t byfield on Sat, 15 Sep 2001 09:26:18 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Personal accounts of the bombings [4x] |
> From: "David S. Bennahum" <davidsol@panix.com> > Subject: Wednesday & Thursday in New York > As a New Yorker, it's so utterly weird to sense, in some distant fashion, > that for the first time the whole rest of America actually loves us. > They do. I can sense the love from the emails I am getting, from the > calls, from the way people in other states are responding to what has > happened here. One gift from this horror might, in fact, be a feeling of > connectedness between us like never before. sucker. sorry, but... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28620-2001Sep14.html "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' " it's been interesting to watch how coverage of this has developed. initially it focused on new yorkers, who were very sanguine about it all--none of the usual venom about revenge etc. increasingly, though, the networks have been fomenting a familiar litany: flag- waving, praying, us/them rhetoric. that's why my view of the 'con- nectedness' you extol is much, much darker. there were the initial waves of americans who had direct connections to the city and its inhabitants: their interests were pretty practical--'are you ok?' but then comes wave after wave of people who DON'T have any direct interest. and what do you know? suddenly we're inundated with spec- tacles of public piety, endless flag-waving, schmaltzy soft-focus slow-mo tears by candlelight, &c. this kind of bumpf was quite absent in the city in the wake of the events. the only sign of it i saw was one of those ultra-aggressive indy towtrucks with "REVENGE" written on its windshield in soap-- and each time i saw it cruise by on tuesday (three times), it was met with a nice mix of censure and hilarity. but yesterday, after a few days of--i'm sorry, the best categories i know to describe this are from dolce^Wdeleuze and guattari: order-words, major lan- guage, molar blabla--i started seeing flags, lots of flags. quite different from the meditative disorientation that i felt all around manhattan on tuesday, which was remarkable for its quiet sympathy and--to be quite frank--dissociation. new yorkers' neighborhoody provincialism served them very well; and the physical fabric of the city, which made the aftermath literally invisible except via the prosthetics of the media, supported (or, if you prefer, *en- forced*) that dissociation. mostly what we had was a BIG cloud on the skyline and more or less vague mental maps and addressbooks of who worked and traveled where. but it's very hard to orient one- self when the preeminent beacon vanishes: my topographical map just became the diagram of an archaeological dig. poised in the middle of it all--halfway between a nation that has one way of trying to cathect with its love-hated sodom, OT1H, and a pretty solid grasp of how certain other parts of the world try to cathect with *their* understanding of the gomorrah they love to hate, OT0H--i'm at a bit of a loss as to what to think or, even, how to think about it. every language has its kernel of legitimacy. the premasticated outpourings of a country whose main failure is the piss-poor job it does of translating its native genius (which certainly includes boundless generosity and kindness) into a gov- ernment of equivocating bullies and braggarts: their public piety isn't my cup of tea, but, well, i'm an american, so i 'can take it in stride.' the contorted mix of drives and desires (also detourned by pedagogs and weenies into spectacularly fucked-up governance) that makes up northern africa, the mid-east, central asia, and a numbing matrix of diasporas and migrations: they've got some very good points, too. personally, after almost 18 years of living here --just months shy of half my life--i've grown pretty fond of new york's 'deliriousness.' and, certainly, these events have given me a new appreciation for what's irritated me no end here, the micro- parochialism of neighborhood 'identities.' in a flash, or in four flashes, those nanodistinctions gave the city's residents a bit of wiggle room, as it were, to NOT 'identify' in straitjacketed ways with the poor shlemiehls who--my theological undies are show- ing--were returned to dust unexpectedly. naif that i am, i hoped that this absence of kneejerk responses might actually shape the ensuing media frenzy. but it didn't. instead, these multitudes of atomized identities made it impossible for new yorkers to produce a coherent collec- tive discourse--except, of course, for the ones 'we' SELL to 'our' customers and clients, i.e., the rest of the country and world in the form of 'our' media. this was a (i hope) RARE opportunity for new york to export some of its worldliness in a way that might have made it much more diffi- cult for america to indulge itself in ritualistic drum-beating and blood lust. but no. once the dust settled, the battalions of media drones went back to work: the graphics whizzes concocted 'ATTACK ON AMERICA' banners, the copy-writers banged out manipulative litur- gies, the camera ops did their little lanzmannesque lingering shots on tearful people who lost people, the reporters fell right into line by dwelling on the WTC instead of the pentagon and playing along with the bin laden routine, the producers churned out their boilerplate scripts, and so on. the customer is always right. and america loves us for it. there's lots more to say, but words fail me. maybe i'll try again later, but probably notr. the cadence of these events, the crashes and collapses, made this a very democratic spectacle: everyone has their own authentic real-time, if not firsthand, experience of it-- and 'experience,' as we know, is the foundation of philosophy, am- erican-style. the collapsing building blossom on a thousand videos: goodbye zapruder, hello ESPN. cheers, t # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net