The Strange Path of Mr. Shahzad

Faisal Shahzad, the bumbling bomber of Times Square, was not some poor outcast from a refugee camp. He was a handsome, intelligent son of a wealthy Pakistani family who seemed to be prospering in the US. He had an MBA and a job as a "junior financial analyst," and he and his wife had two children and a house in the Connecticut suburbs. His wife once posted that she was "non-political" and that her interests included "fashion, shoes, bags, shopping!!"

Then something happened. He and his wife defaulted on their mortgage, abandoned their house, and moved back to Pakistan. When he returned to the US, he rented a cheap apartment in Bridgeport and began planning his attack.

Maybe one day he will explain what this was all about. From what we are told he seems to be chatting away freely with his FBI interrogators. But for now we have only this stark story, this twisting path from Pakistan to Fairfield County to a bomb-maker's pad in the slums, where he hatched his ludicrous scheme.

Sometimes it seems to me that civilization is a very fragile thing. The pleasant surface of nice people in nice suburbs doing their nice jobs feels to me, sometimes, like a camouflage screen thinly stretched over a roiling sea of resentment, frustration, and rage. When I listen to people screaming about socialism at Tea Party rallies, or read about road rage or the latest nice, quiet guy to open fire in an office building, I see a lake of violence held back by a thin, leaky dam of custom and conventional morality. Are the rewards offered by our society to nice people who play by the rules -- suburban house for your family, a job, a car, a vacation at the beach, shoes, bags, shopping -- enough? For most people they seem to be, but for some they are empty. Many Christians are captivated by prophecies of the final days, when the petty nuisances of life will be swept away in a cosmic cataclysm. So far this remains a passive desire, but who knows whether it will always be so? An embittered Muslim like Faisal Shahzad had a way to enact his own cosmic cataclysm, and the training camps of the Pakistani Taliban offered a attraction that in the end he could not resist. He threw away his nice, normal life to become a soldier of the apocalypse. The dam of normality broke and hate flooded forth, washing away his suburban life in a torrent of rage.