This is a somewhat condensed version of a paper I wrote at the beginning of 2008, I believe. It provides a good foundation for my perspective on where we are collectively, and what we really must do to get out of it.
~~~~~~~~
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
~Dwight D. Eisenhower
It would be a peculiar sight to regard war through the eyes of a bird. Denied the ritual of moral justification and the impediments of intellectual presumption, one could soar above the misshapen landscape of human conflict and see neither injustice, nor glory. A procession of displaced people would garner no soreness in the heart, and should the dust below congeal upon the limp, bloody hands of a fallen youth, no tears would fall from a feathery cheek. Billowing smoke from a car bomb over a city center would rise indistinguishably amid seeping clouds of car exhaust, the explosion itself forgotten like an anomalous crack of thunder in the daylight.
Yet the hearts and minds down here upon the dirt of the earth are not imbued with this natural indifference. Amongst hills broken for freeways and unmarked graves paved over by parking lots, Americans have undergone continual fluctuations and upheavals regarding the necessity, or the folly, of the modern war on terrorism. Though we may be eager to take flight and forget about the frailties of our opinions regarding the war on terror, and the emotional foundation upon which they stand, it is time to get to the heart of our trauma.
As was the case after the Oklahoma City bombings of 1995, Americans were shocked to realize our country, from sea-to-shining-sea, was vulnerable to militant schemes that could have been brewed up by lamplight in a 4-person tent. A deep and brooding malaise settled over the public after the attacks, and we waited eagerly for a voice to provide some answers and guidance. Such was found in President George W. Bush, though through his words America would discover little in the ways of comfort or peace. To Bush/Cheney and their cronies, our enemy was not simply terrorists or a wayward tyrant whom had orchestrated such destruction upon us - it was and is the faceless epitome of evil itself.
In such a state the next global war was initiated, and it is no wonder. Quoting Bush, “This is good versus evil. These are evildoers,” (2001) and, “This is a war to save the world". With crushed spirits, America was suddenly granted the miraculous opportunity to partake in a Hollywood-esque crusade. The rhetoric of George Bush became increasingly reminiscent of inspirational comic book dialogue, describing a “kind of faceless enemy” abhorrent to the claims of democracy and freedom-loving people. In a state of collective lamentation this “peaceful nation” was united, and rallied for war.
Years later, America and its allies have routed the nationalist Afghani regime of the Taliban, and the hanging of Saddam Hussein, the long-standing Iraqi dictator, can be streamed on YouTube. Though our enemy was once deemed “faceless”, the American government has obtained an uncanny ability to distinguish the supposed countenance of evil from among a lineup of Middle Eastern authoritarian leaders. From our standard as a “peaceful nation”, prior to September 11, the war machine has become a battle-hardened beast which shows few signs of stopping.
Many of those who proposed and supported the war from the beginning have begun to doubt the practicality, if not the morality, of the preemptive tactics employed by the Bush administration. A powerful minority still hold true to Bush’s decree that, “We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory.” This stipulation of total victory appeals to a romantic ideal which does not take into account the haphazard violence that oppressed people have always, and will always resort to in order to resist the Empire.
Those left who still vehemently support war in Iraq and Afghanistan imbue their hostility with psychotically-religious undertones and show little signs of the cross-cultural respect essential to reestablishing peaceful ties between the United States and the global community. And so, as it stands, the war regime slouches onwards by the desire for a traditional victory over a vague and malleable entity; And, as if attempting to swat a fly with a broadsword, the constituents of the war effort in their quest of salvation, inadvertently chip away at the very foundation of liberty we claim to be delivering to the oppressed peoples of the world.
Many Americans trudge through their days with the slight mental burden of the war spread thin over them like a chain mail security blanket. Forged by the sacrifice of liberty at home for the sake of freedom abroad, the weight of America’s new armor has built up unpublicized social tensions which have few means of effective release. The subtle depression of the constitution at home, adopted whole-heartedly by an older generation of public representatives in the wake of the September 11th attacks, is commonly denounced by academics and younger technocrats.
Even they have at times encouraged government surveillance and an enhanced police state as the only viable way for America to protect itself from the "terrorist insurgency" – but when we begin to weigh freedom against security, it should be obvious our concerns are misguided.
So many have died for the sake of freedom... how could we possibly choose to dilute it in order to save our own asses?
This is what the war-mongers propose - but at best it is a moderately evil necessity.
