haunted by fire (5)

IS seems to be deliberately aiming at a key feature of our global imperial system, the paradoxical mix of buffered distance -- how we can let loose war and mayhem (how many nations' skies are patrolled by drones?) without ruffling society's calm operation -- and voyeuristic obsession with everything excluded from the system's controlled confines -- murder, massacre, rape, destruction. the voyeurism is directly related to the control and distance, i believe, offering the controlled (us) a way to participate in the frightening forces of mayhem and violence without getting our hands dirty or interrupting our daily routine. but what is new about IS is how it tailors media content in a direct way for our media machine. rather than incidental coverage of atrocities being committed for other purposes (a dictator massacring protestors, for example), which doesn't feel so dirty in consuming because we didn't cause it to happen, there is the sickening sense in looking at these images of orange clad victims that their murders are deliberately done for us, our media eye has been hijacked by savvy men who know exactly how it works. our watching eyes, in some sense, were the condition that allowed the murders to be done. we are like suited, middle class men who for years got off on peeping at unsuspecting women through windows, only to find a woman turning directly to where we are hiding outside the window -- knowingly performing, eliminating our pious denials and forcing us to admit that we are somehow implicated in the performance, coercing a response from us. the one controlled has found a way to control, even if this control operates only in one direction: inciting our rage.

haunted by fire (6)

of course, their doing so is intended to amplify their strength. time will tell whether they succeed. a lot depends on the ability of americans to remain cool-headed and keep a sense of perspective. however, a harnessed people (harnessed to the discipline of the 'free market') fed a daily dose of violent imagery and periodically finding release through ritual violence against an external satan (noriega, milosevic, saddam, bin laden, IS, the list goes on and on), a people tricked repeatedly into believing tiny panama or battered iraq actually threatened the existence of the mighty united states -- i doubt their ability to do so. our long addiction to horrible news -- our need to feel haunted by death and cruelty vicariously -- makes it unlikely americans can choose to believe facts -- a rational approach to dealing with this strictly regional force. instead, i fear we will see what we have seen since the end of the cold war, but with this twist: IS, the target of our war, is deliberately manipulating our propaganda machine to make us attack it, to incite our moral rage (based on voyeuristic love of violence) as a weapon against us. how so? the more we widen this war, the more we nourish and strengthen them, growing these killers into a real enemy. for now, obama seems determined to not let this pyschic escalation occur. for the future, we'll see.

the terrorists' weakness, and ours

terrorists are politically weak. they must rely on the enemy society to nourish them -- first, by transmitting and amplifying their violent acts, and second, by vengefully overreacting, and in so doing, expanding their base of political support. the obama government cannot do much to avoid the first, in part because the national security state itself relies on threat propagation to justify continued high budgetary allotments.

maybe because of its inability to stop nourishing the terrorists in this way, the government is strenuously working to avoid the second form of feeding: overreaction. i don't believe senator graham or any other national politician is so stupid as to really want a religious war against Islam, or 'radical Islam.' there may be some americans, politicians and media figures as well as ordinary people, who want such a war for their own domestic purposes -- in other words, the accomplishment of what they claim already exists, America the Christian Nation. they want to undo the secular basis of the republic and establish a state religion.

but for graham and his ilk, attacking obama for being 'weak' and 'unable to say the words 'radical islam' is simply an easy, cynical schoolyard form of point scoring. any real consideration of the consequences of naming a religion, or part of a religion, as the enemy, must lead to the realization that such a move is exactly what the terrorist groups want, for it nourishes them politically. the proponents of religious war on the american side seem to think that adding 'radical' to 'Islam' dampens its inflammatory potential. hardly.

i would challenge graham or any of them to tell us all: what is 'radical Islam'? and more importantly, who decides who is a 'radical Muslim'? and if such a person be determined to exist, is he or she automatically an enemy of the state? such a label, upon examination, reveals people and practices all over the map. does a person who grew up in a Muslim family, does not practice Islam, but who hates american support for israel qualify as a 'radical Muslim'? and how so, if their opposition to israeli occupation is essentially an anti-colonial stance? does a religiously observant Muslim who passively supports terrorist attacks against western targets within war zones (such as afghanistan) but not in western countries, qualify as a 'radical Muslim'? if so, what exactly does it have to do with this person's entirely mainstream religious observance?

these two examples are enough to show the absurdity of attacking 'radical Islam.' simply put, it is a fictional category made up by americans; the heart of the concept is not religious at all, but political, and yet the label makes religion the central point; it is a supposed ideology which does not map at all onto the real world. were the US tomorrow to declare war against this ideology, these weak terrorist groups would suddenly be joined by tens of millions of people, in every nation of the world, as the target of a truly global war. in short, america would be voluntarily growing their enemy from weak to strong.

