“A Lot of People Watching”: Understanding the Theater of Terrorism

Abstract

“In Renaissance religious paintings, angels and saints, lifted by faith, float above the ground,” said Brian Michael Jenkins in 2016. “Similarly, nuclear terrorism, lifted by fear, became gravity free.” Notable because of his position as a leading defense intellectual and respected within U.S. national security circles and internationally, Jenkins was used to speaking to official and public audiences alike about terrorism. His analogy to art in addressing a gathering of security experts was not just a passing rhetorical flourish. It was constitutive of the way Jenkins understood terrorism. By the time he made this comparison to Renaissance painting, Jenkins had spent more than fifty years trying to convince his audiences to see terrorism the way he did—as not just like art but itself a kind of art. In his view, counter-terrorists, in not understanding this, were enabling “media savvy terrorists” to play upon fears that had been “freed of evidence.” But it was worse than that. “Terrorists read what we write and listen to what we say,” said Jenkins. “Then they start talking about it. In turn, we listen to them, completing a feedback loop that confirms our own worst fears.”1 Jenkins wanted counter-terrorism, as in viewing a pointillist painting, to perceive the scene with enough perspective to see more than individual dots, but rather to see the whole. And seeing the whole meant understanding the theater of terrorism.