"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
The real means to ending the war is more fundamentally existential than modern minds would commonly consider. A direct consequence of a terrorist act is the confrontation between the Survivors and the pallid face of death – whose eyes, like a bird’s, transcend morals, race, and creed. Death, during times of peace, may be regarded as a deep mystery, a personal journey, as fate; but in a world of terror, death comes savagely and intently, even upon the innocent who rest far from the cacophony of war.
George Bush is correct in his ghostly depictions of our enemy – the enemy itself is our own terror of death.
During the “great wars” of the past, the mangled disposition of the battlefield was restricted mostly to the eyes of soldiers, warriors presumably hardened to endure the horror. On September 11, 2001, the colorless and disaffectionate guise of brutal, unexpected death confronted us all. Naturally, our instinctual reaction was to seek its source and destroy it - but we need only look inward to find the faceless shadow of the Bush myth.
Imagine a world in which children are raised to appreciate the frailty of life, where it is explained to them that death will some day meet them, perhaps unexpectedly, like a bolt of lightning. Yet it is not to be feared - for to fear it is to miss the point of living. In such a world, death would be seen as a means of creation, a symbolic and final act of life to exact the message of their existence. In such a world, a suicide bombing would be seen as nothing more than a temper tantrum.
War is the brother of Terror, we all know this to be true! It is enlightenment and reason which are its opposites, and they are the only means of combating terrorism.
It is my hope that some day we will have eyes like the Eagle of our heritage, fearless of death and those who may impose it upon us – and when we glance back into history and perceive the ravages of war, we will smile as if remembering the vile antics of a childish and bewildering game.
"War settles nothing."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war."
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Hit The Jump!
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Breaking the Spell
When I sat down at the computer, I was all charged up to write a rant about how the bottom has fallen out of Western society, that the collapse of our dominance is immanent. A rant about how Europe, yoked at the ankle to the U.S., is clawing at the brink of some immeasurable gulf while the U.S. covers its eyes and pretends that it didn't just swan dive over the edge. Something about how the world is already changed, the dynamics of power are already shifted, and that we are just now awakening to this fact. How, it seems, they have been for some time. I was going to tear into how the banks melting down only presaged another implosion. How there's no money left- anywhere- to pay for it again. How finally, September 11th didn't represent anything that anyone generally attributes to it. About how it represents in reality nothing less than the end of the American Century. I was going to end it wondering what will grow in its corpse.
This is what happens to me when I read the news.
It isn't as though now, having sat down to find the words to scream all this, that I find I don't believe it. I do. It's that in the process of trying to say it, between having to think through it and having taken a swig of raw absinthe, I've calmed down a little. Maybe quite a bit. So the only difference really, between what I'm writing now and what I sat down to write is the affect. Fewer jangled nerves and jolts of abhorrence and frustration. More calm, and hopefully insightful, analysis.
So why all the post-Chicken Little angst? Well, I was reading El Pais this morning, and between all the gruesome pictures of squashed Haitians, I found a little editorial. It's in Spanish, so I'll explain for the bilingually-challenged among you. It begins with Italy, as always, leading the way. To the Renaissance, to Fascism, and now again downward. To post-fascism. The chilly mix of a privatized state and heated racially-exclusive nationalism.
Europe is hollowing itself out. They are simply not breeding to replacement, and say what you will about the beauty of a culture, that's unfeasible. As in biologically. Europe will need, at bare minimum, 70 million immigrant laborers in the next fifty years, but they're more and more drawing into themselves, cementing their reputation as xenophobic and willing to go so far as to pass laws to exclude the cultural artifacts of non-Europeans. And the Left here is just as complicit as the Right. Both sides of the spectrum are eagerly sacrificing everything good about the Western tradition to do it. Concepts of universal human rights, and a consuming curiosity with the East. So, we'll lose the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, then everything else that goes with them.
But at least in Europe, the reason the U.S. invade Afghanistan is common knowledge. It's only within the empire that the inscrutability enters and cockamamie theories like the CIA and heroin need to be invented to cover the evidentiary gap. After all, it's not as though the narco-cartels need the help. It is not only likely- in the U.S.- but almost assured that to suggest that the 'war' could be related to the control of a (the) strategic resource rather than some poorly formulated revenge plot will get you called a conspiracy theorist. Afghanistan doesn't have any oil after all, right?
It may not, but it does have the Af-Pak oil pipeline that stretches from the Western Caucasus (which does have oil) to India (the closest ally of the U.S. in the region). This is below-the-grid politicing. Or rather, grid-below-the-grid(This article will blow your damn mind by the way. Cold like the breeze past your balls while you're standing naked on a glacial field). Shit like this never shows up on TV. And never will.
