The Humanities Review

Issue date: 6/1/08 Section: Spring 2008

FIG. 1: Weekly World News, August 28, 2006

On August 28, 2006, the sadly now-defunct Weekly World News, "The World's Only Reliable Newspaper," as it bills itself, led with this headline: "Vampires Attack U.S. Troops: Army of undead taking over mountains of Afghanistan" (Fig. 1).

The Weekly World News is better known for its placement at the checkout counters at supermarkets and its Bat Boy stories than it is for its geopolitical reportage. And needless to say, the U.S. is not fighting vampires in Afghanistan. Yet the fear that the facetious paper belies is real enough. The Weekly World News, for all its frequent absurdity, understands that, metaphorically, we have been at war with vampires all along. The "New Terror in Middle East" that the subheading warns us of is not new at all, but rather a sensationalized way to describe the terror that is already there. In our current post-September 11, 2001 climate, the new invasion narrative of the terrorist-and, more recently, of the insurgent-follows the conventions of previous monster stories. For the modus operandi of the terrorist is nearly the same as the vampire's: both infiltrate, hide in plain sight, use capital against the capitalist, and eschew the light. The revision of this conflict has a name: the War on Terror.

Despite attempts to change the name-Iraq war, second Gulf war, war on Saddam, war on Islamic radicals, war on militant jihadism, war against Islamofascism-the War on Terror is the title that stuck. And little wonder-it is archetypal, epic, sweeping, poetic, and unassailable. It leaves no room for ambiguity, no place for argument, no possibility for, say, a pro-terror position. Waging something called a War on Terror is understandable: its rhetoric instantly turns nonbelievers into implicit enemy collaborators, renders criticism dangerous if not treasonous, enforces an incontrovertible Manichaeism of "us" against "them," and encourages a desperate times, desperate measures elusion of the law. Best yet, the enemy can remain nameless, amorphous, and disembodied. When we declare war on terror, we declare war on something other than terrorists, as a result turning the enemy into something not just foreign, not just inhuman, but noncorporeal. No wonder the Bush Administration chose the name, then stayed the course.

Yet declaring a War on Terror presents problems as well, not so much in the name but in the implied narrative. The stories nearly always begin with the monster's creation or invitation-frequently, by the would-be hero himself. And the endings are even more troubling: even when the seeming subject of terror is defeated, it nearly always forces the hero, the creator-turned-slayer, into acts of barbarity and conspiracy that eventually rival the monster's own. Or even worse, news of the monster's death is greatly exaggerated, so that, sometimes in the same form, sometimes transformed, the terror will return. By the end, contemporary audiences often sympathize more with the tale's monster than with its hero.

Continued...

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