Atrocities

The news out of Fallujah is heart-wrenching. This is the least of it. There are many reports of wanton slaughter of civilians, the refusal to let aid agencies in, the strategic closing of hospitals, and the wholesale destruction of the city that hearkens back to Vietnam ("burning villages in order to save them"). This goes far beyond targetting insurgents, if that were even legitimate in the first place. This is "pacification" of any resistant impulse by means of overwhelming military terror and extermination. Fallujah has been made an example by a calculative machine operating from air conditioned offices in Washington. I pray for the citizens of Fallujah and our soldiers who have been ordered to carry out this atrocity. While we sit at home debating the status of a questionable mosque shooting, an entire city is being razed.

Just in Time for Christmas

Here is a product I can get behind. TV-B-Gone. A gadget that turns off all TV's within a certain radius. It will also turn on all TV's, but this is only an unfortunate side effect. [[[[I'm reminded of Woody Allen's inventor character in "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy." He invents a machine that will take the bones out of fish. "It will also put the bones back into fish, but what's the point?"]]]] I especially like the vermin metaphor. It's quite difficult to find a restaurant these days where patrons (including myself) aren't drooling into their food staring into a high corner. (Waiter, there's a TV in my soup.) I don't want to get all Andy Roony on you, but I think that our news world has gotten even more sound-bitey and screen-crawley because of television's adaptation to (what used to be) public (read: human) spaces. Don't forget the other side of the camera, too: Sousveillance. As Arthur and Marilouise Kroker of the Critical Art Ensemble tell us, "Technology is about the language of harvesting, and what is being harvested today is ourselves. Technology harvests our consciousness; it harvests our thoughts; it harvests our bodies. We're simply raw product for the great technological dynamo."

Also, check out the Mighty Morphin Administration (AKA: "The Great Technological Dynamo"). This is likely a rare find this Christmas, but if I could, I would get everyone on my list the Ashcroft Sings LP: "Truth: Volume I". Oh, when you get a chance, stand up to those who hate our freedom.

Communion

The ice caps are melting. Reuters ran an interesting article about the inability of arctic languages to describe environmental changes of the last decade, which include the appearance of elk, robins, hornets, and other animals migrating north. There are no words.

The assumption is often that communion brings peace, that travel brings good relations, that communication brings understanding. But isn't it just as often the case that some things weren't meant to commune - that the world is held together by an intricate lattice of exclusion - that communication is war, that travel bring tourism? In other words, isn't it just as possible to communicate ourselves to death? When non-native organisms are introduced, whole ecosystems must adjust. In 19th C. U.S. one of four trees was an American Chestnut until the Chinese Chestnut was introduced, wiping out the entire population. Currently, the redwoods in California are threatened by a strain of the Irish potato famine fungus. Kudzu in California and Georgia, gypsy moths in Pennsylvania, mongoose in Hawaii - the list goes on.

The case of the arctic languages gives us an analogue by which we can cross the nature/culture divide - that languages as social architectures are as much a part of natural ecology as genomic material or the weather. Certainly we have become used to the gradual process of communicating non-English languages out of existence. Here, our practices of communication (commuting, mostly) have forced an ecological shift that threatens the language in much the same way as did the introduction of kudzu to California, small pox to the American continent, or English to the airwaves.

Don Knots is Funny

Dubya: The Movie



For dessert, to quote Beck, I-eye want to find the logic of our sex laws....

From New Zealand

Wow. Dolphins lifeguard the lifeguards.

Deprive Yourself

While in Chicago over the last weekend, Kate and I had our first opportunity to float in a sensory depravation tank - a little place in Lincoln Park called Space-Time Tanks - highly recommend for price ($40/hr), atmosphere (incense, diffuse lighting, and a salt-water fish tank), and plain ol' friendliness.

A sense dep tank is an enclosed structure about the size of a full-size bed wherein sits about 10 inches of water. The water is saturated with epsom salts - about 800 lbs - so it is quite thick and amniotic-feeling. Lying on your back, you float effortlessly. This water is also heated to 93 degrees fahrenheit, the temperature of the skin. It's dark and silent. The idea is that a large portion of our everyday brain activity is occupied with interpreting mundane sense data. When this capacity is freed, the mind is opened. Thoughts race; the mind goes into periods of deep meditation; a clarity of thought it achieved. Some people have out of body experiences or profound hallucinations. I would refer you to this site - Rebirth - to read various experience reports. The tank was invented in the 1960's by John Lilly, who was probably best known for his work in dolphin communication.

