Anthrax

Somehow, I can't see Terry Brooks's new novel
Anthraxbecoming a bestseller.

Robert Fisk, "Promises, Promises," The Independent 17 Oct 2001.

Modernity and mass destruction

"Modernity means killing civilians, because unlike swords or axes, which are extensions of the human arm, machines of mass death -- whether passenger planes, chemical weapons or even assault rifles -- sever the emotional link between a violent act and its perpetrator. For modern mass killers, human beings are abstractions that can be wiped away like figures on a blackboard."

Anthony Giddens might add that this severing of the emotional link itself depends on the prior severing of the physical link - a process he calls "disembedding," which is a more general characteristic of modernity itself.

The quotation is taken from Robert D. Kaplan's review in Sunday's New York Times of a couple of recent books on terrorism. (As usual, you may have to go through the Times's free registration process or login to its site to access this review.)

Beyond the Frame: Alternative Views on the September 11th Atrocities. New alternative media site started by Sut Jhally, featuring streaming video interviews with "America's leading dissident thinkers and activists."

If you're concerned about government efforts to impose control over the circulation of information about the war, the networks' collusion in their own censorship, and the marginalization of any dissenting viewpoints as "unpatriotic", this site is a welcome alternative.

(Thanks to Arvind Rajagopal, Culture and Communication Dept., NYU.)

Robert Fisk's latest commentaries on the Afghanistan bombing:

"Slaughter of the innocent bolsters view that this is war against Islam," The Independent 15 Oct 2001. Scathing critique of the destruction of Karam and how it reproduces the pattern of events in the bombing of Baghdad and Kosovo, albeit here with more damaging implications.
"Will a few holes in the runway of Kandahar airport make a difference?," The Independent 14 Oct 2001.

Someone from Associated Press interviewed me earlier this week about the use of weblogs since the WTC attack. Here's the
article that resulted from it (USA Today 13 Oct 2001), which has some background on the whole weblog thing.

For more on weblogs, see MIT's blogdex project.

Robert Fisk, "Lost in the rhetorical fog of war," The Independent 9 Oct 2001. (NF)

"[W]hy are we journalists falling back on the same sheep-like conformity that we adopted in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo war? For here we go again. The BBC was yesterday broadcasting an American officer talking about the dangers of "collateral damage'' – without the slightest hint of the immorality of this phrase. Tony Blair boasts of Britain's involvement in the US bombardment by talking about our "assets'', and by yesterday morning the BBC were using the same soldier-speak. Is there some kind of rhetorical fog that envelops us every time we bomb someone?"

Florida anthrax story

"Anthrax Alarm," Newsweek 8 Oct 2001.

Maybe it's a false alarm, but consider this: there have apparently been 18 reported cases of inhalatory anthrax in the US in the entire 20th century; and Mohammed Atta reportedly trained at a pilot school about a mile up the road from the site of the outbreak.

Culture wars

Quetta, Pakistan, 8 Oct 2001: "Tear gas hung over parts of Quetta, and gunfire echoed across the old city as police fired repeatedly into the air. Columns of smoke were visible in every direction. Two fire trucks were torched in the street.

'Look what they did,' wailed Chaudary Umedali outside the smoking ruins of his movie theater, the Imdad. He had been showing a Hollywood film: Desperado.

Umedali said 1,000 people swarmed around the Imdad, smashed in its door and threw firebombs inside. 'They didn't like our showing American and English films,' he said."

-- Mort Rosenblum (Associated Press), "Violent protests in Pakistan," Nando Times (US).

Jokes and their relation to the collective unconscious

"Hijackers Surprised to Find Selves in Hell" The Onion 26 Sept 2001.
(Thanks to Amresh Sinha, New York University.)

"The available evidence strongly suggests that sick joke cycles constitute a kind of collective mental hygienic defence mechanism that allows people to cope with the most dire of disasters, natural and otherwise. Deploring the resultant jokes serves little purpose. They would not come into existence if they did not answer some sort of deep psychological need."

Excerpted from Alan Dundes, "At Ease--AIDS Jokes as Sick Humor," American Behavioral Scientist, no. 1 (Jan-Feb 1987): 72-81. Cited in Constance Penley, NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997): 150. Penley was writing about the sick jokes which circulated in the aftermath of the Challenger disaster in 1986 (I believe).

