``Truly the words of a truly sick and malignant fuck...''
Brad DeLong -------------
Well me and Arafat wish you and yours a Merry Christmas too Brad. Glad you could make it out today.
You know I was just saying something nice about you to Doug the other night at the SF Film Center, when he was out here. Too bad you missed it.
Now do you want to explain what is sick and malignant about describing the probable motivation for ploughing into the world trade center?
Is it necessary to explain that a certain sympathy for and an understanding and apprehension of terrorism is not the same as committing terrorist acts? Evidently, my understanding is equivalent to approval, but an approval that has already bled into complicity and outright advocacy.
Is it somehow essential that I commence blubbering over the dead, none of whom I knew, to somehow expiate myself of these bloody hands?
I have to admit that I suspect the displays of sorrow by public and political figures who are also complete strangers to the victims, is in fact nothing more than theater on the part of Empire---wishing to hide its own bloody atrocities under the debris of the towers. Am I malignant for thinking so?
Or rather, is the conclusion that I am a sick and twisted person for suspecting an abundance of duplicity, a far more healthy response?
Is my lack of sorrow for the dead in these attacks, any different than their family's unknowing indifference to all the people I've known who have died far more miserable, protracted, and struggling deaths---in much less spectacular, but easily preventable circumstances?
Maybe you forgot I work in the bowels of the healthcare system and have known dozens of people who died mostly at the hands of the empire-for-profit system itself. Hence, my provisional gratitude for just about any form of attack against this system. Why are these latter deaths so much less meaningful? Well, because they were less spectacular, that is to say they were routine, and they were mostly poor, crippled and silent. It turns out that these are perfect qualities for commodification and profit taking by Empire.
In any event, sorry about getting the Bradbury title wrong. Yes, I remember that the number is the temperature that paper burns(?).
In light of the US government's domestic and foreign policy reactions, which I think I can safely characterize as truly heart-warming and patriotic blows for our way of life, it seems to me that Fahrenheit 451 should start re-appearing on reading lists in literature survey courses soon.
For those who haven't read it here is a quick summary:
``...Developed in the years following World War II, Fahrenheit 451 condemns not only the anti-intellectualism of the defeated Nazi party in Germany, but more immediately the intellectually oppressive political climate of the early 1950's - the heyday of McCarthyism. That such influential social criticisms via fiction as Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 and Skinners Walden Two were published just a few short years prior to Fahrenheit 451 is not coincidental. These works reveal a very real apprehension of the danger of the US evolving into an oppressive, authoritarian society that existed in the post-WWII period...''
Taken from:
(http://www.classicnote.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/fahrenheit/about.html)
Maybe its time for a re-make.
Chuck Grimes