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Show Acting Alone Page 97 to be brought bit by prismatic bit from the finest glassworks in France, and installed at Saint Paphnutius. What if some crazy person were to firebomb that chandelier and its little chapel, as someone had evidently been threatening to do, spraying over two tons of beautiful prismatic chandelier crystal in a molten state halfway up the side of Cheyenne Mountain? It would be an especial shame, particularly meaningless, were the bomb to be placed not by some misguided but identifiable political group with more or less legitimate issues to raise before the public eye, but rather by some lone single-issue terrorist: the especially contemptible academic type terrorist, acting as much out of boredom and emotional immaturity as anything else; bombing for esthetic or abstruse historical reasons more than any political conviction; perhaps angered by the rather obvious symbols of Marie Antoinette, or the papacy, or, equally obvious, the Saudis themselves; spurred on by the not exactly red-hot issues these symbols represent. The sentimental, pitiful kind of terrorist in his mid- to late-twenties, nostalgic for his high school years, for some remnant of sixties ferment in his life. The type of hippy that is rapidly dying out in Reagan's America, but still can be found whimpering his foul language to himself alone in any substantially large university's humanities departments. The type of shaggy dinosaur that, having done something naughty enough to call attention to himself, would probably make a moderately interesting subject for a paperback psychosexual biography, something leering and cheap enough to feed secular humanist America's voyeurism and secret national glee at having debased, absorbed and nullified the leftwing radicalism of the sixties. |