A failure to promote a positive program to get justice for the victims of Sept 11 as an alternative to war and violence is a fundamental moral and strategic failure of the Left. They are making war more likely by the day.
-- Nathan Newman
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Well, somewhere in the first two or three posts on WTC and DC attacks, I advocated full government financial support for the human costs in medical care, rehabilitation, employment, family support, and funeral expenses. Of course business and real estate will get the cash and the people will get whatever that bogus wall to wall telethon brought in. This idea of volunteerism for the human victims and solid financial support for the capital targets demonstrates what the US government considers important, and illustrates its own cynical and opportunistic policies toward these events. Cash for the airlines, and kisses to the grieving.
Does anyone know how FEMA works and what it actually provides in concrete assistance to individual people caught in disasters like this? My guess is a bunch of low interest loan guarantees and some insurance supplements. In other words forms and bullshit.
So, if the US empire is going to ratchet up its assaults on the world, it should at least make arrangements for its own current and future civilian casualties. That's my positive program to get justice for the victims.
More accurately, I am not interested in justice in and of itself, partly because that very construction lays the foundation for terrorism and paradoxically because there is no such thing as justice in this context. Does a second dead body, make the first dead body any less a loss to family and friends? I think what you have are simply two dead bodies, and a second set of family and friends weeping and demanding justice. The only moral is pain loves company.
The other positive program is educational. It is necessary to not only the follow up the previous anti-globalization efforts to counter what Empire and Capital are doing, but also explore and examine this current government and media war hysteria.
Government policies and media work in tandem (along with all the other institutions of mass society) to produce what I think of as the mythological envelop through which we articulate and express ourselves. I consider this a little different or distinguishable from a more comprehensive idea of culture, since this mythological envelop is intentionally fabricated in order to mold perception and behavior. Especially during a crisis this psychological, symbolic, and social construct or medium manages and steers our perceptions, actions and reactions and it is important to understand how that all works---and especially describe and explain it to people who may not be particularly aware of or want to acknowledge how they are being manipulated by this medium---which is really a complex interaction of several different communication mediums and a confluence of political and economic interests. Chomsky calls it manufacturing consent. I call it a mythic envelop for a short-hand because it seems to take on both the expressive qualities of mythological thinking, and configure our conceptions of the world in mythic terms. In concrete terms of course these are nothing more than people writing news stories, camera crews taping events, political and economic professionals designing policies and fabricating justifications for them. However, the totalizing effect of all these activities taken together brought to us as a continuous stream of mass media, takes on a kind of seamless whole from which it appears to be impossible to escape. So I call that an envelop. In my mind it also has something of the mythic quality of a living entity, as if it were a living force of some sort with a will of its own.
After a stunning event or crisis this entity which is always present in some low key fashion is aroused to some heighten state. It seems that the arousal begins with the elementary process of naming, so we have bin Laden, we have Terrorism, and we have the Attack on America, and we will have A War on Terrorism. All of this is simply rational garbage---and yet it all makes sense to the mytho-poetic mind, or what Levi-Strauss called the Savage Mind, that is always co-present with and co-extensive to our rational and analytical thought.
So, here is my mythic cast to what we are doing.
There are no more just wars, only holy wars. The difference is critical. A just war is theoretically supposed to seek some secular balance, measure for measure, and in that sense has a potential conclusion, the return to a proper balance of all things. But we are far beyond that modicum of rationality. We don't want justice, we want vengeance, divine retribution, measured out in cosmic scales of death, thousands to one. There is no conclusion to a holy war and no return to balance, only the exhaustion of blood lust. In literary terms are devolving from the realm of the Odyssey into the world of the Iliad.
Lord Bush has evoked a Holy War, and it is an unmistakable Christian crusade against the barbarian Islamic hordes. These stealthy, dark, heavy browed, flashing eyed fanatics, welding scimitars and screaming Allah to the sky, descended upon our holiest peace loving shrines and gleaming white temples of beatitude and decimated them, leaving nothing but a vast array of death and smoking ruins. These were unspeakable acts of desecration and they will be avenged.
We will send forth our terrible angels of wrath leading armies of the faithful, even down to the errant among us, not just to defend the borders of our lovely countryside, but there and beyond. Our forces of might will sally forth into those distant dismal regions where these hooded demons live and breed and we will exterminate them all to the infinite dismay of their gods and to the absolute horror of their suppliants.
The clarion call of our criers is already heard at the gates, in the burning flame of America, coming from all sides. They are recounting the valiant deeds in the hours of the terrible time and of the universal lamentation to come. We hear them as the very entreaties of the dead, all those lost souls begging for the vengeance denied them.
See? It's also fun stuff to write because it attempts to find linguistic compliments to all those mythic or psycho-motive registers that need some expression and some release from their prison.
So the collective trick of the mythological envelop is to find compliments to these psycho-motive registers in the existing configurations and repetitory of the political economy, its legalistic armature, and its mytho-historic imagery. The goal is to find the most satisfying combination and enact them. Vast displays of military might with their pyrotechnics are always a good pick. Lots of rousting of the usual suspects with lots of cops on the street, lots of trials, lots of announcements of imminent capture, big sweeps through foreign looking communities also make good display. And there are the often forgotten benefits of the self-flagellant. We ask for it, because we are too good. And, there are the paranoid pursuit of secret plots, rooting out the witches and traitors among us, and the revelation of new mysterious hidden forces of the world are also favorites. Meanwhile lots of nose to the grind-stone shows of hyper-normal activity help to belay the fear of demons just beyond immediate grasp. Keep real busy, making lots of noise, and maybe the boogie won't get us.
