Emergency Brake

[Dennis Robert Redmond]

In what seems to be a former life, I remember playing my class a video
from the Gulf War, from a smart bomb about to slam into some hapless Iraqi
bunker. The dread one felt while watching the thing was that you knew, you
just knew, that this wasn't going to be the end; the abyss of the 21st
century was opening up underneath one's feet. But now another set of smart
bombs have slammed into the First World, the dialectical and utterly
predictable recoil of the first catastrophe. All my aesthetic antennae
tell me, we're entering some sort of freezing Ice Age, administered by a
bunch of despicable and unelected petro-oligarchs, as the Second World
zone otherwise known as the USA descends into savage combat with other,
lesser petro-oligarchies -- chasing its own inverted shadow, as Zizek
would say.

I hope I'm wrong, though the antennae have never been wrong before. In any
case, my own small, feeble attempt at slamming on what Walter Benjamin
called the emergency brakes of history (check out the fascinating
background info by Aijiz Ahmad):

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/groundzero.html

I'll be adding stuff to this as time goes on.

-- Dennis