> Gandhi wrote that an eye for eye, a tooth for a tooth, and soon the whole
> world will be blind and toothless.
Hear, hear. Just a ghastly day. There's nothing you can say about mass murder other than it's nauseating and horrible, whether it happens in downtown NYC or rural El Salvador, and whether it was touched off by collapsing a building and killing innocent office-workers, or collapsing a currency and starving innocent peasants.
But the unforgettable video shots of the jet planes, those gleaming ciphers of globalization, torching the purest architectural expression of multinational capitalism, have a long mass-cultural history. One of the great images of Patrick McGoohan's effortlessly brilliant "The Prisoner" is the sight of No. 6 looking up, just before being abducted by nameless, faceless agents of The Village, and staring in puzzlement out a window to sheer office towers, the primordial 1967 version of the WTC. That was the moment multinational capitalism emerged on the world-stage. Hideaki Anno's "Evangelion" showed us underground skyscrapers in a futuristic Tokyo-3 assaulted by the Angels of Neoliberalism, and defended by Asiazilla, the cipher of the multinational proletariat, 21st century capital's mortal foe. Now the glass towers of Capital have been turned into free-fire zones -- not just symbolically but in reality, the logical and entirely predictable result of the monstrous violence of neoliberalism. If human life has no value in the peripheries, neither will it have any value in the metropoles.
I suddenly thought of the apocalyptic scenario of Half Life, of the infrastructure of the US national security state becoming a battlefield teeming with alien technologies. The videogame anticipated the reality. Nowadays we all live in the ruins of Black Mesa Research Facility, hunting and gathering Xen technology, as the Empire burns and burns.
-- Dennis