sIcK
a reaction to 9/11 by John Dentino
Quick! Emergency despatch…We gotta problem…
As I write this, the news is filled with nothing but new anthrax scares. People are getting mysterious letters in the mail and they’re afraid to open them. Any white powder—anywhere—is suspect. For me, it’s only an exaggerated version of a state of fear I’m familiar with. Everyone in America seems to have my disease—obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). As a sufferer of this nuerosis, I have had fears of contaminants and poisons ever since I can remember. As a child, I read Rachel Carson’s gloomy book on pesticides, Silent Spring and believe me, that was a bad idea. I imagined that everything around me was poisoned. I was hyper-aware of the potential lethal consequences of staying in the garage too long with the car running. Or inhaling the air inside the car as I passed near a cropduster…drinking milk from an outdated carton…consuming a plate of mercury-laden swordfish…or getting botulism from mushrooms canned in Malaysia…
We’re edging over a new abyss...The first thing I thought when the two airliners sliced, then dissoved into the World Trade towers and the doomed leapt to their deaths, was that it was the sickest thing I had ever seen. For those who flew the planes, it was an act born of closed rooms and fervent prayers.
“Neither pregnant women nor unclean people should say goodbye to me.”
—Mohammed Atta
In Bunuel’s definging 20th century image, a thin cloud slices the Moon, then an eyeball is slit with a razor. Cut to the present spectacle — the first defining images of the 21st century. We are making our little life plans when, suddently, we wake up to find we’re living in a dystopian, futurist novel. The world of speed that Futurist poet Marinetti wrote about has arrived, but are we invigorated? Do we suddenly savor life with new urgency, sip our espresso with new gusto?...
Artists may finally be readjusting their plans for shocking the bourgeoisie. While the public wants escapist fare, its preferred diet in times of war, artists will need to find a deeper truth. Can they shift from whining about their NEA grants being pulled to something a little more…serious?
...Karl Stockhausen, the composer and, apparently, megalomaniac, unwittingly articulated the artist’s overweening ego in the face of his restrictions as a mere mortal. He said to a group of reporters that the World Trade Center disaster was “the greatest work of art ever.” After he uttered it, he attempted to put it into context as one of “Lucifer’s works of art,” but in his misguided, strangely enthusiastic original statement, he revealed an envy for the terrorists: “You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched into the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing.”... As is often said, Satan is the more interesting character in Paradise Lost, but he’s never been one to envy.
Stockhausen reminds me of the Kurtz character in Apocalypse Now, who, after the horror wore off from seeing that the Viet Cong had left behind a pile of hacked-off little arms of children he had innoculated, “realized…like I was shot with a diamond bullet right through my forehead…My God…the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure.”...
...The Taliban, who are pure, deny the power of icons and images to convey meaning and so, obliterate them as in the destruction of the ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan. They outlaw music and dancing. In a twist, this spectacle of control and brute iconoclasm creates its own set of powerful images. For us in the West, where the eye and ear are important organs—it’s a deep hit. They have wished on us and, indeed manifested in New York, a sort of negative space, a Medieval silence.
Alla, Alla
Doom sits in gloom in his room
Destroy the infidel, in a mosque
In a ghost, is a sword
Is a Saracen, Alla
—Flowers of Romance, Public Image Ltd.
I think about staying in that silence for a while. I imagine no chattering media, no libraries, no collective memory of the Judeo-Christian history we share. I imagine no United States, no European nations, no single power.
...America, the first culture to be based in the idea of unfettered individual freedom (albeit white male landowners), has become too big and successful. While we rep ourselves as a beacon of human rights, entrepreneurism and free-market idealogy too often trump our softer side. Our cult of the individual has been institutionalized and sold back to us via advertising, as Thomas Frank reminds us. And yes, our freedoms have eaten us alive — witness our insatiable appetites for drugs, gambling, and sex…
But capitalism, I’ve come to believe, is merely the most accurate metaphor for human interaction that we’ve come up with yet. It reflects the state of nature into which we’re born.
In the beginning was nature, the background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed; nature remains the supreme moral problem.
