>Tuesday's terrorism has turned a classic contradiction: by attacking
>the symbols of Capital and Empire it has managed to dis-organize the most
>progressive elements of a society, and re-inforced the most repressive
>elements of a society.
The enduring political image from Tuesday will be the national administration choking on the obligatory I'm-in-charge-here statement, going back into hiding, clearing its throat and trying again. The performance was reminiscent of Gore's premature evacuation on election night. The Florida recount lasted a moment compared to the eternity Tuesday that passed from choke to composure.
Subsequent tub-thumping is, in one respect, a collective denial of the abyss that you all have gazed into. The NATO allies are TOO unified, the senate is TOO unanimous, the presidential resolve is TOO firm to be credible. The lady doth protest too much. Can those who would be comforted by tough talk answer the following question: assume that the U.S. positively identifies the terrorist culprits and accomplices, hunts them down and annihilates them, what then?
What then? It is a rhetorical question. The evil mastermind scenario is a comic book staple. We know how the comic book narrative ends but we also know it is a comic book. Despite the Alfred E. Neuman countenance of the emperor's new scarecrow, this ain't no comic book, Dorothy.
> . . .there was just the beginning of a collective realization that
>the US was nothing more than a vast ugly imperialist power . . .
>
>It's been very convienently replaced with a kind of nationalist
>hysteria . . .
The hysteria is produced by exclusively focusing on what has changed without taking account of what hasn't changed. One reason why it is difficult to take account of what hasn't changed is that most of us are starting from a superficial view of what the fundamentals were Monday.
For example, the U.S. was and has always been something more than a "vast ugly imperialist power". I dare say that the vastness and the uglyness couldn't endure a moment without some underlying human substance. The problem with such demonology is that it begs more questions than it answers.
The problem generally with viewing the new reality through right/left spectacles is that on the one hand there really isn't a left to speak of and on the other hand the rhetorical hegemony of the right is largely based on its comic book vacuousness. The notion of a counter-hegemonic left-sensibility comic book genre is obscene.
The word that just came into my head was sachlichkeit -- "objectivity" -- as in *neue sachlichkeit*. Let me propose a slogan:
Neither left nor right -- sachlichkeit!
Tom Walker Bowen Island, BC 604 947 2213