Digital Patriotism

In his book Banal Nationalism (1995), Michael Billig contrasts the "hot" nationalism of "waved or saluted flags" by which "daily the nation is indicated, or 'flagged', in the lives of its citizenry" (6), with what he calls banal nationalism: the everyday media discourses and routine cultural practices which subtly position us as citizens within the nation-state. There can be little doubt that the nationalism we've been seeing in the US since Sept 11 is anything but banal.

As everyone knows by now, if there's one area of the flagging US economy which hasn't been, er, flagging in the past few weeks, it's sales of the American flag. Recently, I even heard a rumour/joke--there isn't much difference these days--that Bin Laden had secretly bought stock in US flag manufacturers before the attack, knowing their value would soar after Sept 11.

The back page of the Sept 16 issue of the New York Times was almost entirely occupied by a full-colour reproduction of the Stars and Stripes. Along one side, in block letters, were the helpful words THIS SIDE UP. At the bottom were instructions for use: "Remove from newspaper. Place in window. Embrace freedom." The source was identified as the over 250,000 associates of Kmart.

Judging by the number of flags which have been appearing in windows over the past few weeks, a lot of people have taken Kmart at its word. The flag is everywhere: taped to the antennas of gas-guzzling SUVs, on T-shirts and bandanas, streaming from the balconies of apartment buildings.

Predictably, the left has derided such flag-waving--or "flag-wagging," as someone sneeringly referred to it--as jingoistic nationalism. What's striking, though, is how many of the flags around aren't being waved at all, but displayed. Many of these displayed flags are actually "just" color xeroxes or printouts. Tedious postmodern conundrums aside (can a xerox of the flag be the flag?), one thing is clear: the flag has gone digital.

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to one of the virtual flags which began popping up on websites after Sept 11 - a simple image file which anyone could download and post on their own page, and which in the days after Sept 11 spread through the web like a semiotic virus. The star-spangled banner and the online banner ad seemed to be converging. Things have moved on since then: the entire computer interface can now be themed as the American flag, from high-resolution PDF files and wallpaper for your desktop to screensavers. I'd be willing to take a bet that somewhere you can download a Stars-and-Stripes skin to put on your mp3 player, presumably while listening to Bruce belting out "Born in the USA". The flag isn't just a flag anymore. The interface itself has become a symbol of national pride.

In its new digital formats, the American flag looks increasingly like just another corporate logo. The national flag-as-brand theme isn't confined to the American flag, of course - the British Union Jack has become a popular icon in cosmopolitan youth culture, while I myself own a winter fleece by a company which uses the Norwegian flag as its brand icon.

In her book No Logo (1999), Naomi Klein discusses this tendency of corporations to appropriate national icons to project a "patriotic" brand identity, mentioning in particular Tommy Hilfiger's branding of the red, white, and blue of the Stars and Stripes, albeit stopping short of actually trying to brand the symbol of American national identity itself. In fact, he doesn't need to, because the flag itself is already a brand.

The interchangeability of flag and logo, national identity and brand name, emblematizes how capitalism and American national identity are virtually synonmyous today, not just in the US itself but in the eyes of the rest of the world. Capitalism is hardly a US monopoly in the current world economic system, but the US still prides itself on being, and is seen by many outside, as the foundation of free-market capitalism as well as the most advanced capitalist society (although the Japanese might disagree).

One can thus begin to see some of the logics underlying the choice of the WTC for an attack on "America". Much has been made, since the attack, of the fact that, if the Pentagon was a powerful symbol of the American nation-state, the World Trade Center was a symbol of global capitalism rather than the United States as such. Those who died in the attack, it has often been pointed out, were citizens of over 60 nations. No doubt. But the branding of the American flag since Sept 11 suggests that the separation of national and economic symbols isn't so easy. It also gives us some insight into why the WTC was chosen for the attack rather than (or at least in addition to) more obviously "national" American symbols. If America = capitalism, then a symbolic attack on capitalism is no less an attack on America. Paradoxically, the digital patriotism of the flag-as-logo since Sept 11 has only served to confirm this equation rather than to undermine it.

Subcontintental perspectives

Couple of articles from the OpenDemocracy site by my NYU departmental colleague Arvind Rajagopal:
"Real and imagined enemies" 15 Sept 2001.
"The new war seen from an old hot spot: South Asia" 4 Oct 2001.

Seems I'm not the only one who's been reading Murakami's Underground of late...

Sorry if you've been having trouble connecting of late - not sure if the problem is traffic on the page or just that the blogspot server is lagged. Either way, I'm looking into moving the page to a faster server. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.

Edward Said, "Backlash and Backtrack: The Necessity of Scepticism," Counterpunch 28 Sept 2001.