Real 'Bravery,' 'Courage'
Elude Webster, Maher
I say this after hearing "Politically Incorrect" host Bill Maher refer to the terrorists who flew the jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as being "brave" since they apparently never flinched from an action that was certain to cause their deaths.
Not to mention the deaths of the terrified passengers on those planes.
Nor the thousands of unsuspecting folks just settling in for another day's work in their offices-turned-targets.
"Brave?"
Huh-uh. No way. There's got to be some loophole, some exception, some asterisk, in the definition of "brave," to exclude mass murderers.
But when I went to my Merriam-Webster and looked up "brave," all it said was: "BRAVE: Ready to face and endure danger or pain; showing courage."
Well, I guess if you intentionally fly an airplane into an office tower, you must be ready to endure danger and maybe even a millisecond of pain.
Ah, but "showing courage" -- surely a noble word like "courage" could never apply to a terrorist; the stealth and the anonymity in which he goes about his dastardly business, never hoisting a flag, never confronting his adversary face-to-face, would seem to be the complete antithesis of "courage."
Certainly "courage" would call forth such synonyms as "honor" and "valor," "selflessness" and "heroism." Here would be a quality entirely inapplicable to creatures who immolate men, women, and babies whose only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time; deny them "courage," and by Merriam-Webster's own definition, we deny them "brave."
Once again, though, all Merriam-Webster had to offer was this sterile entry: "COURAGE: Mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty."
Well.
That wasn't any better than the antiseptic lines about "brave," now, was it?
In the dictionary's strictly clinical context, those guys did, indeed, have to possess some sick, aberrant "mental or moral strength" in order to keep a steady grip on an airliner's control yoke and watch 110 stories of glass and steel and concrete rushing up at 300 miles an hour to smash them into atoms.
Fine.
Flunk me out of Comp. and Rhet. 101 -- draw a frowny face on my vocabulary test -- but I cannot and will not credit the perpetrators of Sept. 11's obscenity with anything approaching "brave" or "courage," despite the eerily unflinching efficiency with which they carried out their missions.
"Delusional," perhaps, brainwashed by their handlers into believing they were carrying out the work of their God. Or maybe just -- shall we say, "impatient?" -- fired up to a suicidal frenzy by visions of the 77 virgins awaiting them on the other side.
But "brave?"
"Courageous?"
No, nae, never. Not in this million years nor the next.
Certainly not while we're still burying 300 firefighters and police officers who were last seen by mortal eyes rushing unhesitatingly up, up and up into the burning, crumbling hell created by these "brave" terrorists.
Nor while we still debate what medal, what monument -- what pitiably inadequate honor -- we can possibly bestow that even begins to express our tear-streaked gratitude to the citizen-heroes who took a stand in the skies over Pennsylvania, that their nation's Capital might be spared the carnage and destruction planned by their "courageous" cutthroat captors.
And never, ever while our sons and daughters, wives and husbands, put on their uniforms, kiss the kids goodbye, and march off toward a shadowy, uncharted battlefield -- brave and courageous far beyond Merriam-Webster's and Bill Maher's myopic parameters -- to grub out once and for all every metastatic cell of the social carcinoma that is world terrorism.
