Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteAbout the word play in the title: I'll have to rely on memory, which is dangerous for me, and ascribe the fictional account of an engineer whose radio station has ordered him to replace the term "God" as used in a sermon by a well regarded philosopher with the less aggressive, more easily swallowed, "That higher being whom we revere" to Heinrich Boll's short story "Murke's Collected Silences," [1] in which said Murke makes the switch (this is from back in the analog tape days) and then collects and splices together the bits of tape containing the "dead air" excised while crafting the new tapes.
Lately, people have been producing "higher beings" in numbers--governments, presidents, oddballs--but not to revere them.
Most dismissible: the conspiracy theorists who have granted to the United States of America the awesome power to attack itself by engineering the September 11, 2001 catastrophe and effecitvely maintaining a cover-up for lo these half a dozen years.
The United States government can't keep a blow job a secret.
Who are they kidding?
Then, elsewhere in the world, wherever something goes wrong, blame America or The Jews.
The latest lunacy: America needs Iraq, Al Qaeda needs America, and together, secretly or by divine, possibly predestinated madness, we're just helping one another along.
"Jihadists need their American boogeyman as much as Bush needs his Islamist boogeyman. By fighting them in the wrong way and on the wrong terrain, we have inadvertently allowed them to claim the heroic mantle of nationalism and anti-Americanism. When the U.S. occupiers leave, Osama bin Laden and his ilk will groan in despair." [2]
Gary Kamiya's summertime (or should it be simmertime?) op-ed at Salon opens with invective ("It is long past time for America to grasp that Bush's decision to pound the Muslim world into submission -- not just in Iraq, but in Lebanon and in Palestine -- is not the solution, it is the problem") and dismissible for its heavy-handed cant alone, but there it is: not a U.S. warplane at war in sight over either Lebanon, Gaza, or the West Bank, but we are mysteriously pounding Muslims living in each into some sort of submission (to what: the Internet? automobiles? clean air? safe water? health care?) and never you mind those stubborn old Christians in Lebanon either.
The proper rhetorical lead for ascribing super duper powers to those who don't have them may be, "If the bogeyman wanted to":
- If Hezbollah wanted to (massacre French peace keeping forces in southern Lebanon");
- If the United States really wanted to (make Somalia its 51st state--sorry, Puerto Rico);
- if Al Qaeda want to (get the bomb from Pakistan's military, or, better, control Pakistan's defense force) . . .
Why, hell, they all could.
Except they don't, an observation that may rank as one indicator among many that they can't and are perhaps not as "big and powerful" as the impressionable (and irresponsible) would have them--or, just possibly (we know, don't we) they're just holding off because they have something even more evil and insidious in mind.
?
In one hushed, conspiratorial whisper, all together now: Whoa . . . .
?
Please, really, world: stop it!
----
My mind may be looking for a new home.
I've been hanging out at modelmayhem.com, a fun bunch out of "model-photographer culture" for sure with some reasonably representative and suitably polarized Americans on board who joust in the "off-topic" section of the community. I get into conversations like this one:
Writer "A" notes: "National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell told a House committee today that 9/11 was avoidable, the intelligence was available but the Bush administration failed to connect the dots to stop it." For reference he provides a link: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=3621517&page=1.
Writer "B" responds: "the worse thing is how we are still vulnarable after all this time, open borders, poor relations with potential terrorist and just plain bummbling where this matter is concerned has been the hallmark of this administration."
I respond:
"It's not like "the terrorists", warlords, governments, and militaries have their gear wired tight. Most don't (no matter what they tell you).
"It's a miracle things are not worse than they are worldwide (although for too many surviving or seeking refuge from conflict, things really could not get worse).
"If you look for underlying cause, often you'll find deeply wounded people coupled with prejudice and armed as never before possible with magical thinking and decent weaponry.
"In childspeak, reducing the violence is like trying to calm a nest of upset wasps with really big stingers."
Jewish American infidel that I am, I'll side with Einstein on the nature of God, lean toward my agnosticism, and add one additional observation: the organization of the universe is a wonder with or without conscience, and most certainly the chaos and organization of both war and peace may well contain patterns and structures working out through the minds of mankind that in every way fit with the physics of existence.
There. I've said it: when it comes to war, quite possibly design, infernal as it may be, trumps substance.
Today, there's little in the way of political or social accommodation to be found among the various and small parties creating war in Iraq--their numbers are dwarfed by the civilian casualties and plus-four million internally displaced and refugee citizens who have had the misfortune to have shared a little bit of real estate with them--even as their methods and rants become familiar, predictable, tired, and old.
The Terrible Cause, whatever it was--oil, democracy, Sharia law, women's liberation, women's suppression, phallic pride and vanity, perceived insult and honorable retribution, etc.--may remain as clouded as ever while the behavior of war itself, that compulsive want of violence and drive toward authority and dominion may become ever more clear.
So one hopes.
1. Boll, Heinrich. "Murke's Collected Silences."
2. Kamiya, Gary. "Leave the Muslim world alone." Salon, July 17, 2007.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
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