DATE: Friday, November 21, 1997             TAG: 9711210038

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: OPINION 

SOURCE: Keith Monroe

                                            LENGTH:   84 lines

MAD BOMBERS WE LIVE IN AN ERA OF COLLIDING CULTURES

Someday before I die I hope to see the pyramids along the Nile, in the words of the old Jo Stafford song. But I'm not prepared to literally die in order to do it.

So cancel my visit to Egypt for the time being. As long as followers of the man the news media insist on describing as ``the blind cleric,'' Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, are committed to massacring doofy visitors taking snapshots of tombs, count me out. Since 1,100 visitors have been killed in the past five years, the tourist trade in the land of the pharaohs is likely to be as dead as Tut for some time to come.

Nor is Mecca going to become a tourist mecca. The fabulous ruins of Persepolis are off-limits to Westerners given the antagonistic attitudes of Iran's mullahocracy. Baghdad can't be selling many museum tickets to Americans. And there are factions only too happy to turn the so-called Holy Land into a hellish experience for pious pilgrim and airheaded day-tripper alike.

The motives for the murders in Luxor have been variously reported. By one account, the gunmen were seeking hostages to exchange for the sheik who languishes in a U.S. prison for his part in inspiring the World Trade Center bombing. Others claim the big idea behind the anti-tourist campaign is to wreck the already ruinous Egyptian economy, thereby toppling the Mubarak regime in hopes of installing fundamentalist rule on the Iran-ian model. Just what the Mideast needs, a second Iran.

But, of course, what's really going on is a clash of cultures. People prepared to blow up their fellow humans at random are pretty far outside the mainstream even in extremist cultures. But just as the poor are always with us, so are those who feel marginalized, voiceless, powerless and paddling without success against the tide of history. Tim McVeigh partook of the mind-set, as do abortion-clinic bombers and other dangerous outsiders with visions of revolution, hopes for theocracy, Luddite nostalgia for days gone by or Utopian dreams of a better tomorrow.

Of course, sometimes those driven mad (or at least deeply angered) by their lonely crusade do have justice on their side. The Palestinians haven't been dealt a very good hand by history, and the fellaheen of the oil states who haven't gotten a piece of the action have a gripe against their feudal conditions. People of faith - any faith - appalled by a secular society that has no use for their most cherished values can persuade themselves that violence is justified to produce the change they desire.

In the prosperous West, with its pluralism, democracy and capitalism, most people can't identify with the kind of disenfranchisement and disaffection that gun down visitors to Luxor or plant a bomb at the Olympics. In a commercial culture, commercial values are paramount. So the deliberate squandering of tourist dollars strikes us as not just misguided but frankly immoral.

A great gulf divides us from the bombers, the kind of people we make into movie villains. John Lennon's funny lines come to mind: ``And if you go carryin' pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow.''

And, yet, we are going to have to get used to living the rest of our lives in explosive times. What we regard as mainstream values will continuously conflict with ideas that we regard as retrograde at best, flaming lunacy at worst. The late Joseph Campbell, the scholar of the world's mythologoies, described our situation as long ago as 1971:

``There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: There is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunderstorms, lightning and hurricanes all around.''

Campbell thought it was natural that ``when energies that have never met before come into collision - each bearing its own pride - there should be turbulence.'' And he thought the end result would be ``a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind.''

Maybe so, but in our pride we are inclined to believe the collision will end with our way of life triumphant and the backward notions of the bombers and loonies vanquished. That is not a foregone conclusion. After the Golden Age of Greece came the brutal conquests of the Hellenistic period. After Rome, the Dark Ages. After the Renaissance, 100 bloody years of religious war, inquisition and fanaticism.

We may never safely see the pyramids along the Nile. MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot.

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