Mosquitos

"We know for sure that there is so much more to be revealed, even when we dismiss the many conspiracy theories that swirl around our body politic like malarial mosquitos feeding on the national unease" - Danny Schechter on 9/11 in Media Wars, p. xxxviii

I have been thinking about the mosquito metaphor lately in regard to the current War on Terror. I have a swampy area near my house, and as I gaze into it, I can just imagine the hordes that will rise from it this next summer. In Georgia the mosquito problem was temporarily quelled by the mid-century use of DDT, and apparently the mosquitos are on the rebound in its absence. Mosquitos are peculiar in that, unless they get very thick, they aren't really a problem until someone mentions them. The thought of mosquitos can be almost more oppressive than the bugs themselves. Terrorism, by definition, works in a similar way.

The West Nile Virus is a superb analog to the War on Terror. Though West Nile is dangerous to some extent, with a very limited number of fatalities, it is essentially a creation of media fear mongering. Like high rise office buildings, subways, and jet aircraft, mosquitos are everywhere, and the threat is continually signified, seemingly ever-present. Since September 11, more Americans have been killed by lightning than by terrorism, and yet its specter haunts us to the last person.

Noam Chomsky wrote a widely circulated essay entitled "Drain the Swamp and There Will Be No More Mosquitos," referring to a statment made by Israel's military head, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, concerning the "Palestinian Question." The metaphor has found its way elsewhere too. The idea justifies, for example, the targetting of "rogue states" and "failed states" preemptively - the swamps - in order to destroy the "breeding grounds." As water itself is perhaps replacing oil as the world's most precious resource, it, like oil, has become a weapon. Saddam Hussein, after the first Gulf War, infamously drained the wetlands of southern Iraq and displaced the 5,000-year-old and 250,000 strong culture of the Marsh Arabs, presumably to punish the Shia for the post-war failed uprising. Part of the impetus behind the Israeli wall is to claim precious aquifer access from the Palestinians. Much of the devastation resulting from the decade of U.S.-led economic sanctions against Iraq (1.5 million dead, according to the UN) was a result of an initial bombing of water treatment facilities followed by the denial of replacement parts and purification supplies.

The word "mosquito" is an anglicized version of "Miskito," the African-Indian tribes of what is now Nicaragua. In the late 18th Century, the Miskito people were the subjects of harsh British colonization, and there was an insurgent situation. While the British were battling the mosquito, they were also battling the Miskito.

The mosquito metaphor also quite aptly plays into the oil war equation. The most common anti-war slogan in the lead up to the Iraq wars in both 1991 and 2003 was "No Blood for Oil." This slogan was chanted so often, the two liquids seemed to have transubstantiated into one. The force of empire assumes that the oil belongs to U.S. corporations, and it is often said that it is the "lifeblood" of the post-industrial West. The Iraqis, with their demands for self-determination, have a habit for randomly blowing up pipelines. These tiny flying parasites cannot be allowed to drain what rightly belongs to corpulent corporate oil. All junkyard tires must be turned and sitting water siphoned away. The threat is everywhere, even within our own borders, and the war is never-ending.

Digital Aesthetics and 9/11

"There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary code and those that don't."

"You are either with us or you are with the terrorists"

When the CD emerged and began to replace magnetic audio tape as the dominant music medium, Neil Young reportedly complained that whereas listening to a tape was a like being caressed by a warm ocean wave, digital sound was like being pushed over by a pile of ice cubes. Neil Young has never struck me as one with a particularly tuned ear, but his statement begins to address the digital aesthetic. What he heard - or thought he heard (the difference?) - were jagged clouds of binary pairs, of on-offs, of cold shoulders. In the digital realm, there is no jerry-rigging. The entire ritual of retracking the tape, winding with pencils, and hiding it from your neodymium speaker magnets is gone. There are no gray areas, no fudging. The information is either present or not. We might ride Neil Young's train of thought and argue that we are losing our pliability, our fleshiness, to the brittle world of silicon.

When digital goes wrong, it goes big. Some of the most inhumane sounds emanate from my speakers when the CD skips or when the digital player fumbles. The perfection of digital audio is only matched by its irredeemability when it goes wrong. Paul Virilio argues that every technology has built within it a catastrophe. To find out if this is true, one only has to follow the general use of the word "crash." The word has come to be almost exclusively associated with our machines of commuting and communication - cars and computers. Computers don't just falter or lose step. They crash. The specter of the Y2K bug was the anticipation of this idea coming to fruition on a grand scale - a general "system crash."

