Time

Here's an excerpt from a piece I'm working on right now about the discourses of time in the War on Terror. The article will be a series of unpublishable vignettes.

UnReal Time…

The Iraqi desert dunes shift in the hourglass of the world’s television set, cycling with but transcending time. “Moonscape,” the war correspondent repeats into his videophone, radiating a signal up through the crystal clear dry night air to a geostationary satellite, through the switchboard of the 24-hour network, and into a million homes. Beneath his feet, blankets of white sand shelter enormous lakes of black crude, a testament to Earth’s organic prehistory. In the lo-fi crackle of the reporter’s satellite uplink videophone, whose fine components are driven by a sputtering gas generator, the world hears the contrasts of black and white, carbon and silicon, past and future. The collision of opposites yields a peculiar synthesis called “real time,” a designation whose most explosive admixture is the real time television war, where a billowing flag marked “LIVE” flies high above an advancing parade of death. In this peculiar spot on the globe, one can seemingly trace time from the Big Bang forward: from the universe of night sky bearing down on the horizon, through mineral time of the desert, beyond the liquefaction of organic time, to the protean mirages of human time. It was here, in the womb of the Fertile Crescent, that the Sumerians first “invented time,” dividing up the day into increments of twelve and bestowing the base sixty number system that survives today on the face of every clock. The reporter checks his watch. It is five thousand years later, March 19 of the year 2003 c.e. The planet’s lone superpower, whose military nearly eclipses all the remaining militaries in the world combined, marches toward Sumerian Babylon, what is now called Baghdad. The reporter has been invited along for the ride. At the helm of this awesome force is a group of intellectuals who declare the superpower to represent the “end of history.” Indeed, in only a matter of days the invasion will create the conditions by which the main store of Mesopotamian archaeological artifacts, including the first known written tablet, will be lost: looted or destroyed. Human history will have cruelly effaced its very origins.