The question of what the mind is without the body is an interesting one. I am in the process of building my own tank at home from plans, and, having tried it, I'm even more excited about finishing the tank.

My own long float experience (2 hrs) was very calming, and I did go into periods of lost time or sleep. I would say it is a distilled form of meditation - expansive and pure. I did not regress to a fetus or leave my body. I did begin to see a pulsing white light, however, and some aurora borealis-type lights. Thoughts came and went easily as if they weren't my own. Reintegration into the world was very pleasurable, as you might imagine, and the buzz remained with both Kate and I for a good 24 hours. I felt extremely refreshed, and I believe them when they say that a 2 hour session is equivalent to 8 hours of sleep.

Kate and I talked to the owner of Space-Time for quite some time before going in. I was most interested in the reasons people come to float, which range from self-exploration to work-a-day relaxation. The tiny float tank business has gotten progressively smaller since the 1970s, but has recently undergone a bit of a resurgence. According to the owner, "sensory depravation" was euphemized for most of its life as "floatation," but now, people are starting to warm up to "sensory depravation" again. In Chicago, I went to a birthday party at Dave & Busters, a giant adult arcade. Blindly feeling my way through clouds of white noise and strobe lights, I now know why "sensory depravation" doesn't sound that scary to folks anymore. I recall a section of an interview with Gilles Deleuze in "Negotiations" where he is discussing the "control society" - a social existence where every surface of body and brain are electronically or chemically "hooked up." Deleuze's comment was that in the near (or now) future, a person will have to make of herself a "circuit breaker" if any kind of personal existence is going to be had.

Good stuff. Highly recommended. Perhaps a cure for ADD in there somewhere.

Myth, Prescience, and Technoevolution

Again, reading Paul Carus' The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil... Carus traces the Greek figures of Prometheus and Hercules and their combination into the figure of Christ. Hercules was the protector and embodied many of the ascetic virtues we attribute to Christ. Prometheus was the "crucified one," who, after stealing fire from the gods, as the familiar story goes, was tied to a stake to have his liver repeatedly torn from his body by an eagle.

As the best known of the fire stealing myths (and if there is a universal myth, this would be it), Prometheus (the "one who thinks ahead") has some heuristic gems. I like to think about this particular birth of technology and the natural world. Remember, it is Prometheus' liver that is targeted here. The liver's main function in the body is as a toxin filter. Buckminster Fuller has reportedly argued that the human of the future will appear as a giant liver with arms and legs, since we will essentially be living in a toxic world of our own making if we live at all. Thus, it seems appropriate that the price for stealing fire - the price of technology - would be taken out on the liver.

Prometheus, however, is eventually saved by the heroic Hercules, Christ's "better half." Now, if one were to just blue-sky a little bit, one might propose that this is an archetype of technological development - a hopeful one on balance - and one reflected in Christian mythology as well. That is, the Platonic-Christian-Scientific techno story is going to progress through some tortuous, toxic times only to be saved by itself. In other words, Christ sets in motion the Christian story whose grim legacy only Christ can resolve in the end with a "second coming."

I recently had the opportunity to see Jill Tartar of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute. One of the more interesting parts of the presentation was the experiment's rationale. At one point in the project's genesis, assumptions needed to be made about the "nature of technology" (oxymoron?) on Earth and other systems. The question: Does technology spike and crumble spectacularly like the tower of Babel? Or does it at some point stabilize? If it spikes, there will be little chance of two high-tech civilizations crossing signals. The only hope for SETI is the second option, and the more hopeful scenario is affirmed with SETI's continuation.

One might argue that Prometheus, Christ, and SETI are three versions of the same story: that technology is eventually its own salvation, evidence of the present notwithstanding. We hear this argument all the time from those unconcerned about the state of the environment - that technology will solve for technology all in good time, that Hercules or Jesus will swoop down from the sky and transform torment into a thousand years of peace and clean water. I wonder.

Apologia

I urge you to visit Sorry, Everybody for a little post-election therapy. Perhaps it will put a dent in this.

Cut-ups

I urge you to try Instant Poesis, a little applet that turns any webpage into mellifluous verse. I've fashioned/found two poems for your dining pleasure.