Whereas the digital aesthetic early on was one of perfection, now it has become sufficiently complex enough to contain dirt. The computer virus, for example, is a symptom of this complexity. But what does the aesthetic look like? It is violent. It contains big crashes (system failures) and little ones (dropped film frames and jagged discontinuities, pixellation, screeching mutations). The digital aesthetic longs for the golden days of static, the noise component of analog media. Static is fetishized in the digital aesthetic. Static is humane and forgiving. The digital aesthetic is intolerant of any aberration.

Philosopher Gilles Deleuze talks about the "control society" emerging out of "disciplinary society." That is, the modes of social control are moving from their linguistic and institutional bases to cybernetic, pharmaceutical, and military ones. Think of the control society as a high-tech, decentrallized, crystallization of the social field. Terry Gilliam's film Brazil is a great illustration. While the social field of Brazil looks more like a low-tech 1960's Soviet Bloc country, it has a number of features of the control society. The inhabitants of this world never see the face of the master, and they can never see beyond immediate orders. There are explosions everywhere - at the restaurant, at work. The "terrorists" are hard at work. People have grown accustomed to the seemingly random violence that it doesn't even demand a second look.

The control society is the digital aesthetic applied to the political field. Another word for this is the War on Terror. The politics of fear, on the domestic end, along with a cocktail of antidepressants, are what the global managerial society needs to remain solvent. The managerial machine needs to remain in tension, like the integrated circuit. The energy that pulses through it needs to be stabilized. All the errant libidos are tamed with Zoloft and soothed with Nexium. The aesthetics of the Terror War are either clean (as in the clean desert TV wars) or unconscionably bloody and senseless - as in the case of the sudden, shocking, still unexplained collapse of the Twin Towers, not undone by an outside rocket, but by the confounding of its internal machinery. The War on Terror is as brittle and smooth as silicon itself, punctuated with the most violent ruptures. The explanation for this is as mystifying as the the computer message "Error: 0048485923LL4" - only decipherable by the most specialized technocrats of state who "do not negotiate with terrorists." Even the towers themselves seemed to imitate the ones and zeros of binary code.

One could argue that 9/11 was only an early episode in the progress of the control society; that as the digital age complexifies, the big crash will diffuse through the system; that these microcrashes will really constitute the mutant genes of social-technological life; that the space for free movement will be potentialized in the catastrophic fragility of everything. This is why the modes of social enforcement are moving away from a discourse of "defense" to one of "security," as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note in their Multitudes. The new paradigm is also showing up in the combination of military and police forces on domestic streets. As the image of "black bloc" protest violence advances, so does the security state and the emphasis on the development of the less-than-lethal weaponry of domestic crowd control. "System crashes," will perhaps themselves "network out." By this time, of course, it will be meaningless to talk of a "digital aesthetic."

God's Gets an Idea

In December, astronomers documented the largest starburst on human record (AFP, Feb 18). In 1/10 of a second, this exploding neutron star emitted the energy our sun would in 100,000 years. The sky briefly lit up with the force of a full moon. Apocalicious televangelist Jack Van Impe ought to have a hay day with this. I am about ready to take it as a sign of something. Hmm. Back to Daniel and the book of Revelations for this one.

The Name

This is a very fun, interactive graph of baby names and their popularity over time. I don't know what I learned from it, but... er... something. If nothing else, you can find out how conventional your parents or grandparent are by matching names with birthdays. My parents decided to go retro with me. "America," by the way, has really exploded with the steepest recent curve I could find.

Happy Lupercalia!

Channeling the History Channel today...

While some believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial -- which probably occurred around 270 A.D -- others claim that the Christian church may have decided to celebrate Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an effort to 'christianize' celebrations of the pagan Lupercalia festival. In ancient Rome, February was the official beginning of spring and was considered a time for purification. Houses were ritually cleansed by sweeping them out and then sprinkling salt and a type of wheat called spelt throughout their interiors. Lupercalia, which began at the ides of February, February 15, was a fertility festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the Roman founders Romulus and Remus.

To begin the festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at the sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would then sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification.

