Featured Find: Jason Kuznicki's The Machinery of... whatever

From start to finish, this is probably the best piece I've read on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

September 11 was the day “Orwellian” stopped being an argument against anything. It became a checklist. My country started collecting various-sized bits of Nineteen Eighty-Four like so many grim commemorative postage stamps. Constant surveillance. Constant warfare. Constant suspicion. Last week’s enemy is this week’s friend, is next week’s enemy, and woe is you if you can’t keep up—Gadhafi, Putin, Arafat, Chirac. Censorship? Making steady progress. We didn’t get Victory Gin, but we did get Freedom Fries; close enough for government work. Oh yes, and torture. Because we are the greatest hegemonic power, and because we can do no wrong, and in the end, just because we fucking can, okay?

Who though is this “we”? It is the deepest, most festering wound of 9/11.

Someone does something shameful, somewhere, maybe just once, usually in secret. Someone’s data mining. Someone’s spying on citizens. Someone imprisons, with neither an indictment nor any other cover of law. Someone puts people on a secret plane, to a place where electrodes and power drills are the standard interrogation protocol. Someone cuts out the middleman and just tortures in place. Someone orders American citizens assassinated. Someone starts an illegal war.

In a braver time, these acts would have kindled a revolution.

Someone, however, is an agent of the state. Therefore someone wasn’t the real actor. No, we did it—that’s the core of the lie, right here, that that someone is us. Sooner or later, we find out about the thing we did. We say, in the awful light of morning, that we did it because we are fighting a dirty enemy, and maybe we have to embrace the dark side just a little bit if we’re going to win.

But really we did it because we were afraid. But really, we didn’t do it. But really, the ones who did it will keep right on doing it.

That’s what’s changed, post-9/11. In the end, we didn’t have the will to fight. We fought the terrorists, sure, and plenty of others who didn’t even attack us. But we didn’t have the will to fight as they took our civil liberties away. We didn’t even have the will to punish them afterward. The word “we” is the pawl on the ratchet of state power. It’s the little catch that ensures there’s no backsliding. The we clanks ever onward. The sun shines, the rain falls; the economy is good, or it’s bad. It doesn’t matter. The abuses haven’t gone away. We’ve mostly just gotten used to them.

A Cross For All America

Two years ago Los Angeles sculptor Jon Krawczyk was presented with a unique opportunity.

The image of the I-beam cross left standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center is a familiar one. In the days and weeks following 9/11 the cross became many things for many people: a symbol of hope and healing; a representation of the unyielding stance of good in the face of evil; a sign of God's presence; a meaningless coincidence. After standing for several years on a pedestal at the corner of the former Trade Center site the cross was in October 2006 moved a block away, to a place along the sidewalk next to St. Peter's Catholic Church (which itself was not only damaged when the towers fell but also played a vital role in the recovery efforts carried out in the wake of the attack). This I-beam cross would eventually be moved back to its original site, as a permanent part of the September 11th Memorial & Museum. The St. Peter's community, meanwhile, had grown attached to the cross and what it represented, and began searching for someone who could create a new cross to stand in its place. My friend Jon Krawczyk, a New Jersey native, accepted the task.

Rather than replace that I-beam cross with a replica, Jon wanted to create something completely different. After many months of designing (and redesigning), Jon had ready a model of a sculpture that, while in the basic shape of a cross, took on in abstract form the shape of a human body, comprised of several uniquely contoured pieces that came together into a single entity. The symbolism, Jon hoped, would transcend the traditional significance of the cross and make this memorial a conduit of remembrance that would embrace all Americans.

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Welcome to Hard Times

“Every time someone puts a little capital into this Territory I’m called in by the Govenor and sent on my way. It doesn’t matter I suffer from the rheumatism, nor that I’m past the age of riding a horse’s back. If a man files a claim that yields, there’s a town. If he finds some grass, there’s a town. Does he dig a well? Another town. Does he stop somewhere to ease his bladder, there’s a town. Over this land a thousand times each year towns spring up and it appears I have to charter them all. But to what purpose? The claim pinches out, the grass dies, the well dries up, and everyone will ride off to form up again somewhere else for me to travel. Nothing fixes in this damned country, people blow around at the whiff of the wind. You can’t bring the law to a bunch of rocks, you can’t settle the coyotes, you can’t make a society out of sand. I sometimes think we’re worse than the Indians... What is the name of this place, Hard Times? You are a well-meaning man Mr. Blue, I come across your likes occasionally. I noticed Blackstone on your desk, and Chitty’s Pleadings. Well you can read the law as much as you like but it will be no weapon for the spring when the town swells with people coming to work your road. You need a peace officer but I don’t even see you wearing a gun. I look out of this window and I see cabins, loghouse, cribs, tent, shanty, but I don’t see a jail. You’d better build a jail. You’d better find a shootist and build a jail.” - Brown from E.L. Doctorow's novel, Welcome to Hard Times

Welcome to Hard Times is the first novel of writer E.L. Doctorow.  When it was published in 1960, it was heralded as a beautiful and thought-provoking blend of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the generic themes of the American Western.  The novel is an account of how the human soul reacts to tragedy.  At the beginning, a "Bad Man from Bodie" comes into the makeshift town of Hard Times situated in the bleakness of the Dakota Territory.  In a drunken yet pleasure-filled rampage, the Bad Man kills several residents of the town, including the only man who stands up to him, Fee, rapes a local prostitute, and burns what remains before riding off into the proverbial sunset.

