On New Year's Eve, a man was arrested in my hometown of Rochester, New York, for supposedly plotting with ISIS to massacre patrons at a local bar. The bar in question is an utterly average place called Merchant's Grill, outside of which the man accused of the plot used to loiter. It boasts a modest review score of 3.6, and Google describes it as "pizza, burgers & sandwiches feed sports fans at this TV-filled pub with beer flights & dartboards."
Google streetview of the establishment (pictured above) shows that Merchant's Grill is next to a bowling alley and a parking lot. It also has some picnic benches outside, which I assume are for the two weeks a year when Rochester has nice outdoor weather. Merchant's Grill is so normal that if it was in Brooklyn it would be overrun with normcore hipsters.
Now, as someone who was horrified—even frightened, to be honest—by the attacks in Paris a couple months ago, you might think that news of a possible ISIS attack less than two miles from my house would just make me even more scared.
However, it has actually had the opposite effect. A neighbor of mine, who I know more from Facebook than from real life, perfectly summarized why:
Bingo. This whole thing reeks of incompetence and ineffectuality, à la Wile E. Coyote. Instead of making it feel like ISIS could strike anywhere, mostly it makes the idea of a “successful” terrorist attack appear remote. I mean, if you can't even get Merchant's Grill, where can you get?
This is not in any way meant to ignore the many people who were killed in Paris, Beirut and far too many other cities in recent months. Rather, I just wanted to share my personal experience on how my view of ISIS changed when they—supposedly—attempted to attack the city where I live. What happened is that ISIS went from appearing to be a global terrorist superpower to a Keystone kapers clown car that failed to even scratch some random-ass local pub.
To put it a different way, they stopped being an abstract caricature, and just started being kind of lame, incompetent and pathetic, as most people tend to be. (Don't be offended—I include myself in that category and you know what I am talking about.) And just like that, they weren't really scary anymore.