The boys then sliced the goat's hide into strips, dipped them in the sacrificial blood and took to the streets, gently slapping both women and fields of crops with the goathide strips. Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed being touched with the hides because it was believed the strips would make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day, according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in a big urn. The city's bachelors would then each choose a name out of the urn and become paired for the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage. Pope Gelasius declared February 14 St. Valentine's Day around 498 A.D. The Roman 'lottery' system for romantic pairing was deemed un-Christian and outlawed.

(more)

Shooting Journalists Shooting the Shooting of Journalists

First they came for CBS, and as I did not really like Dan Rather and thought he really did screw up (or let himself get set up), I did not protest.

Then they came for CNN, and as I considered CNN to be largely a lapdog to the administration, I did not protest.

(to be continued)

Is it me, or does it appear to you that the disciplining of journalism has given way to open discrediting? Could it be that the politics of media consolidation also is beginning to increasingly include dirty tricks to consolidate audience? After Sept 11, we saw the first intermedia mudslinging between news segments. Fox and MSNBC were battling it out to prove which one was more "patriotic." Peter Arnett is a traitor, Geraldo Rivera is giving away strategic military secrets, etc.

As to the CNN news chief's exiting remarks, I think he is spot on. Many unilateral (unembedded) reporters were hit by U.S. fire. Many were killed. More in the short duration of the Iraq II than in Vietnam. They were a "pain in our rear" as one Pentagon media spokesperson at Centcom stated. We know that Al Jazeera headquartersand Abu Dabai TV were intentionally hit by U.S. bombs. As they say in trial law, the actus reus is not in dispute, only the mens rea. Were these killings intentional? The evidence would seem to suggest that it's not only possible but useful military strategy.

Intenational journalists seek war crimes investigation.

Sliding Scale Citizenship

You know the times are a-changin' when the so-called "conservatives" are on board for loosening immigration restrictions. While paleocons like Pat Buchanan is still talking about building a wall on the Rio Grande, Bush is proposing that we let folks in on temporary work permits.

I had an inkling that this might happen a few years ago when I was doing a little summer teaching gig in Palo Alto, CA at Stanford. Palo Alto is such a prized Silicon Valley location that even tenured professors at Stanford can't afford to live in town. Yet there is a whole lower class serf population that keeps the town running - mainly Mexican immigrant labor. I remember thinking at the time: beds have to get made, and these rich folks are not going to do it. Since then, the ghettoization of the service sector has become more visible. Is it just me?

Over the past 20 years, the US has become a managerial hub of the world. Whereas factory manufacturing used to dominate, now the workforce is in one of three big areas - global production management (overseeing overseas factories), marketing/entertainment industry (they've melded into one), and the shifting temp workforce (Manpower being the largest employer in the US). To a lesser extent there are others like R&D, retail, military, and domestic agribusiness. With such a grand consolidation of the world's wealth, we have indeed become Reagan's shining city on a hill - or, better yet, the great gated community on Nob Hill. Now our biggest business concern is not breaking up the labor unions, but rather policing the world's export processing zones.

But again, beds need to get made. Who will do this? 1) Former factory labor, now temp labor (usually handling the non-skilled paper-cut and data entry jobs); 2) The prison industrial complex, which is taking an ever larger slice of the population (1 of 74 males is in prison, just edging out China for world's largest prison population. Privatization of prisons and the use of prisoners for cheap labor by Microsoft, Dell, Northwest Airlines, YouNameItCorp, etc.); and 3) Temporary immigrant labor.

This last one is a recent switch in approach. Whereas the paleocons demonized immigration to ostensibly protect American factory jobs when we had them and whip up racial fear to keep the color caste system in place - now the new global economic consciousness says hey, these immigrants are money in the bank! In other words, while the new economy has figured out how to export manufacturing jobs to the third world, it hasn't figured out (until now) how to get the third world to come to the US to do the service sector jobs we can't export. The answer: temporary work permits. All the benefits of low wage labor without all those pesky citizenship rights. See Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Mario Cuomo's response to Reagan's shining city at the 1984 DNC: the tale of two cities: one above ground, one below. None dare call it slavery.

