist but one of their own, a lame with a chip on his shoulder named Muhammad Syed. He apparently went after these guys because of perceived slights. He has a record of domestic violence complaints, dropped because nobody in his family would press charges against him. We would suspect, the women, and a culture of submission, an authority figure who terrorized them. In other words, we’re not talking about a Medieval belief system, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s primitive interpretation of Islam, we’re talking about Primitive Dick Syndrome. The murders in Albuquerque were about insecurity.

This seems to be kind of where we’re at.

I don’t know whether the clown who went after Salman Rushdie really imagines he’s going to get ninety-nine virgins in Paradise, or whether he’s just compensating. It’s hard not to see these guys as sad sacks, Lee Harvey Oswalds, dead ends and losers. They’d never make it on a level playing field.

And while we’re on the subject, I think the Ayatollah’s another limp dick.

It’s a locker-room thing. The biggest loudmouths have the least wisdom. Anybody with sexual confidence keeps it to themselves. Would this be about Trump and his fluffers? You betcha. Kari Lake, running for governor of Arizona, tells us Gov. DeSantis of Florida has Big Dick Energy. She’s opening herself up to a bunch of cheap shots, but I’ll settle for the one. All that Big Dick Energy is what killed those guys in Albuquerque, in my opinion. It’s a toxic, corrupted view of manhood.

I may not like militant Islam, but I don’t have much if any respect for militant evangelical Christian Nationalism, either.

Over-orthodox bible-thumpers of any description just plain stick in my craw. Nobody’s got a lock on salvation, not you, not me, not the pope in Rome. I think Marjorie Taylor Greene’s a moron, but what really gets my goat is her righteousness. If she were nothing more than a simpleton, I might be able let it go; but she’s pushing a poisonous brand of snake oil I can’t swallow.

The problem with the mullahs and the anti-vaxxers and crusaders of every stripe, is their conviction that they alone know the path to godliness. Trump and DeSantis are of course without principle, repellent and opportunistic thugs, but that’s a horse of a different color. The more dangerous aspect is the committed and convinced among us. There’s no reasoned argument you can use with a true zealot.

I’ve got no prescriptive answer. We’re stuck with this gene pool, for better or worse. You have to wonder, though, about our poisoned models for masculine behavior.

Honor killings, rape as a weapon of war, vengeance for disrespect. But isn’t it just locker-room talk, after all, that Big Dick Energy? Who does it really hurt?

Fill in the blanks.

Oh, and now polio is back.

Just how dangerous is ignorance and misinformation?

I give up.