The Good Terrorist

The God of Small Terrorists by K-Dogg

Phillip K said it’s how kind you are
so don’t stand there wishing on a star
get up off you’re a** and cover some ground
and that don’t mean blowin’ up s*** you found
life is not waiting by the side of the road
it’s there down in the heart of your fellow toad
so pucker up and lay one down on the lips
turn’ em all into princes (and princesses with hips)

we’ve all got gods you know--I do, too
and the god of small terrorists will be there for you
but you’ve got to think large, get out of the box
before you get clautrophobic and short of locks
listen my children now and you will hear
about how to ride at midnight and forget your fear
about how to strike fast and hard and good
and how to clean up the world (or your neighborhood)

step one you’ve got to step up, cut the apron strings
stealing from your moma ain’t no kind of thing
man must earn by the sweat of his brow
(and woman do the same, you all equal now)
step two you’ve got to find the appropriate ring
Ali don’t fight in the alley, he’s a king
find something worth dying for—or preferably worth living
don’t make yourself the turkey at the next Thanksgiving

step three you must take a good look at the world
pull your head out of your orifice, let your spine uncurl
that don’t just mean marching at a protest downtown
sometimes you’ve got to just wrap your fingers around
the neck of the problem and give it a shake
blocking up streets is a good start and take
a lesson from the teachers in Oaxaca, oh man,
their b**** was so big it must have been hard to stand

looking down from heaven like some blessed damozel
or looking up from your coffee break in hell
one thing you don’t want to read on your stone is s***
like you hadn’t really been a part of it.
go . . . go
the god is on your side


Skeleton:
Question: What is a “good” terrorist?

Answer 1: One who is independent of others—which means a big “No” vote for Alice so far as her quality as a terrorist goes. Alice is obviously still dependant on many people. First up is her father. She goes to his office and steals “a thousand pounds” (Lessing 190), a very large sum. In fact, according to my friends at www.measuringworth.com/ , it’s over $3,000 dollars in today’s money. This is not even the first time Alice has taken money from her father . . . and the way that she does it—using her familiarity with the place of business and the people who work there to gain access to the money—is despicable. Outright thievery would be much more honest and admirable . . . not to mention more independent. She shows the same childish dependence on her mother on various occasions, but the one that sticks out most to me is when she reflects on the fact that her mother has moved out of the house Alice grew up in. Her reaction is that of a child: “her heart whimpered and hurt her; she had no real home now. There was no place that knew her, could recognize her and take her in.” (Lessing 214) Needless to say, I hope, for a thirty-six year old woman this is pretty pathetic. (Not to mention the fact that this is seriously exacerbated when we later find out that the reason Dorothy had to move out of her house was because she had given succor to Alice and Jasper.) Alice also depends upon the largesse of the British government—“So we are all on Social Security,” she says to her mates early on in the book, and they continue to live on the Social Security system even as they go about making bombs, etc.

Connection: The most natural point of synthesis here would seem to be Plato’s “Crito,” in which Socrates speaks for the Laws of Athens. He says, “Although we have brought you into the world and reared you and educated you, and given you and all your fellow citizens a share in all the good things at our disposal, nevertheless by the very fact of granting our permission we openly proclaim this principle: that any Athenian, on attaining to manhood and seeing for himself the political organization of the state and us its Laws, is permitted, if he is not satisfied with us, to take his property and go away wherever he likes.” (Plato 62) It’s easy to see the flaws in this argument—for instance, it would seem to make all forms of protest invalid, and to eliminate free speech, which I wouldn’t really be behind—but there is also some obvious truth here. (And Alice won’t even leave the country behind long enough to be trained as an anti-government agent!)