(1)
This Blog as a Cut-Up Poem: Or "Bloggerel"

The Hebrew tongue; Beelzebub
was a legitimate expression,
it has finally made public polls and equal.
If you do something other issues like
Anton Satanists in 1984
Reagan aired in the
destruction of the country
believe in a shot of the sound no more
of thing And the
most The earliest
religions We don’t
personally like
guns to the fact that ushered
in some Christian god watching this,
through the circus or in
The enemy is great.
The idea that Al Qaeda hate
or it Wolf Blitzer is
that, and certainly not
a few significant patterns.
First, the word to me that religion has
to do either with
a game... The
livestock.

(2)
Bush’s Address to the UN, May 2004: Or "April is the Cruelest Month"

President of our military
police, and suicide, but they
are held. America and launching attacks on
the Governing body in
a transitional national assembly will
also embolden the heart of
our money
is not working for the
fourth step in 27 battalions, to
wear out a vision.
that is an occupying power.
and civilians on broader responsibilities. Eventually,
they will cease to join them
Successful fighting for sovereignty,
many of government, And rebuilding, American
and thanks in helping construct a prime minister,
The future they commit dramatic acts of a harsh
society in April.

If you are done cutting up the body politic, I urge you to visit the Visible Human Project and cut up the body. Or fly through it.

The Devil in Bin Laden

"They are either with us or against us." Judge - Arthur Miller's The Crucible

I've been reading Paul Carus' classic turn-of-the-century text, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil. The history draws out a few significant patterns. First, the earliest religions were what Carus calls "devil worshipping cults" where fear of maleficent gods - especially the gods of the desert drought, from Egypt to India - drove the practices of appeasement, like sacrificial offerings. The crucial turning point occurred not with the Israelites but with the Persian Zoroastrians (500 BCE), who first devised a duality of good and evil, with the devil as lesser deity. Carus' second insight is that, if one follows the development of deities, the evil deities that do emerge are almost always the highest deities of the closest enemies. The word "Satan" means "enemy" in the Hebrew tongue; Beelzebub was a high Phoenician god, and since the Phoenicians were enemies, it became another word for Satan; a Hebrew name for hell, Gehenna, was a place where the Phoenicians worshipped Moloch; Satan was a snake for the Hebrews because their enemies, the Assyrians, worshipped a high snake-god. While we often say that politics is affected by religion, it is probably more correct to say that religion has always been determined by the political.

Like a lot of folks, I have been trying to tease the religious symbolism out of the War on Terror. We hear a lot about the "perversion of one of the world's great religions." We also hear about "hating freedom." There is the perfunctory God Bless America at the end of every speech and references to "the civilized world." There is the obvious millennialism lurking in the background. Though the Bush administration pays lip service to the notion that this is not a "holy war" or (whoops) "crusade," the religious themes clearly shine through.

I think the best question to ask is: How has politics reconfigured the idea of evil? Certainly the evil of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda is different from the Soviet Evil Empire or the Nazi threat. (BTW, George Bush prefers the word "Nazi-ism" to "Fascism" conspicuously.) I would suggest that the War on Terror and its enemies fit the standard Christian idea of evil better than previous enemies--that this war beats out previous 20th C. conflicts as it is more amenable to a good v. evil framing. Another way of saying this is that the War on Terror is more of a witch hunt than the Cold War ever could be. Here's why. (I say "Here's why" when what I really mean is, "Here's a big pile of under-theorized ideas.")

1) The idea that Al Qaeda "hate our freedom" has a direct analogue in the Rev. 12: 7-9 story of the War in Heaven, where Michael and the gang toss Satan out. Bin Laden spitefully cannot stand freedom because he has been ostracized from "the civilized world." The highest satisfaction he have now is "killing as many Americans as possible."

2) The idea that "evil is among us" in the form of sleeper cells is much more salient story than it was even during McCarthyism. The Soviet threat, though advancing, was always external. Whereas the horrifying metaphor during the Red Scare was The Blob, the metaphor today is Resident Evil (the movie and the video game). The Onion captured this idea well running the headline: "Where's Bin Laden? There's a Little Bin Laden in Each of Us." This is no Cold War dialectic. This is a story that only makes sense within a global body politic - where one nation, the U.S., acts as the god power that must cleanse itself of the Goody Proctors.

