Narcissism more than terrorism Meat cleaver in one hand, blood on both,
the butcher explains himself for the benefit of a bystander’s smartphone – and
the millions standing behind it. The grain of his voice is the giveaway. Truth
will out of the mouth of the (alleged) Woolwich murderer. He may have
customised Islam into a rhetorical skin – the surface account of his own
horrendous actions; but the way he speaks – neither Cockney nor Nigerian but
‘multicultural London English’ – suggests that the substance of who he is and
what he is doing, lies in London itself.
And what does London do nowadays? The ‘world city’ of London
is a global spectacle, largely paid for by the outside world: funded by the millions
of international tourists who experience the
London scene in person; grant-aided by billions more who stay home to watch
The London Show (Reality TV wherever
and whenever you want it); zillions the world over who subscribe to pay-per-view
London by entering their domestic wealth into the financial circuits routed
through here.
Money that makes the world go round, itself revolves around
the spectacle of London.
Young Londoners have never known anything else. They are
keen – desperate, even – to be entered into this spectacle. To be featured
in it if only, famously, for 15 minutes. For the most part they have nothing to
circulate but themselves; and in the attempt to get a showing/gain a hearing,
they are under constant pressure to raise the spectacular value of the self – their
one and only commodity in the attention economy.
In Woolwich yesterday two isolated individuals responded in
a manner that plumbed new depths of desperation and depravity. Not even ‘lone
wolf terrorists’, they are best comprehended as pop-up narcissists. A
perversely extreme manifestation, here today and gone tomorrow, of what has
become London’s guiding principle and principal dependency: manifesto ergo sum; I
show myself therefore I am; my existence depends on spectacle.
Not terrorism, but a terrible way of saying: LOOK AT ME!
In writing this, the author has to confront the possibility
that he too has succumbed to the same addiction. Is it that I crave the
controversy which could be sparked off by my analysis? Am I touting myself in
the intellectual’s version of famous-for-15-minutes? Or by showing how even
such depravity has something in common with the life of London, am I staying
true to the maxim that nothing human is completely alien to me?
Hoping it’s the second of these.....
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