Answer 2: One who possesses a set of ideals. This one is a bit trickier when it’s applied to Alice. On the one hand, she clearly does have some true zeal when it comes to the communist agenda: “ . . . when we have abolished fascist imperialism, there won’t be people like that.” (Lessing 53) Oddly enough, though, she thinks this when she looks at the ripped wires in the kitchen early in the novel. Undoubtedly the men who did this were common workingmen. For a communist, Alice seems to have a great deal of aversion to the common man, though. She is contemptuous of her father’s secretary and she at one point refers to a maid in a very derogatory fashion. Her convictions seem to run towards the abstract (one day we will create a better world) and the violent (throwing a rock through her father’s window, attacking used clothing in the attic, saying she wants the people of the middle class to be destroyed). It’s also easy to see where her ideology goes wrong. For instance, almost from the start of the book—at least as early as page 48, and perhaps earlier—she refers to 45 Old Mill Road as “her house” (Lessing 48). Even worse, she uses money to make improvements to the house even after Jasper tells her, “While you play house and gardens, pouring money away on rubbish, the Cause has to suffer, do without.” (Lessing 150) Alice just seems to be playing at this business most of the time. She likes to go out and spray-paint graffiti (Lessing 232), for instance. This is minor vandalism—of the sort usually practiced by children, I might add—not revolution. I think Alice’s mom, Dorothy, summed it all up best when she said, “ . . . people picketing, or marching or demonstrating, they are having a marvelous time. And if they are beaten up by the police, so much the better.” (Lessing 339) She then delivers the coup de grace: “To the people who really run this world, you are a joke. They watch you at it and think: Good, that’s keeping them busy.” (Lessing 340) When you get right down to it, it seems that Alice has absorbed all of the values of her (upper) middle class upbringing, and all she really wants is a nice home in the suburbs where she can make soup and take care of her brood. She won’t let herself accept this because she feels that she was mistreated as a child and because of her love for Jasper, who is the true communist here.

Connection: I see this in Prisons We Choose to Live Inside in many spots. For one, “Adults who hold on to all kinds of cosy illusions and comforting notions remain immature.” (Lessing, Prisons 19) It may seem a bit odd to refer to wanting to destroy the fascist imperial middle class regime as a cosy illusion . . . but that’s just what it is. It’s an illusion in that neither Alice nor anyone else in the group ever does anything to bring the idea into (or even closer to) reality, and it’s cosy in that the fire of this thought is used to bring the group together; they warm their hands on this anger. We could also talk for a page or two about brainwashing and individuality (or the lack thereof) in Alice, but let’s leave it with this: “But more subtle and demanding—more dangerous—are the pressures from inside, which demand that you should conform, and it is these that are the hardest to watch and to control.” (Lessing, Prisons 55) This line could be the foundation stone of The Good Terrorist.

Answer 3: One who acts upon his/her ideals. As John Fletcher (1579 – 1625) said, “Deeds, not words shall speak me.” (I’ll bet you thought it was Chuck Norris, didn’t you?) This is where Alice most obviously fails in terms of being a good terrorist. She only does useless things in the political arena: the aforementioned graffiti spraying, marching at rallies, and blowing up a concrete post in the center square (Lessing 311). When Comrade Andrew asks Alice to take part in his plan, her reaction is, “It’s no good, Comrade Andrew. I couldn’t do it. . . . I couldn’t live like that. I would go mad.” (Lessing 167) We must keep in mind that Alice saw Comrade Andrew as the real thing so far as communists were concerned, yet not only does she refuse to take part in this plan, she even refuses to passively cooperate when she will not allow the packages Andrew has agreed to accept to be lodged at 45 Old Mill Road.

Connection: Alice is a good girl. She is not a good terrorist. By dint of the fact that she lives amongst, knows the actions of, and participates to some degree in the acts of terrorists, I would have to say that she is a terrorist, though—even though she wants to deny this at the end of the novel. The big problem here seems to be that Alice is unaware of the powerful riptides that rule her life. In “Habits and Will,” John Dewey discusses bad habits. He says, “It makes us do things we are ashamed of, things which we tell ourselves we prefer not to do. It overrides our formal resolutions, our conscious decisions. When we are honest with ourselves we acknowledge that a habit has this power because it is so intimately a part of ourselves. It has a hold upon us because we are the habit.” (Dewey 17) Alice can’t see this . . . can’t look into herself and understand that she truly wants a “normal” life . . . and so she constantly contradicts herself. Oddly enough, she becomes as translucent to us as other characters are to her—which may be the purpose of this book. “Does everything always have to be so predictable? Do people really have to be such sheep?” (Lessing, Prisons 53) The answer, of course, is no. Jasper and Faye, for instance, are fierce individualists. For the most part they refuse to even walk with the herd. They are both caught in the bomb explosion at the end of the book because they actually are involved in the business of terrorism. (They may not be good terrorists, but at least they’re trying . . . and there’s still room for one of them to improve.)

In the end, all you can say of Alice is that “she hadn’t really been a part of it.” (Lessing 371) That is one sad epithet, isn’t it?