But there is no conspiracy. It's all right there for anyone willing to put down the culture of distraction to look. According to a German friend, though I have no official confirmation of this- U.S. troops are stationed along both sides of one of this grid's most important channels. Though I think it may be more of a channel-to-be at this point. State mercenaries of the oil companies that will eventually sell the oil back to the state and its citizens. Elite back-patting at it's finest. And that's being kind. You could just as easily call it a circle jerk of money-doped, weasel-necked old (not just white) men huffing the last of our planet's resources while the rest of us cower in terror of the environment's inevitable recompense.
And speaking of Germans. The (lovely) people I stayed with over Christmas were an Iranian-American hybrid family living in Germany. So I had an opportunity to talk with not just one, but six real live Iranians. They appreciated that I'd supported Mousavi, but I think the most salient thing that I got out of the time I spent with them read like an Idiot's Guide to Understanding American Relations with the Middle East. The only difference being that it's only one sentence. They are not impressed by us.
To an Iranian, scion of the second oldest culture in the world with roots stretching back to Xerxes and Cyrus the Great (who, incidentally, is actually named as a Messiah in the Old Testament); the entirety of Western Culture, a concept eight hundred years in the making at the outside, has more in common with the Vandals than it does with Rome. Barbarians with a pretense at culture that invade, hold on for a while, and wither away. Everything's eventual; and as always these forces have been in play for a while. Reference Bollywood.
After all, how many people do you know that can quote Shakespeare? I know a few lines, maybe ten lines at most. And I'm (not to brag) one of the best read people I know. Their equivalent to Shakespeare- Sadi, can be quoted at length by nearly every Persian child. Just goes to show, culture is more than how much money you can spend on 3D animation for a movie.
Imagine humanity as network, a mycelium that has been spreading from approximately Ethiopa for the last 100,000 years. And as it spreads outwards, the parts more central compensate to balance the overhang by becoming ever more structured and complex. A fractal filigree. Coming from America, a society less than 300 years old; the subtle complexity of an eight hundred year old culture is nearly overwhelming. It's a simple matter of education. In Europe, for every possible characteristic you could manifest, every frame of reference is already possessed of an endogenous philosophy and poetry to support it. You can recognize yourself more fully in the culture and further mature within it, if only because accumulation. The U.S. doesn't even really know who it is , culturally, and therefore has to import most things of any real profundity.
But as the U.S. is to Europe- its point of origin, because let's be serious, the only affect the Native Americans had on proper U.S. culture until very recently has been to provide a modicum of challenge- so to is Europe to the Middle East. You'll never hear this in an U.S. history class, but it was the Arabs that saved Europe from the Dark Ages. Gave them back Rome and Greece. Allowed the Renaisannce (the rebirth, more properly, of Orientalism) to happen. Islam did that.
What I mean here is that as dwarfed as I am by European culture, Europeans are dwarfed proportionately by the real classical cultures. Persia and India. The dwarfing isn't apparent in the way you'd imagine it to be. It's not that they simply out-compete you in one regard or another, it's simply as though that every word someone says, every attitude they adopt, is more considered because it has been said or considered in very similar ways so many times before. The conceptual reign of the Enlightenment idea of the State stands out more glaringly. People construct cultural norms below or around it to create their lives. Think of the damage the idea of the state has caused to people of Africa for confirmation.
No one, except maybe Britain and Nic Sarkozy, is bowing to the U.S. anymore. We're one among many, our favored position lost in the tatters of the 2007 collapse. If- it occurs to me- it ever existed at all and is not just a mass media fiction. The favored position that is.
Our recent history in South America and Israel would suggest otherwise, but I submit to you: what wars, what cultural cleansings are China and Russia, neither of whom are known for their record on human rights, waging that the Western populace isn't even informed are occurring? Sri Lanka? Look, at the role China played a propo the U.S. in the collapse. We may have the biggest economy in the world, but if it is all just a Great Game, perhaps China has been spotting chips to the U.S. for going on ten years. And the rein on the chip-spotting just got a lot tighter.
So I'd ask, what can the people of the world do in the face of all this. Well, the Global Justice movement is already underway, and has had a good deal of success in the outlying areas of the Global South. So you can say that all the normal people, the people who work all day and go home and watch TV and their children, should get together to fight this thing and that we can demonstrably make a legitimate difference. But that sounds kinda trite.