all of a sudden, people around the world who identify as Muslim but not as terrorists would begin to think, hey, am i their target? am i the enemy now? if even a percentage of the people who respond in this way decide to throw in their lot with the terrorist groups, they would see massive growth. if one really thinks about this issue, the current alternative -- to identify as the enemy only those specific groups which have self-identified as enemies -- and not a religion, or blurry subset of a religion -- makes excellent sense.

the chicken hawks may think that using this supposedly non-PC term of radical Islam shows their toughness. but it really shows their reactivity, their complicity, in the terrorist aim: to fool americans into starting a religious war.

why we say 'you' instead of 'thou'

'you' was originally a plural pronoun; the ordinary singular pronoun was 'thou' or 'thee.' but to show greater respect to another person, the plural 'you' was often used in 17th century England. Quakers, as a radical sect opposed to 'worldly forms' such as honorifics, rejected status distinctions in their 'plain speech.' in their view, all were equal before God, and so such distinctions were false. the fact that they raised the ire of non-Quakers was accepted as part of the suffering necessary to prove that one was following the Truth for the right reasons (ie, not to curry favor with other people). one ultimate result of Quakers insisting on the familiar 'thou' was many non-Quakers, in order to distance themselves from the sect, insisting on using 'you' exclusively.

in utah, july/august 2012

eating 40 year old dreams

as the move approaches -- 3 weeks to go until we are out of my parent's house -- strange situations arise. my parents have stored emergency food supplies ever since i was little, some of it unchanged: large cans of dried peaches or potato flakes or margarine. they have no intention of lugging this 40 plus year old food to Utah, so we have begun eating it. yesterday i opened a large can of 'baco dices' -- bacon bits made of soy protein. there was a soft 'whish' of decompression as the can opener bit into the metal, and crisp, reddish, gravelly bits appeared. delicious! what an amazing sensation: eating something produced 40 or more years ago. even stranger was eating apple bits, soaked in water. to think that decades ago, this very fragment was part of a real apple hanging on a tree somewhere! the cheery advertising language on the cans reveals the old optimism about science and guaranteed progress of decades ago. 'life insurance in a can,' 'fresh taste,' etc. there was a kind of amazed bedazzlement, as if imagining that the country's rising wealth were solely due to an automatic bounty of science that would inevitably spread throughout the whole world: a utopian vision that know-how could surpass any natural limit. so the right technology could allow potatoes and margarine to taste the same today and 50 years from now: no old fashioned 'time' could get around american expertise, no worries about 'freshness' need trouble the house wife. food could be made impervious to time. timeless. in a way i guess such cans were one small example of the way science, manifested in consumer products, became metaphors for modern civilization as a utopia without limits of time and space. we still regard science with amazement. but with the decline of the american empire, and the degradation of the earth, we are well aware that science is not a panacea. in fact, science can be a destroyer, if harnessed to political and economic forces bent on short-term gain only. my wife will not eat the mashed potatoes with bacon bits. being chinese, she does not regard these products with amazement, but rather as bizarre and unnatural. for her, freshness is the chief guarantee of both flavor and healthfulness in food. for her food is a metaphor for a whole other set of ideas and emotions. she does not relate to that youthful exuberance of the 50s and 60s. she simply asks, 'why?' and she is right. what is the point of using science to divorce people from fresh, natural food and divorcing food itself from ordinary human contexts like cooking? where is the deeper value in it? and what sort of society is envisioned behind this odd product? while i agree with her, i can access that utopian wonderment of the previous generation. i can admit the project of freeze-drying food is odd -- but i can also enjoy crunching into those unnaturally red bacon bits.

sneering at 'hippies'

a couple of students in my undergrad anthropology classes have made sneering references to 'hippies' or 'dirty hippies.' i wonder what is behind this contempt. first, do the people referred to in this way also refer to themselves as 'hippies'? or is the term merely meant to smear those so designated? i wonder at the roots of this contempt. why is a group so intentionally and deliberately harmless nonetheless so hated by some? is this harmlessness and sense of openness threatening to those who adhere to another definition of what 'american' identity entails? is lacking a defensive, security-oriented attitude taken to be a betrayal of american values? a couple of nights ago, a young man walked down wall street in madison, carrying a couple of sticks of lit incense and loudly reciting something -- song lyrics, maybe -- to the silent house fronts. he perfumed the air as he walked. seeing me and my son, he quieted, greeted us, and began shouting again once a safe distance away. declaim on, gentle sons of the night!