3) Evil in the War on Terror grows like a mold in a petri dish where the penicillin of "democracy" is absent. The countries that harbor terrorists, like parents of truant kids, are as much responsible as the terrorists themselves. As we all know, idleness is the devil's playground.

4) Evil in the War on Terror is, to use a religious studies term, "uncreated." It, like Satan, is not an ideological response to anything. It's clear what drives Satan: primal hate - or in Bush's oxymoronic language, "an ideology of hate" (not a "hateful ideology"): hate springing forth out of itself. There can be no explanation or context, and any attempt to do so (say, in Bin Laden's pre-election tape release) must be ignored and left unaddressed. We already know why Satan does what he does.

5) Paul Carus suggest that the worship of a positive god (rather than the appeasement of a fearsome god) marks the beginnings of civilization. We could probably pull this through the creation of the high-tech global managerial corporate hub we call the U.S. In many ways, the Christian god is a high-tech one, and our wealth is often cited as proof of divine favor - that we're headed in the right direction. French theorist Paul Virilio makes the observation that post-industrial war is that of technological fundamentalism vs. brand X fundamentalism. The spectacle of the falling Trade Towers is proof of this. This was the long-awaited "sign" that ushered in a new story of cosmic struggle.

6) Finally, in the civilizing function of monotheism, we have the idea of a "god of order" and a "devil of disorder." In some Christian circles, this talk has all but replaced good v. evil. Thus, the enemy is not the "different order" of Sovietism; it is the disorder of not-global-American-empire. Thus Bill O'Reilly stops in the middle of the word "socialist," preferring to call Michael Moore an "anarchist, really." Though the word "anarchy" may have a specific meaning for Emma Goldman and Noam Chomsky, it is synonymous with disorder in the public eye. The most accessible image of this is the "black block" figure burned into the the popular imagination as it busted up the Starbucks in Seattle in 1999. Like Anton LeVey's Satanists in Christian thought, the black block anarchists play a crucial role in affirming the story of evil in uber-religion of advanced capitalism.

I'll get back to you when I get it all sorted out.

Revival

Post-election commentary from contributing editor and house political scientist, Mike Wagner.

Time to Send "Liberal" to Rehab
Mike Wagner

Paging Ted Sorensen. . .the Democratic Party is rolling on into the cultural-
issues ICU and needs a shot of adrenaline - stat! The soul-crushing defeat of
John Kerry and Dems across the nation could send the party of Roosevelt,
Kennedy and Clinton into such a shattered-in-the-face-of-defeat political coma
that even uplifting lines from former JFK scribe Sorensen wouldn’t be enough to
resuscitate them.

And yet, the four year search for the soul of the Democratic Party needs to
begin right now.

The biggest mistake that those putting together their 2008 exploratory
committees can make right now is to try and find yet another way to move to
the conservative-defined middle. With four years of what will very likely actually
be more of the same, Democrats have enough time to administer CPR to the
word “liberal.”

In short, to win back the White House, Democrats must run as liberals.

Sit down, Howard – the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party disagrees with
you on too many issues like guns to make you the standard bearer.

Democrats have four years to do what they should have done during the last four
years: reframe the debates that they have been losing in the red part of the
country between New Jersey and California.

After Gore’s campaign of “surely they’ll see how dumb W. is” and Kerry’s
campaign of “surely they’ll realize how bad things have gotten” it is time to
give people a reason to become liberal again.

It’s time for an intervention. Democrats must send “liberal” to rehab and
bring it back into the world as something that stands for freedom and equality,
two values that the middle of the country believe in. Then, the lefties will
finally be able to stand up to Republicans during debates over social issues
when conservative candidates give one and two sentence answers about how
abortion is murder or gay marriage damages traditional marriage. Now,
Democrats have to say, “Well, see, I respect your opinion, but I would have to
put aside my own faith perspective and uh, well, do something you don’t like.”

Post-rehab, liberals can say, “In America, we are free and equal. That means
that gay people have the right to get married and I support that and you should
too for the simple reason that it is American to support it. We have to
support some things that we don’t personally like or do or agree with for one
simple reason: we’re Americans. If you support freedom and equality for all
Americans, then you should support the right to gay marriage.”

