The premiere issue of China Grove Literary Journal is currently available and features my quasi-essay, anti-connectivity piece, In Extremis – Opting Out.
You can read it alongside talented, imaginative writers like Ellen Gilchrist and Michael Farris Smith as well as previously unpublished work by Eudora Welty and Mark Twain.
It is also a nominee for the Ellen Gilchrist Award.
Pick up a copy at http://www.chinagrovepress.com/china-grove-a-literary-journal/
This was initially posted on Facebook in a civil discourse with a friend.
Out of context. Disembodied. Mutilated.
It appears to resemble some sort of complete thought. Concept.
If you pay attention to the world, our plight worsens daily.
Pollution. Famine. Violence. Societal malaise.
What will cure us of our collective trauma?
Facebooking Discourse
Certainly a disconnection of a fabricated moral standard is a symptom of the American/Western hegemonic structure, as such those symptoms—9/11, profligacy, security—are the easiest-to-digest for invasion, preemption and occupation of a resource rich country.
9/11. An asymmetric rationalization of a moment embedded in the collective consumption of reactionary culture.
Falling Man >|< Fall in man
Reactions equate to rhetoric, i.e. “we have to fight the terrorists wherever they may hide,” or worse, apathy “It’s a fucked up world altogether.”
SO GIVE UP
As a corporatocracy, America’s interests are purely profit: oil, private security contracts, construction etc, not to usurp the post-Soviet Islamist rule of the Taliban (yes they were awful, just look at the pictures of civilized Kabul! Some of the Afghans have blue eyes!). Record profits abound. The apparatus of control is gilded in perpetuity. Crisis’ increase exponentially even after public discovery of fraud “#nowmd” and manipulation of information. Still, as our warrior brothers and sisters return home from the global conflict, damaged and exposed to a domestic nightmare of ghost towns and economic decrepititude, we can be assured that somehow, enexplicably, the effort was worth the risk and sacrifice.
We exacted our revenge on the enemy who was living comfortably in a palatial estate miles from Islamabad, surrounded by Pakistani military elite. By using extrajudicial execution “while condemning the practice by other nations, we succumb to our own hubris. Of Afghans, disconnection from people suffering works much better (sells much better) on paper (or Facebook/Twitter/Huffpo/FauxNews/Obama&Bush teleprompters) to a public increasingly less interested in truth.
The difficult realization is that we’ve apparently succeeded and simultaneously failed.
“Mission Accomplished-ish”
[right, right, left, left, up, down, up, down, A, B, to start all over right?]
We can’t withdraw, pullout, mid-coitus, we’re vested in making the best of the situation, finish on the backs of main street and the shrinking middle class.
We can’t sustain the approach much longer either, unless Afghanistan will serve—and this is mere speculation—as our proxy staging area for a war with a nuclear armed Pakistan. More automated combat. Reliance on computers to determine hostiles.
America is indeed exceptional. In our military and security spending. In our continued pollution of third world countries via proxy manufacturing for cheaper labor and the unregulated environmental legislation of those countries and by extension, our governments massive military and budgetary support of an Israeli neo-apartheid.
This system enabled us to supplant democracy plant pliable leadership in North Africa and the Middle East for the past four decades. But as we’ve witnessed, through our mediated American perspective, people often tire of being served the same meal for too long. We are idle and conveniently diplomatic while Assad murders Syrian’s indiscriminately.
Perhaps, to “see it from both sides” detracts from the complexity. There isn’t necessarily a discernable side when faced with the ultimatum of “you’re either with us or with the terrorists.”
Post-Obama HOPE conspiracy election buzz, do we embrace the new normal?
Drones. Disposition Matrix. Targeted Killing and other euphemisms for the tactics used in our perpetual global war on terror.
A Coat of Red Paint In Hell 