Allow me to suggest a real and practical first step. Education. It seems elementary. You introduce an idea to people, it catches on and spreads like wildfire. It is The Idea after all. But the Chinese censor Google and the American public is a worldwide joke in its ignorance. So this is going to take a while. Most people understand the Global Justice movement as the Anti-Globalization movement and just goggle at it uncomprehendingly.
In Spain, before the revolution; they had been organizing, distributing literature, educating people for fifty years. There was no vangaurdia, they had an informed, active populace. It doesn't matter if you believe you are a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, or and Independent, a Christian or an Atheist. If you can put down the partisan shit and just look at the brass tacks, how food gets in mouths and how cars drive on streets, how genes got where they are- it's obvious that this is how it works. People have to be snapped out of their TV and anti-depressant coma and shown that there are tools to better their lives.
If it's true that humans function like a network, then the internet has bent it back onto itself. Made it reflexive. With its ability to store and transmit the increasing tally of human endeavor, it could be thought of as a cultural enzyme. So we need not despair. Help is on the way. And it may turn out that with the demotion of the west, so too will topple it's favorite sacred cow. The Savior. Because it turns out we save ourselves after all. Something beautiful may yet grow from the corpse of the West. The future is a brick through the window of the Bank World. Hit The Jump!
This is what happens to me when I read the news.
It isn't as though now, having sat down to find the words to scream all this, that I find I don't believe it. I do. It's that in the process of trying to say it, between having to think through it and having taken a swig of raw absinthe, I've calmed down a little. Maybe quite a bit. So the only difference really, between what I'm writing now and what I sat down to write is the affect. Fewer jangled nerves and jolts of abhorrence and frustration. More calm, and hopefully insightful, analysis.
So why all the post-Chicken Little angst? Well, I was reading El Pais this morning, and between all the gruesome pictures of squashed Haitians, I found a little editorial. It's in Spanish, so I'll explain for the bilingually-challenged among you. It begins with Italy, as always, leading the way. To the Renaissance, to Fascism, and now again downward. To post-fascism. The chilly mix of a privatized state and heated racially-exclusive nationalism.
Europe is hollowing itself out. They are simply not breeding to replacement, and say what you will about the beauty of a culture, that's unfeasible. As in biologically. Europe will need, at bare minimum, 70 million immigrant laborers in the next fifty years, but they're more and more drawing into themselves, cementing their reputation as xenophobic and willing to go so far as to pass laws to exclude the cultural artifacts of non-Europeans. And the Left here is just as complicit as the Right. Both sides of the spectrum are eagerly sacrificing everything good about the Western tradition to do it. Concepts of universal human rights, and a consuming curiosity with the East. So, we'll lose the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, then everything else that goes with them.
But at least in Europe, the reason the U.S. invade Afghanistan is common knowledge. It's only within the empire that the inscrutability enters and cockamamie theories like the CIA and heroin need to be invented to cover the evidentiary gap. After all, it's not as though the narco-cartels need the help. It is not only likely- in the U.S.- but almost assured that to suggest that the 'war' could be related to the control of a (the) strategic resource rather than some poorly formulated revenge plot will get you called a conspiracy theorist. Afghanistan doesn't have any oil after all, right?
It may not, but it does have the Af-Pak oil pipeline that stretches from the Western Caucasus (which does have oil) to India (the closest ally of the U.S. in the region). This is below-the-grid politicing. Or rather, grid-below-the-grid(This article will blow your damn mind by the way. Cold like the breeze past your balls while you're standing naked on a glacial field). Shit like this never shows up on TV. And never will.
But there is no conspiracy. It's all right there for anyone willing to put down the culture of distraction to look. According to a German friend, though I have no official confirmation of this- U.S. troops are stationed along both sides of one of this grid's most important channels. Though I think it may be more of a channel-to-be at this point. State mercenaries of the oil companies that will eventually sell the oil back to the state and its citizens. Elite back-patting at it's finest. And that's being kind. You could just as easily call it a circle jerk of money-doped, weasel-necked old (not just white) men huffing the last of our planet's resources while the rest of us cower in terror of the environment's inevitable recompense.
And speaking of Germans. The (lovely) people I stayed with over Christmas were an Iranian-American hybrid family living in Germany. So I had an opportunity to talk with not just one, but six real live Iranians. They appreciated that I'd supported Mousavi, but I think the most salient thing that I got out of the time I spent with them read like an Idiot's Guide to Understanding American Relations with the Middle East. The only difference being that it's only one sentence. They are not impressed by us.
