Dummy Blasts

"It's confirmed now," said the assistant at W.H. Smith's as he handed me my change and receipt. "I just heard it. Three more bombs gone off on the tube."
On my way out of the shop I was already on my mobile, firing off emergency texts, texts that sounded like Radiohead album titles (im ok are u ok), to everyone I knew before the networks went down. When I got my first failure notice, it felt like a tiny stab in my side. All around me, I could see other pedestrians work their phones, frowning, jaws set, like old ladies with their beads. (If anyone is interested in making a movie about modern urban disaster this is how it looks. No riots, no lootings, no traffic pile-ups. Just people walking fast with tight faces, staring at their fists.) I stopped at a crossing close to the office. There was a plane banking low over South London, and I watched it for a second, feeling sentimental about how innocent it looked up there in the blue sky, like a pointer on a computer screen. The traffic was growing thicker. I walked past two packed buses pulled in to the kerb and tried not to look at the scared faces on board. For the first time in a week I was aware of the sirens again, coming from every direction, all whooping loud: You See? You See? You See?

It wasn't the big one, of course. It wasn't more than a minor incident. But it did leave me slightly shaken, perhaps more than I had expected. I guess when I blogged here last week, I was wrong about terror. I had only heard half the story. Because we had come through a horrible attack with grace and dignity, I thought we had resisted terror. But that's not the way terror works. Terror isn't a test of character. Terror is bullying written large. And just as strength, popularity and competence are no defence against bullying, so level-headedness and pragmatism don't cut it against terror in the long term. Because the spectacular, straight-ahead attacks, aren't really the day to day business of terror. Terror thrives on the bomb threats, the spur of the moment evacuations, and the dummy blasts, just as bullies live for the feints, the head fakes, the threatening glares. Bullies and terrorists have a common goal: to reach a situation where they lift a finger, and you fly into a panic, or a rage.

Although the details remain unclear, it looked as if today's incident had a pedagogic sheen- it was all about re-inforcement. The inane repetition of the particulars of the first attack (three tubes, one bus) takes what seemed like a random act of violence and invests it with a mysterious significance. A panicking commuter will start to think: why these bus lines? Why these tube stations? What's the link? And if I find it, will it help save my life? This is terror's goal. Terror wants to infantalise us, to reduce us to a state where paranoia and superstition seem like valid survival strategies. In the end, blowing up a train is nothing but violence; horrific, senseless violence. Making us relive it day after day: that's terrorism.