The simplest Surrealist act consists in entering a Church, saying "bless me Father for I have sinned," and right-way picking up a copy of Origen's De Principiis, after which one will read, reflect, and beat oneself up for being the close-minded and hyper-sensitive aesthete that one is ...
By way of note: There was nothing "convulsively beautiful" about the scenes of destruction of the WTC. In fact, to anyone who holds thus, I would say that s/he has a well-defined place amongst the missing/dead ...
Simply put. Yes.
Edward
Edward,
maybe your anger would be better directed at the process that turns the real suffering of real people into a spectator sport?
or maybe the process that transforms that spectacle into a melodramatic sentimentality -- even adding chapter titles and music -- so as to enhance the dramatic effect, leading the spectator to expect a nostalgic dénouement of the kind provided by “Independence Day” but denied by the Viet-Cong?
or maybe the process that reduces the real horror of real people to video tape, then replays the tape again, and again, and again, until the real reaction to that horror dulls into a frustrated helplessness and a generalized fear of cabbies and parking lot attendants that the “common man” can only "properly" express by blind obedience to the authorized agents of patriotic vengeance?
or maybe the process that surrenders all dissenting imagination to the vaguely defined aspirations of those authorized agents, endorsing the unbridled extension of their violent arrogance (the extension of which will certainly leave us even more vulnerable to retaliation from the equally violently arrogant)?
or maybe the process that takes that surrender to the authorized agents of patriotic vengeance and uses it as the mortar to construct new towers, dedicated to our security, that will be both monuments to our increasing vulnerability and command posts for new levels of repression justified by that vulnerability?
this is all one process, easily found wherever POWER's hierarchies are maintained, but especially visible in the USA since 9-11 (and less visible but no less present in the mountains of Afghanistan).
that process survives by creating tensions and false dichotomies that mask the effect of strengthening the existing order -- POWER.
that process is the real problem at the core of such periodic turbulence. that process was the target of our text.
-- barrett