To an Iranian, scion of the second oldest culture in the world with roots stretching back to Xerxes and Cyrus the Great (who, incidentally, is actually named as a Messiah in the Old Testament); the entirety of Western Culture, a concept eight hundred years in the making at the outside, has more in common with the Vandals than it does with Rome. Barbarians with a pretense at culture that invade, hold on for a while, and wither away. Everything's eventual; and as always these forces have been in play for a while. Reference Bollywood.
After all, how many people do you know that can quote Shakespeare? I know a few lines, maybe ten lines at most. And I'm (not to brag) one of the best read people I know. Their equivalent to Shakespeare- Sadi, can be quoted at length by nearly every Persian child. Just goes to show, culture is more than how much money you can spend on 3D animation for a movie.
Imagine humanity as network, a mycelium that has been spreading from approximately Ethiopa for the last 100,000 years. And as it spreads outwards, the parts more central compensate to balance the overhang by becoming ever more structured and complex. A fractal filigree. Coming from America, a society less than 300 years old; the subtle complexity of an eight hundred year old culture is nearly overwhelming. It's a simple matter of education. In Europe, for every possible characteristic you could manifest, every frame of reference is already possessed of an endogenous philosophy and poetry to support it. You can recognize yourself more fully in the culture and further mature within it, if only because accumulation. The U.S. doesn't even really know who it is , culturally, and therefore has to import most things of any real profundity.
But as the U.S. is to Europe- its point of origin, because let's be serious, the only affect the Native Americans had on proper U.S. culture until very recently has been to provide a modicum of challenge- so to is Europe to the Middle East. You'll never hear this in an U.S. history class, but it was the Arabs that saved Europe from the Dark Ages. Gave them back Rome and Greece. Allowed the Renaisannce (the rebirth, more properly, of Orientalism) to happen. Islam did that.
What I mean here is that as dwarfed as I am by European culture, Europeans are dwarfed proportionately by the real classical cultures. Persia and India. The dwarfing isn't apparent in the way you'd imagine it to be. It's not that they simply out-compete you in one regard or another, it's simply as though that every word someone says, every attitude they adopt, is more considered because it has been said or considered in very similar ways so many times before. The conceptual reign of the Enlightenment idea of the State stands out more glaringly. People construct cultural norms below or around it to create their lives. Think of the damage the idea of the state has caused to people of Africa for confirmation.
No one, except maybe Britain and Nic Sarkozy, is bowing to the U.S. anymore. We're one among many, our favored position lost in the tatters of the 2007 collapse. If- it occurs to me- it ever existed at all and is not just a mass media fiction. The favored position that is.
Our recent history in South America and Israel would suggest otherwise, but I submit to you: what wars, what cultural cleansings are China and Russia, neither of whom are known for their record on human rights, waging that the Western populace isn't even informed are occurring? Sri Lanka? Look, at the role China played a propo the U.S. in the collapse. We may have the biggest economy in the world, but if it is all just a Great Game, perhaps China has been spotting chips to the U.S. for going on ten years. And the rein on the chip-spotting just got a lot tighter.
So I'd ask, what can the people of the world do in the face of all this. Well, the Global Justice movement is already underway, and has had a good deal of success in the outlying areas of the Global South. So you can say that all the normal people, the people who work all day and go home and watch TV and their children, should get together to fight this thing and that we can demonstrably make a legitimate difference. But that sounds kinda trite.
Allow me to suggest a real and practical first step. Education. It seems elementary. You introduce an idea to people, it catches on and spreads like wildfire. It is The Idea after all. But the Chinese censor Google and the American public is a worldwide joke in its ignorance. So this is going to take a while. Most people understand the Global Justice movement as the Anti-Globalization movement and just goggle at it uncomprehendingly.
In Spain, before the revolution; they had been organizing, distributing literature, educating people for fifty years. There was no vangaurdia, they had an informed, active populace. It doesn't matter if you believe you are a Democrat, a Republican, a Libertarian, or and Independent, a Christian or an Atheist. If you can put down the partisan shit and just look at the brass tacks, how food gets in mouths and how cars drive on streets, how genes got where they are- it's obvious that this is how it works. People have to be snapped out of their TV and anti-depressant coma and shown that there are tools to better their lives.
If it's true that humans function like a network, then the internet has bent it back onto itself. Made it reflexive. With its ability to store and transmit the increasing tally of human endeavor, it could be thought of as a cultural enzyme. So we need not despair. Help is on the way. And it may turn out that with the demotion of the west, so too will topple it's favorite sacred cow. The Savior. Because it turns out we save ourselves after all. Something beautiful may yet grow from the corpse of the West. The future is a brick through the window of the Bank World. Hit The Jump!
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