911
For now, America appears to have decided on a course less radical than nuclear Armageddon, to pursue terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden across the earth until he is brought to justice. And, if famed Arab poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran was correct in his assessment of the U.S., that "The Americans are a mighty people who never give up or get tired or sleep or dream", then bin Laden will be caught.
What then? Surely our issue is not with just one man, no matter how perverse. Security alone, while not worthless, will ultimately fail because it is a purely defensive action, something which always flops in the long term.
Should we shrug off as unreal all religion, and Islam in particular, because of the threat it presents in an enclosed world?
Should we have a Madison Avenue experience and make up slogans like "Islamic jihad - The untouchable doing the unthinkable"?
None of the above. As it happens, bin Laden and his boys are just some of John Calhoun's rats.
Dr. John B. Calhoun, a researcher at John Hopkins University and the National Institute of Mental Health, observed the behavior of Norway rats and laboratory mice under enclosed conditions in experiments that continued from about 1946 through at least 1962. Dr. Calhoun died in 1995 at the age of 78. His results are referenced in most works on social pathology as a study on the effects of crowding. It is not merely crowding the researchers studied, however, but crowding under very specific conditions that prevented the removal of aberrant individuals by emigration. That is a practical definition of enclosure from the social pathology point of view.
The disorders observed in Calhoun's experiments included unprovoked incidents of violence and and bizarre sexual behavior (bizarre for rats, that is). Perhaps the strangest of all the types that emerged among the males was a group that Calhoun called "the probers". They were the most active of all the males in the experimental populations, and they persisted in their activity in spite of attacks by the dominant males. Their behavior included lying in wait for weaker animals, both males and females, whom they would rape. They cannibalized the young. They always turned and fled as soon as the territorial rat caught site of them, but, even if they did not manage to escape unhurt, they would soon return. Terrorists. (See also "Universe 25".)
You know those kids who blast away at
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