After the Bad Man from Bodie departs, most of the remaining townspeople do as well.  Blue, the mayor, too cowardly to have stood up to the Bad Man, takes personal responsibility for rebuilding Hard Times and convinces a few others to stay, among them a ravaged barmaid, Molly, and the orphaned son of Fee.  Blue takes Molly as his common-law bride and adopts Jimmy Fee, but Molly despises him for not stopping the Bad Man, and her paranoia infects Jimmy.  The remaining townspeople succumb to rage and madness.  From the 1960 New York Times review from Wirt Williams:

Perhaps the primary theme of the novel is that evil can only be resisted psychically: when the rational controls that order man's existence slacken, destruction comes.

Indeed, the ripple effect of tragedy on the human psyche is something with which we should be more familiar.  From the events of September 11, 2001 to the recent fatal shooting of six people at a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, we as a technological civilization have reapeatedly responded to tragedy in a fashion characteristic of a different, tribal human nature, divorced from present time and circumstance: descent into direction-less madness, paranoia and finger-pointing.

David Hume once said that reason ought to be the slave of the passions.  It's okay to be angry when a tragedy happens, but we must be conscious of our anger, and we must employ it judiciously.  Any scientist or philosopher of science will tell you that anecdotal evidence should never be taken without a proverbial grain of salt.  Indeed, anecdotal evidence was the basis for phrenology and we all know where that kind of sloppy thinking eventually led: to techno music.  (Incidentally that previous contention rests on anecdotal evidence, but you see where I'm going with this.)

The interconnectedness of our media-saturated society makes us particularly prone to wild displays of misdirected anger sprung from obscure and isolated phenomena, like the shooting in Tucson.  For this reason, it is especially important in emotionally tense times like these to postpone action.  There is a reason the ancients prescribed long periods of mourning.  We must learn from the mistakes of the USAPATRIOT Act and the War in Iraq that hastily conceived legislation passed in an emotionally heightened political climate seldom achieves its stated ends without enormous repercussions.

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More on the Burlington Coat Factory Non-Mosque

I was pretty short on material for today, so I decided to see what the good folks over at National Review were up to, and saw that Charles Krauthammer himself had weighed in on the Burlington Coat Factory Islamic Culture Center controversy with a piece called "Moral Myopia at Ground Zero".  I was not particularly impressed by this one, and I have been impressed by Krauthammer before.  Basically, he lumps the standard liberal argument into an effigy of straw to be sacrificed to the god of conservative caricature. 

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We're American, We Don't Discriminate

Mazoon Mosque by jhongdizon.comThe top story on Drudge today is the approval by a community board of a planned $100 million mosque in the neighborhood of Ground Zero.  Understand, despite Drudge's usual hyperbole, that it isn't a mosque on the site of the World Trade center, just in the vicinity.  While I appreciate the emotions provoked by 9/11, this isn't controversial.  Of course a mosque should be allowed in that neighborhood.  While the 9/11 terrorists were Muslims, there is no reason or right to censor, discriminate or restrict Muslim groups in lower Manhattan, or anywhere else for that matter.  We are American, we have inalienable rights and punitive reactions borne of fear or anger are beneath our principles. 

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Osama bin Laden is Conan and America is NBC

The upcoming trial of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed should be used to redefine the War on Terror as being about bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice.

The Washington Post recently reported that al Qaeda Grand Poohbah, Osama bin Laden, has endorsed the failed Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Detroit-bound jet:

The message delivered to you through the plane of the heroic warrior Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a confirmation of the previous messages sent by the heroes of the Sept. 11," he said of the Nigerian suspect in the Dec. 25 botched attack.

"If our messages had been able to reach you through words we wouldn't have been delivering them through planes."

Directing his statements at President Barack Obama - "from Osama to Obama," he said - bin Laden added: "America will never dream of security unless we will have it in reality in Palestine."

While bin Laden would seemingly make a perfect Bond villain, this is a non-story.

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Noam Chomsky: Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post 9-11 World

Noam Chomsky's greatest talent is to state the obvious in very clear language, which is why it's amazing that he is so often misinterpreted.  It's no secret that those with power act in ways conducive to keeping this power and attempt to elicit support from those without power. This is an underlying tenet of all kinds of religious, economic, Marxist, socialist, anarchist, libertarian thought, etc., as part of an intellectually self-conscious, continuous scientific research program dating into oblivion.

In "Imperial Ambitions", Chomsky applies his distinctly pluralistic framework to a post-9-11 American populus become hysterical by domestic attacks, enterprising plutocrats, and lazy media coverage.

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Good Thing We Finally Closed that Barn Door

Ever since I read Jeffery Goldberg’s dismantling of the Transportation Security Administration, I have believed that the TSA was a complete waste of time.  However, it is no use to kick against the goads: of all the worthless crap in our system, airport security has the most glaring cause and the least political gain from change.  It is the ultimate orphan of a cause: if you make airport security less of a pain then everyone benefits, but if anything ever happens it will be your fault.  You would literally have your face on the cover of every paper in the country under a headline blaming you for a terrorist attack.

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