—Camille Paglia
To further quote Camille, “In wesern culture, there are no nonexploitative relationships. Everyone has killed in order to live. Nature’s universal law of creation from destruction operates in mind as in matter…Identity is conflict.”
And conflict is, alas, all too natural. We are all vulnerable to what French literary critic Rene Girard calls “memetic desire.” People in a society always desire what the other group wants. This is, for example, the mechanism of the romantic triangle. In Girard’s words, “two hands reach for the same object simultaeously.” In larger societal terms, two feuding groups invariably find an innocent party to scapegoat. If we are part of one group, we must find an innocent third party to scapegoat, someone or some group who resembles our actual rival in some way, but whose murder will not affect either of us, thus satisfying both feuding parties. The scapegoat is a substitute figure for our rival—a “symbolic displacement.” Usually the scapegoat is accused of the worst crimes imaginable; rape or murder or wanton greed, then lynched in a purgative bloodletting. The sacrificial violence — usually a lynching or pogrom of some sort — cleanses the society internally. No one is guilty or aware that a terrible crime has been committed because no one can see the scapegoats as victims.
For a while after, the internal rivalry is quelled. The sad thing is that the death of the innocent third party always works to save more souls from mass murder. Therefore, we reason, if the scapegoat’s death is the solution to the problem, the scapegoat must have been the cause. Later, we memorialize the victim in myth.
Of course, the mimetic rivalry eventually starts up again, because we’re beings who need to have what the other has. Early in human history, this cycle became ingrained in our collective memory and in oral traditions. It transformed into myth and is at the core of early religion. The “Corn King” must be sacrificed, etc, etc.
The whole cycle of mimicry, rivalry, and violence averted by sacrifice only works when human beings are blind to the underlying mechanism. This blindness to the fact that the scapegoat is a victim is what allows generations of people to repeat the same myth; the killing of the sacrificial victim is done with a clean conscience..
“So long as we are in the grip of this bloodletting, we do not see our victims as scapegoats. Texts that hide scapegoating foster it. Texts that show it for what it is undermine it,” says S. Mark Heim.
The New Testament explicitly puts Christ in the victim role. It’s a sacrificial story like the early myths, but this time it’s told from the victim’s point of view. What happens is unmistakably unjust and nobody can pretend that Christ’s death is an appeal to God for protection. After Christ, we supposedly don’t have to go on for generation after generation, scapegoating victims to appeal to the gods. Therefore, Girard sees Christianity as the answer, but the world, of course, isn’t ready for it yet.
Remember Shirley Jackson’s short story about a quiet, peaceful New England town of good, God-fearing citizens who annually stone to death a person chosen at random in a simple lottery.
Think about all the major slaughters in the world and they come down to either the naked exercise of power to conquer and subdue an enemy, or a crusade top create a secular (as in communism) or a religious utopia.
As Americans we’re in the former camp. We drive huge SUVs, fly eight American flags and use up a bunch of the planet’s resources. Bin Laden’s in the latter camp. His vision is a perfect world ruled by sharia law and cleansed on infidels. It’s going to take more than a teach-in or a mass visualization of world peace to reform either side. But now, it seems to me, is no time for Americans to haul out their guilt complex over their numerous transgressions.
Sometimes the Left confuses great power (which we are) with great evil. I don’t believe the two are synonymous. What they and the current anti-war folks really don’t like is our inherent power. But there are legitimate exercises of power and illegitimate ones. Kill Hitler, get Bin Laden—good. Panama invasion, Kissinger’s Cambodia bombings—bad power. The protracted sanctions against Iraq that were killing tens of thousands were very bad, but let’s give Saddam Hussein at least 50 percent of the blame.
As theorist Jaron Lanier writes, “Perhaps we are now entering a period when tiny groups of people (the terrorists), or even individuals, routinely become powerful enough to be threats to large numbers of people. If this is so, then the original advantages of the State no longer apply.”
The alternative to a useless, behemoth State is a societal “immune system” where each one of us is a protective white blood cell. The duty of each individual is to cleanse his country on the micro level. And if that means we have to do the cleansing ourselves, we really do have a problem here, don’t we?