Postmodernism Run Amok

9/15/07

“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

AGENDA:
MUSIC
CURRENT EVENTS
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
POLITICS

MUSIC

DEAR READERS, REGARDING THE MUSICAL REFERENCES THAT ARISE IN THIS BLOG, IF ANY OF YOU WOULD LIKE TO RECEIVE FUBAR CDS, PLEASE E-MAIL ME AT RLT@UMICH.EDU SEND ME YOUR ADDRESS, WHICH I WILL KEEP ANONYMOUS, AND I WILL SEND YOU FREE MUSICAL STUFF. (This means you, Bonnie D. in S.D.)

CURRENT EVENTS

You don’t think the terrorists are making in-roads in terms of sapping us of our precious bodily fluids? Think again. They’re bringing it to our shores, just as the Wagenfuhrer predicted. Why are we oblivious to this in Ann Arbor (AKA Squirrel town), because we’re too interested in seeing Britney Spears shake her cottage cheese and looking at DOG ATTACK stories in the A2 News. Where’s Michael Vick when we need him? We’re slippin', America! Did you know that two prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp were wearing unauthorized Speedo bathing suits? What next? The appearance of this kind of contraband should have us worried about the potential for smuggling who knows what kind of weapons of mass destruction into our fair land. What’s the Koran say about Speedos? What’s indisputable is that either one of these bearded, Nirvana seekers would have looked far more sexy in Speedo flagrante than Spears did in her black bikini. Who dresses this girl? Barbara Bush?

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ABOUT R. LOUIS TESSIER:

No doubt his sophistication in hermeneutics may be attributed his paternal grandfather, the venerable Pavel Reich, a Czech philosopher renowned for his essays on ontological conundrums related to hopelessness and death. After his death in 1971, an elegiac essay in Critical Inquiry noted that Reich "contemplated suicide for decades, esteems extremists, fanatics and eccentrics of every stripe, and has instituted vertigo into his daily life." Pluto was fond of quoting a passage from Reich's opus, The Wisdom of Despair, published in 1934 and winner of the Salzberg Academy's Trompe-l'oeil Prize: "However much I have frequented the mystics, deep down I have always sided with the devil; I have tried to be worthy of him, at least, in insolence, acrimony arbitrariness and caprice." Pierre Oblique, from the deMan Institute, described him as an ingenious, revolutionary misanthrope without parallel, who worked tirelessly to valorize the value of nothingness. The core of his canon reflects his intellectual preoccupations: Meditations on Dread (1950), The Error of Being (1955), The Illusion of Dimension (1960), and, his last book, The Sentence of Birth (1962). According to interviews with Reich, the source of his grim worldview was a chronic insomnia that plagued him since his youth: "Being abandoned by sleep is the worst. Incarceration is less debilitating. Macbeth's meditation on sweet sleep and its absence says too little. I wandered deserted alleys and desolate byways. Psychotics, diseased prostitutes, hunger artists and creatures of the night were my comrades in isolation, my silent co-conspirators. Diurnal helplessness left me without vocation or direction. Blessed subjectivity, my ontological foundation, withered under the naked glare of stark, uninterrupted consciousness; rusted within the constancy of awareness; and diminished under the influence of superficial perceptions and memory--not dream--images void of chiaroscuro. No rhetoric could soothe me, no discourse convey my dejection with language, rejection of meaning and lack of faith in words. 10 years of cursed insomnia. The sleep of unconsciousness, eternal dreamlessness."

POLITICS

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A RE-EDITING OF AN ESSAY WRITTEN IN 2002

Rather than focus on "how" the tragedy on 9/11 could occur, this rant will consider "why" this happened. If we grant that the twin poster children of Evil over the past decade, at least in the American zeitgeist, are Sadaam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, it behooves us to ask who these men are and how they attained power. During the 1980's the world saw one of the most horrific conflicts in human history: the eight-year Iraqi-Irani war. This war saw suicidal human wave assaults where young Irani boys charged to their deaths and horrible gas attacks were unleashed from both sides. On the heels of the Shah's deposal and subsequent hostage crisis, America decided to back the ruthless Iraqi dictator, Sadaam Hussein. Sadaam’s ability to retain and maintain a gangster state was only made possible through a military power base largely funded by American tax dollars.

And what of Bin Laden? Consider this quote from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: "The Americans say: we [the Islamic world] have no good and bad terrorists, all terrorists are bad. But in practice they themselves divide terrorism into good and bad." Recall that when the Afghani insurgents rose up against the Russian occupation in the late 1980s, the Taliban, a group we now label as criminal terrorists, were described as "freedom fighters." The point. The very same Russians upon whom the Afghani's were inflicting heavy casualties, a toll extracted with weapons and monies provided by the American government, are now offering us airspace and airbases in adjoining Turkistan. A further Irony is that Bin Laden fought with weapons supplied to him by American funding. So make no mistake about it, when American blood is shed in the "war" on terrorism it is a good bet the killing will be done with American or Russian weapons.

But what is “terrorism?” If we are going to make war on a group, or groups, guilty of ”Terrorism” shouldn’t we define exactly what it is.

As evidence of American duplicity on what constitutes terrorism, the Iranian Ayotolla has cited the 1988 downing of an Iran Air civilian airliner by the American warship “Vincennes”, which resulted in the deaths of all 290 people on board: "In the skies of the Persian Gulf they shoot down an Iranian airliner with hundreds of passengers on board, without any reason or excuse. They blow up the airplane, tear the people into pieces and drown them in the sea--a clear case of terrorism...not only do they not apologize to Iran, but they give an award to the commander of the warship. That is good terrorism." While it was defined as a military accident, the commander was awarded an exceptional conduct medal. From the Palestinian point of view, "American officials...define terrorism incorrectly. They define terrorism in such a way that the massacre of the people of Sabra and Shatila--two Palestinian camps in which men, women and children were all massacred one night on the orders of a person who is at present at the head of the Israeli government [Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] -- is not terror." Weren’t George Washington and the early colonial revolutionaries also insurgents bent on ending an oppressive British occupation? Given our history of military expansionism, both foreign and domestic, since this country’s inception, is it so surprising that the Ayatollah offers this grim dialectic: "Have you ever respected the interests of others, that you now expect everyone to respect yours? In today’s world, is the possession of cannons, guns and missiles a permit for a government to say: It has to be what I say and nothing else...it is these things that have made America detestable."

The final irony is this: where we once feared a Cold War world in which two colossal superpowers posed the threat of global annihilation, we may end up with a single monolithic superpower pitted against an enemy as committed as it is ruthless. Al Qaeda once said we were afraid to attack them. It was our tragic error to take this as an affront rather than warning; as an omen that we should draw Santayanan wisdom from, rather than an invitation to defeat. Consider Russia's recent experience in Afghanistan and the American debacle in Viet Nam. Remember past events. We need only look at the resolve of the North Vietnamese General Ngugen Giap (also a military history teacher). Giap defeated the United States of America without ever winning a major tactical battle.