This changing econcomic landscape is captured with remarkable sensitivity in the 2004 PBS POV documentary Farmingville, about a small town on Long Island battling over the influx of Mexican day laborers. It's highly recommended if you can get your hands on it. It's the story of reactionaries, racists, and paleocons on the one hand lining up against neocons and immigrant rights groups on the other. Some strange bedfellows. Of course, the Bush administration and various business interests are mobilizing the "compassionate" rhetoric of conservatism to push this liberalization of immigration policy. Managing the global economy while increasing the wealth disparity is messy business. Get ready for sliding scale citizenship. Already we have a partial infrastructure of this with the War on Terror, do-not-fly lists, felony voting and job restrictions, etc. Remember the neocon slogan, "All men are equal, but some are more equal than others."

Honorsystemistas

I have been considering the cultural effects of file-sharing lately. Already there been a resurgence in live music as the economy shifts away from the CD commodity, though live music venues are still controlled by large media conglomerates. I think there will be other interesting effects of file-sharing. The vast availability of feature films on BitTorrent and eMule formats has generated a crisis in Hollywood. At the same time, the web is able to deliver much more independent video content. As Hollywood adapts to the web, it will likely make the full transition to product-placement revenue - i.e. releasing feature-length advertisements, complete with interactive shopping, into the peer-o-sphere. Pornography has really taken the lead in this respect, releasing peer-to-peer files to the winds in the hopes that, like carrier pigeons, they will point customers home. This strategy is otherwise known as "viral advertising": advertisers, taking a cue from pornographers, release a "too hot for TV" clip in the hopes that it will take wing on a warm wind of taboo.

But back to film and music. Say that people demand meaningful art and get wise to pocket-picking advertisers. One option is pay-to-play film and audio. Right now, this is working largely in an environment of scarcity. Online music stores exchange money for the rights to download content. In a fully developed file-sharing world, on the other hand, there is no scarcity, and everyone has the right to download. Does the starving artist finally starve? I don't think so. I take the record label Magnatune to be a case in point. Though they are not quite where I think music and film will go, they are miles ahead of the curve. Magnatune, for the most part, uses the honor system. You pay the artist what you can or will. Compared to record label CD sales, where an artist gets from 25 cents to a dollar per CD, this is a pretty good deal.

We can imagine a world where, at the end of a peer-to-peer file, there is an admonishment for some kind of viewer- or listener-supported donation. This is a situation much more like public television and radio. In this environment - on the honor system - it would seem to me that certain kinds of art would be economically more viable. For example, Bowling for Columbine would do much better than Resident Evil. That is, file sharing would foster an honorable culture to complement the honor system. Communitarian values would persist while the messages of "all against all" would fail. There would be exceptions to this rule - namely fear-based holy crusades, which will always nab a portion of the population.

As it stands, we are already well on our way to a polarized body politic. It is only part of the story to claim the red state/blue state split is made up of metro liberals vs. heartland conservatives - F911 vs. Passion of the Christ. The other part is the divide between those with Internet access and those fed with TV. As the technology of file sharing spreads, I believe the body politic will continue to cleave into yet another recognizable dialectic - the overcommercialized and the honorsystemistas.

Priming Chavez

Tonight, Fox News is doing a special on Venezuela's populist president, Hugo Chavez. I've been wainting for some time for the mainstream media to get to demonizin' him. I guess we've had too much on our plate. Justifications for going into Venezuela are slim. In the Cold War, he would have been an obvious communist menace on the order of Nicaragua or Chile. (Perhaps they will still pin him up as a drug smuggler.) Now, he's just a guy who would like to continue nationalizing Venezuelan oil instead of giving it away. This is threatening to wealthy interests both in his country (which compromise the 20% who oppose him) and in the U.S. The CIA attempted a coup that worked for about 24 hours in 2002 (See the fine documentary, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"). He's a very popular leader, and in anticipation of another attempted coup, he has armed his citizenry a la Switzerland.

The Fox News promo took an interesting tack. They went right for the argument that Chavez could disrupt the oil supply - the "lifeblood" of America. All the arguments for going into Iraq having fallen through, perhaps the corporate establishment has given up on lofty justifications, settling instead for fin de siecle real politix of resource scarcity. I don't know which is worse, being flim-flammed by lovely humanitarian language or the acceptance that people don't need those sorts of explanations anymore. This Fox Online article makes reference to the State Department's criticizing of Chavez's government for restricting freedom of expression. How? By limiting sex and violence on television. Not much to work with there.

If you have eMule, by the way, here's a wonderful site for accessing all kinds of provocative and interesting documentaries - including The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.