haunted by fire (2)

it is in the essential separation or empty heart of a modern nation (ie, the fact that we are not directly connected to other americans but through imagination) that media can dwell, inhabiting our minds. but it is the controlled nature of our lives within this national system -- the suburbs, the work discipline, the surveillance of all sorts -- that makes us need to imagine, to consume, unimaginable horrors. and this addiction, which i don't believe exists in less separated societies, societies where the everyday violence of daily life, the need to kill animals, for instance, was not hidden from us -- this addiction is used to manipulate us american people into imperial wars. wars against distant countries become wars of defense.

haunted by fire (3)

separations make the american system both incredibly efficient, powerful, and also brutal. this brutality manifests in so many ways, from the mental illness and domestic violence and suicide that isolation breeds (the dark side of 'individual freedom'), to the solitary confinement and executions and prison rape of our prison system, to the concentration of foreign policy knowledge in elite hands, leaving the masses to be manipulated to emotionally charged support for wars that kill and expel millions of people. this primary evil is well-buffered from citizens, allowing us all to go about buying bread and pumping gas and steaming broccoli as if nothing were wrong, no one being tortured, no one being exploited or left on the street to die. in fact, the buffering processes themselves are a second and enabling form of evil which allows the original evil deeds to flourish.

haunted by fire (4)

what the IS killers have done with these horrific executions is to confront us with a form of evil we had intentionally left behind: face-to-face sadism -- knowing we would project it through our media to all corners of society. they are like the horror/suspense movie villain, using security cameras to mock the police captain helplessly watching as the villain prepares to torment his (usually female) captive. i believe that IS emerged in part -- in large part -- due to the controlling and distancing inherent in the global system. first, in the existence of the twin dictatorships of iraq and syria, sustained by the global system of alliances and trade and nourished by cold war blocs. these dictatorships bred a kind of latent extremism, as citizens were held in the suffocating embrace of the state but without a corresponding sense of usefulness or belonging. and secondly, in the american invasion which brought the state structure of iraq crumbling down, a violent process into which the disaffected and disempowered elements moved swiftly.

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.