You have to have watched this epi-phenomenon appear and develop several times in order to see its inner coherence and cohesion. Every round is different, every round had its reasons, every round seems to promise some fundamental change, but in the end, when the time has passed, the dead are still dead even if the funerary pyres get higher, the world more or less stumbles along much as before though changed in some ways that are completely unpredictable, despite the pronouncements of a totally new day. This round will be no different.
It is not news for the US to be reminded that other peoples have their own mythic systems which they insist on preserving (or re-inventing, resuscitating) and which function more or less the same way in terms of configuring and expressing the particulars of their psycho-motive constellations---their identities so to speak. Certainly religious fundamentalisms in their Christian Jewish, and Islamic figurations have become more noticeable these days. What we in the US were just reminded of was that Capital and Empire are expressions of our secular religion, our mythic system of ordering the socio-cultural fabric of the political economy. The WTC and the Pentagon were attacked because they were religious symbols.
And yet Dennis Redmond and others are right in noting there is no longer and perhaps never was a single stewardship of the global system, but a convergence of regional political and economic interests, or their figurative mythical systems locked in dubious battle over steering the directional flows of capital and material power. These collective material interests correspond to the clash of the mythic titans.
``Your nationalists are my terrorists. My freedom-fighters are your terrorists. This is not a cynical observation, nor the judgment of a political relativist; politically, it simply is the truth...'' [International Herald Tribune, Pfaff, 9/24/01, fwd Ian Murray]
But what kind of truth and how are these so-called truths all inter-related to the internal developments under the shadows of Empire and Capital?
To my mind they are related in an interesting way, in what appears to me to be a quest for some authentic or primordial root life force, say a mythic centering of the human universe. This epic journey is of course shared by the magnets of empire and capital, in their portrayal of their own machinations as progress and development toward some techno-utopian future. Let's not forget that the future as techno-utopia in a secular world view, takes the place of heaven in the religious world view---both are completely mythic inventions.
Your techno-utopian, neoliberal future is my corruption of the natural world order, my natural world order is your religious fanaticism. And yet, just as today's techno-utopian neoliberal future no more resembles its originary founding, in the 18th Century conception of modernity, neither do the quasi-religious evangelisms resemble their ancient models. The worlds of the imaginary Luther, Omar, and Moses are just as illusory and mythological as the envisioned modernity of Newton, Kant, and Rousseau.
Is it really just a coincidence that many of these quasi-religious neo-evangelisms or fundamentalisms are fabricated by the dis-illusioned professional elites who were western educated and returned to their homelands after some youthful sojourn in Europe or the US to take up positions of political and economic power? I don't know this, but I suspect that bin Laden is merely representative of several generations of third world elites who were exposed to the high culture of the west and were profoundly disturbed by it. Evidently western academic Enlightenment doesn't always lead forward into the utopian visionary future of progress. Our myth of future as heaven isn't always believed. That certainly isn't news to the equally educated and equally dis-illusioned western discontents. Yet it was probably a combination of that education taking place within the context of our gross consumer culture, dominated by its rhetoric of neoliberal capitalism and juxtaposed to a non-western background that performs a kind of special magic.
While I feel some affinity for what I presume to be passionate rejections of the West, I have no other tangible alternative. That certainly didn't stop me from fabricating my own alternatives. It is simply a guess, but any connection with a living tradition not utterly erase or debased by the West and its techno-utopian visionary future must be impossible almost everywhere. This broken connection, this erasure or debasement is a form of psychic wounding, a trauma inflicted upon the mytho-poetic mind. So that wounding which could also be considered enlightenment, becomes a traumatic center. Like any trauma, it's evidential healing takes on a unpredictable form.
In its guise as Enlightenment it is simply experienced as a void, a kind of numbness to spirituality. Personally, I just substituted art, literature and a kind of cultural analysis which seems to fill this pit just fine. But I have also watched this void or trauma in friends take on other forms, among them western religious fundamentalisms of the Christian and Jewish varieties, or among a few black friends, a kind of Americanized pan-Africanism welded to a deep south Protestantism. In short, it is intimately associated with the spiritualization of our quest for roots.
Since I cut myself off from the friends I had in the LA suburban high school I attended, I didn't watch the cultural confrontation and its mirid of common reactions occur among people I understood intimately during the early phases of the Vietnam War. I realize now, that confrontation was somehow important to watch while media efforts were haphazardly begun to resuscitate some legendary America, some Norman Rockwell poster image of the land that never was. I just ignored it as meaningless war propaganda.
And yet, this Rockwellian imagery is certainly the world that George W. Bush believed he was speaking to during his unfortunately compelling speech the other night. All of this can be dismissed as mere jingoistic nationalism, which it is of course. But it seems more important to me now to understand its internal meshing with all those psychic wounds that seem to me to be the driving force both within Empire and beyond the gates. As I wrote in an earlier post, terrorism is also a mirror.
Chuck Grimes