post-terrorism

Cheerleaders, chants, and beach balls are barbaric responses to the announcement of a political assassination.

Political assassination is not an act of justice. It does not bring about justice in some kind of cosmic tit for tat.  It is not the doing of justice. Justice is not done when another is killed in retaliation.

Retaliation, retribution, revenge--are these now the common terms through which justice is understood in the US? Do we think that victims are avenged when their assailant is killed? The victims are still dead, still gone, still mourned. Are they brought back in the acts of terror, torture, and imprisonment enacted in their name? Are they memorialized daily in airports as we take off our belts and shoes, as we put our hand behind are heads, spread-eagled, and searched, as we are x-rayed and scanned?

For a moment, the twenty minutes or so when the intertubes were alive with the news and before the president spoke, I felt something--something like relief, the sense of an end, perhaps even hope. It was, I think, the anticipation of an end to the disaster of the last ten years of ritualized humiliation, electronically stimulated fear, widespread surveillance, and the enjoyment of camps and torture.

The television media quickly made it clear that this sort of anticipation has no place: the war on terrorism is endless, total. It won't stop. We are not the same people. We have been reconfigured in a massive psycho-political experiment in transforming democracy into fascism, or a new barbarous variant of fascism, capitalist anarcho-fascism.

We are now the sort of people who cheer for death and murder, who repeat mindless lies, who glory in inequality--not bread and circuses but cheetos and reality tv. Everything is a game, yet we don't even recognize the levels on which it is played, the levels on which we aren't players at all but the targets captured or shot as the real players, hot shots, move on up.

Can we glimpse post-terrorism? Can we use it as an opening to something else, a focus not on war but on global capitalist exploitation? Can it be a chance to remake the decade's choice for barbarism into a new choice for socialism?

Comments

[Robert Allen]

A friend called to ask if it was ok to not be happy about Bin Laden's killing. This is a huge topic of discussion everywhere. I already found myself mouthing these words: "Osama may have been a bad man, but I'm not going to celebrate because he died. It is sad when anybody dies, I see no reason to celebrate anyone's death". I feel like a chiding schoolmarm, a Pollyanna from some past order of things, clearly out of sync with the new viciousness of discourse.

[C. DiDiodato]

Jodi,

relatives of Canadians killed on September 11 feel the same way (except for the self-aggrandizing bit you've inserted about using it "as an opening" to a new "post-terrorism". I wish academics would drop this silly name-game).

I'll be relieved when the war on terror is finally over.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/father-cdn-9-11-victim-calls-bin-ladens-143737210.html

[Kzinti.wordpress.com]

I think you've come close, but this whole 10 year long debacle has just made us all into victims. Now that he's dead, do you think the airports will open back up? No more searches and seizures? No more limited rights and suspension of rights under the still in place Homeland Security "laws" put into place?

Today, tomorrow, it will all be the same. Our freedoms will continue to fall victim from whatever new scare tactic, dictator with an agenda, extremist group that our government can get us to believe is a threat to our freedoms. Sadly, Osama got off easy. The rest of us will continue to be the victims and to pay for his crimes.

[Robert Allen]

here is a poem I'm working on, though I'm no Haiku Dave:

We're all Osama now!

we've all been killed by Seals
live from the situation room
paid for our own brainwash
with a gift that can't be returned

wayward sons of Abraham,
we died for his sins,
hidden in our mental caves

in this, the deadest of countries
liberated by murder alone

[Jodi Dean]

Bob--that is a really powerful poem; I'm particularly moved by the way it builds to the last two lines.

[Robert Allen]

Thanks Jodi, so interesting that you noticed a "building" toward the last two lines, especially when it didn't do that for me until I switched the last two lines to "liberated by murder alone/in this, the deadest of countries". Also I find interesting the "sons of Abraham" with its conscious exclusion of the feminine, and I wanted to convey the "Paying for our own brainwash" with a reference to cable tv, but couldn't find a bridge to that that wouldn't weaken the piece.