Tom Walker wrote:
> Carl wrote:
>
> >There's a lot of excess arm waving in Zizek's
> remarks, but his main point is
> >clear and unexceptionable: "America's 'holiday
> from history' was a fake:
> >America's peace was bought by the catastrophes
> going on elsewhere. Therein
> >resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only
> way to ensure that it will
> >not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on
> ANYWHERE ELSE."
>
> Exactly my point about Zizek being European. As a
> native Californian I have
> to confess literally to Zizek's "ultimate American
> paranoiac fantasy." The
> year was 1966 and the "small idyllic Californian
> city" was Davis.
I grew up in Southern California and I've read enough Pynchon and others, and lived there and known people from there enough, to appreciate the Northern California paranoiac fantasy; the essay did ring true in many ways for me. It didn't help that I grew up in Solana Beach (born 1971), inside the triangle drawn by Camp Pendleton, Mirarmar Base, and the Naval Base to the south, a child of laid back privilege who could afford to see the military not only as protector from the Outside, but as friendly and, as it were, hardcore Disney. What was war? Surely these planes were meant strictly for guided tours while the Blue Angels flew overhead. (Remember the beginning of _Vineland_, how the Spielberg filming altered the place?) At the same time, as Zizek says, it was "the awareness that we live[d] in an insulated artificial universe which generat[ed] the notion that some ominous agent [was] threatening us all the time with total destruction."
Zizek's essay begs the final question: *how* to prevent it going on ANYWHERE ELSE.
Alec
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