Democrats must take the next four years to find a way to say that “In America,
people must be free before they can be equal. If we don’t allow women the
option to get an abortion, they are less free, and thus less equal. If you do
not want to be a part of making women less free and less equal, then you should
support a woman’s right to choose, even if you think it’d be the wrong choice.”

In other words, Democrats must stop saying they are resolute and actually be
resolute.

Once Dems do that, it becomes much easier to get traction on other issues like:
Hey, we actually lost jobs during an administration for the first time since
Hoover and Whoa, we invaded a country for no defensible reason, Uh-oh, no one
can afford health care, and Yikes, we’re not even in the top ten in education?

As Bubba likes to say, when people think - Democrats win. But in order to get
them to think, Democrats have to give people who are willing to listen a
reason to select the Donkey button on the paper trail-less voting machines. In
four years, that reason should be the following: Democrats are the party of
freedom and equality.

Wolf Blitzer is God

CNN's election center theatrics are hilarious! Wow. They have Wolf Blitzer in a circular room of LCD screens , each depicting the state-by-state tallies. Watching this, it struck me how closely Wolf Blitzer resembles the white techno god of Judeo-Christianity, of antiquity, or even the recently drawn architect character in The Matrix Reloaded. I half expected the producers to sit him down in a dentist's chair and hook a crown of electrodes to his head.

In other news, CNN's Headline News desk pair, at the techno-theatrical epicenter, look a lot like the alien face archetype. Look again.

The Promised Land

Springsteen has an odd relationship with American elections. Born in the USA (the bumper sticker bite) was petitioned for use by Reagan in 1984. Reagan was not a Springsteen fan, and the kind of person, like his ideal constituent, who 'doesn't listen to the lyrics.' Springsteen has been , for the intelligensia Left, the saving grace of Classic Rock. Springsteen is also the poster boy of earnestness in a naive wonderland of garages and AM radios where a person doesn't feel like s/he is lost in a funhouse of mirrors. Aside from being a nostalic projection, Springsteen is also a projection of the proletariate of Marx's or the New Left's imagination. That is, he satisfies this mythic need while the actual 'proletariate' (which translates to the shifting temp/tele workforce of today's America TM) is not listening to Springsteen but to Toby Keith. Recently, I've been seeing a lot of Springsteen-next-to-Kerry-in-Madison, WI clips. He's the perfect accompaniment to Kerry's billion dollar crooning about the plight of the poor. There he is, earnestly praying the lyric "I believe in the promised land" into the mic. I, predictably, think Springsteen is great. Like Born in the USA of the cold war, this song is an interesting read of the present WAR X. Here it is:

On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert

I pick up my money and head back into town

Driving cross the Waynesboro county line

I got the radio on and I'm just killing time

Working all day in my daddy's garage

Driving all night chasing some mirage

Pretty soon little girl I'm gonna take charge



The dogs on Main Street howl `cause they understand

If I could take one moment into my hands

Mister I ain't a boy no I'm a man

And I believe in a promised land



I've done my best to live the right way

I get up every morning and go to work each day

But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold

Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode

Explode and tear this town apart

Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart

Find somebody itching for something to star



The dogs on Main Street howl `cause they understand

If I could take one moment into my hands

Mister I ain't a boy no I'm a man

And I believe in a promised land



There's a dark cloud rising from the desert floor

I packed my bags and I'm heading straight into the storm

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down

That ain't got the faith to stand its ground

Blow away the dreams that tear you apart

Blow away the dreams that break your heart

Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted



The dogs on Main Street howl `cause they understand

If I could take one moment into my hands

Mister I ain't a boy no I'm a man

And I believe in a promised land

Vote Reality

I was scrolling through the full list of presidential candidates at Project Vote Smart and I came across one write-in candidate who/that goes by the name/title of "Reality." According to PVS, Reality has declined to answer their political issues survey though it has been requested 23 times! I always knew Reality was not all it was cracked up to be. But it begs the question - don't you have to be a flesh-and-blood person to run for president? and 35? I know that corporations can be protected as individuals for free speech purposes. And certainly GWB might as well be a holographic image - the surreal-est, post-toastiest one yet. Is "Reality" a person, corporation, or idea? All three at once? Having drifted into the ethereal skies of mass media and far away to the spinterlands, I think the culture is ready to vote Reality. I predict he/she/it will make an unexpected showing - taking more votes away from Kerry than Bush, unfortunately.