IN TODAY’S OPEN-SOURCE HEADLINES . . .
“Has a Bisexual Muslim Hustler Put France on the Path to Civil War?” tells of “a low-life trying to purge his personal demons with the blood of innocents could have cataclysmic consequences.” That’s Christopher Dickey’s analysis of attacker Mohamed Mondher Larouaeij Bouhlel’s slaughter in context of France’s increasingly fragile social and political scene. It might well be the argument of a doctoral dissertation on Deliverance, a story, in large part, about “a low-life trying to purge his personal demons with the blood of innocents could have cataclysmic consequences.”
Deliverance? You remember. It’s a popular work by late poet and novelist James Dickey’s. Most probably haven’t read the book. Most likely remember Deliverance the 1972 film, one of Burt Reynold’s most memorable performances, and a movie that typecast Ned Beatty so completely that, well, if you’ve seen Deliverance you can never see Beatty in any other role—before or after—without an irrepressible and understandable urge to make barnyard noises. God bless him for sacrificing his career. It was a hell of a performance.
Christopher Dickey is James Dickey’s journalist son. And he writes with the same unapologetic, raw refinement that characterizes his dad’s work. For instance, “Bouhlel appears to be, indeed, part of a new genre of terrorist . . . who decides more or less suddenly to turn his shitty little life into a world-famous spectacle of death.”
France’s Encounter with the ‘Instant Jihadist’
The connection is not some Hannibal-Lecter-esque ham-handed segue. Deliverance (I’m referring to the book, though the movie is one of the few that does justice to a book) is about many things—a descent into hell and back in the spirit of Dante’s Inferno, heroes, anti-heroes, atavism or evolutionary regression, the clash of civilizations. During the course of his career in journalism, so far, Chris Dickey’s been witness to and written about all of that. And his observations about France in the wake of its most recent carnage fall right into line.
Dickey writes, “The profile of Bouhlel, 31, that has emerged from leaked reports of his cellphone contacts and police interrogations with his acquaintances is not just of a troubled young immigrant from Tunisia living in France, it’s of a midnight cowboy on the Côte d’Azur, depressive, confused, filled with rage.” His character sketch of Bouhlel casts him as not just another isolated crazy, but a terrorist archetype Dickey describes as the “instant jihadist.”
There’s more to it. According to Dickey, “What sets Bouhlel’s violence apart is the scale of the carnage, and also the political and social environment of the moment.” As Dickey describes, with more terrorist attacks like the one in Nice, the one at Charlie Hebdo, the one at the Eagles of Death Metal concert . . . and on they go . . . France may find itself on the brink of civil war, “exactly what the zealots of global jihad are hoping for . . . .” Dickey reports, “[T]here have been hints that some individuals or tiny groups have been plotting to provoke open war with the Muslim community in France, rather like those lunatics in the U.S.—the Timothy McVeighs or the Dylann Roofs—who hope their acts of terror can ignite an apocalypse.”
What’s left is a fight for survival. As Lewis Medlock explains to Ed Gentry in the screenplay Deliverance, “Machines are gonna fail. And the system’s gonna fail. . . . Then survival. Who has the ability to survive.”
