Suicide Bombers

9/13/07

Agenda:
Music
Politics

The Pressure Never Drops

The gondoliers are passing
If it’s what you’re looking for
Rolling quiet on the carpet
Bearing coffee, nuts, and more

A man without an eyelid
Takes comfort in his wife
The bald bandanad Diva
Stands stately in her strife

The shackled prison inmate
Stands watch upon his guards
But they know he’s going nowhere
'Cause it just ain’t in the cards

The engineer from Tahoe
Got a port in every storm
Which now includes his belly
We consider it the norm

Broke his back and cracked three rib bones
From a roll in bed, he said
Coulda quit and gave up trying
He’s a transplant man instead

In the bed next door there’s puking
At the thought of what’s to come
And her grim anticipation
Brings a sad eyed tear to some

Where the pin striped girls bring chocolate
And the beeping never stops
Where a cheery nurse will make sure
That the pressure never drops


“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
-- M. K. Ghandi
-- Non-Violence in Peace and War, 1948

The Politics of Immortality
ANN ARBOR:

Given the current state of the world I thought it might be wise to revisit Bertrand Russell's essay, "The Finality of Death" taken from Why I Am Not a Christian (1957). Russell writes, "It is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life. The most important of these emotions is fear of death...if we genuinely and wholeheartedly believed in the future life we should cease completely to fear death. The effects would be curious, and probably such as most of us would deplore." Why does Russell suggest that having no fear of death would produce a deplorable effect?

While Russell lived in a time before suicide bombing would become the defining strategy in global militarism, he would probably show little surprise at the macabre popularity of self-sacrifice as a method of terrorism. It is often, as Russell points out, "an advantage to the victors in the struggle for life to be able, on occasion, to overcome the natural fear of death." What religious fundamentalists require, Christian and Islamic alike, is that the potential martyr accept the reality of a supernatural realm. What the bomber who blows herself up for Allah and the soldier who puts his life at risk for a Christian-politico ideology share is an abiding belief in the achievement of a higher end through violent means.

The overcoming of one's instinct toward self preservation thus serves an expansionist military agenda. Russell describes it this way, "belief in Paradise has considerable military value as reinforcing natural pugnacity. We should therefore admit that militarists are wise in encouraging the belief in immortality." Sagely, he foresaw a millennial geo-political climate marked by a simultaneous rise in violent militarism and religious fundamentalism, both of which see the self as expendable to a certain dogma. Osama bin Laden, like George W. Bush, is willing to sacrifice our children on the altar of ideology. Bush's Christian beliefs, which provide a tacit justification for his pursuit of material gains (oil and democracy), and zealots like Moktada al-Sadr's brand of Islamicism, a doctrine of moral intolerance which encourages the martyrdom of his brethren, are only differences in kind; ideological distinctions that obscure the tragedy of the American and Iraqi dead.

Russell's ideas apply to less understandable, albeit no less irrational, human behaviors as well. He follows his comments on militarism and immortality with the caveat that the quest for Nirvana "not become so profound as to produce indifference to the affairs of the world." The appearance of apocalyptic suicide cults like Jim Jones' People's Temple sect, and Marshall Applewhite's Heaven's Gate following, display the kind of radical, worldly indifference he speaks of. Given that Russell found it morally intolerable that the taking of human life be condoned in any circumstance, he, no doubt, wondered how we could find a martyrdom divorced from the terrestrial more disturbing than sacrificing oneself to an ism. He thought it a sad irony that the idea of life after death can at once provide a rationale for slaughtering human beings and be claimed as evidence of intelligent purpose; the ultimate grand designer's most sublime expression; the creation of an immutable species sealed with the endowment of infinite life on a higher plane. But how does the doctrine of intelligent purpose account for catastrophes like Hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires?

The very amorality of nature supports Russell's conviction that "nature is indifferent to our values and can only be understood by ignoring our notions of good and bad." Since moral principles like right and wrong are culturally derived--one might choose a Nietzschean rather than Christian ethic--immortality is inexorably determined from a position of power. In Russell's words, "those who have the best poison gas will have the ethic of the future and will therefore be the immortal ones." His argument for existential contingency over "divine or supernatural" origin has an historical basis, considering that all natural facts, including our moral beliefs, have developed out of the struggle to survive. Russell surely read Mark Twain's essay, "The Lowest Animal," in coming to the conclusion that "it is only when we think abstractly that we have such a high opinion of man. Of men in the concrete, most of us think the vast majority very bad. Civilized states spend more than half their revenue on killing each other's citizens."

This brings me to a conversation with John Sinclair in February 2003. It was shortly after the sinking of the Senegalese ferry, Joola, in which 1,863 people died en route to the capital, Dakar. After reflecting on this and the various woes of the world, Sinclair remarked that God must be one sick fuck to take responsibility for natural, much less human, events. Perhaps more eloquently, Russell writes, "The world in which we live can be understood as a result of muddle and accident; but if it is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend. For my part, I find accident a less painful and more plausible hypothesis."