about the rush of confidence

President of the United States George W. Bush visited Ground Zero after 9/11, and his team arranged for him to speak while standing with rescue workers, firefighters, and police officers atop the rubble of the Twin Towers. Someone in the crowd yelled out, "We can't hear you!" President Bush produced the perfect response: "I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

 

 

Notes: 

Bob Beckwith was the firefighter standing next to President Bush. Bob died earlier this month.

Link to segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7OCgMPX2mE

 

about zealots

Think of someone you love, whose love for you is such a given that you sometimes take them for granted.

Imagine that person far away, the hostage of a violent zealot. Imagine your loved one, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, forced to their knees. Imagine that person positioned before a high-definition camera in the desert. Imagine, dressed head to toe in black, the zealot crowding in the picture with a highly polished knife.

The zealot speaks to the camera, his hand on your loved one's shoulder, telling you there is no choice. He tells you that forces beyond all three of you have forced this moment. The zealot tells you that your loved one will die, and that, although he will slit your loved one's throat, he did not choose to.

Imagine the zealot puts the knife to the throat of your beloved and cuts through the skin, tears into the muscles, saws through the tendons, and hits bone. Imagine your loved one gurgling, blood urging out. That's how they die.

Think of someone you love. Someone who is so essential that you forget they live. Whose presence looms so large in your life that you take them for granted. Someone who, it's only when they're gone, that you really understand what they mean to you.

Imagine that person far away. Imagine that person being told to wear an orange jumpsuit. Imagine that person positioned before a high-definition camera in the desert. Then imagine that person forced to their knees. Imagine, dressed head to toe in black, a zealot with a bright knife. The zealot, with a hand on your loved one's shoulder, speaks to the camera and says he has no choice. Your loved one will die and no one will be responsible and no one could have done anything differently.

Imagine the zealot puts the knife to the throat of your beloved and cuts through the skin, tears into the muscles, saws through the tendons, and hits bone. Imagine your loved one gurgling, blood urging out. That's how they die.

About an article indirectly about authors and their texts

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a sort-of interesting article titled "The Unabomber's Pen Pal" that is about a college professor trying to teach the anti-technology ideas espoused by Ted Kaczynski among others (but especially by him). This professor seeks to remove from the remote Montana cabin and the remote mind of its terrorist author the ideas captured in Kaczynski's manifesto and resituate them in the academy. Apparently it often turns out that exploring the ideas on their own merit takes a backseat to discussing the practicality and ethics of doing so.

Within contemporary literary theory, can the text be removed from its author? How did the author get "into" the text in the first place?

And should he be removed? Is this a special kind of work? A unique case?

Kaczynski lived his ideology and practiced his philosophy. In one sense, by removing the author from the text, the professor is attempting to protect the text, give it viability in the marketplace of ideas. But at the same time, without its author, the text is deprived of the life Kaczynski lived in its manifestation--the life it advocates for, the revolution it endorses: all that is locked away, isolated, imprisoned so as not to threaten its academic life.

To wit, Kaczynski is first locked away so as not to threaten society; then he is locked away a second time so as not to threaten his own ideas. Indeed, the text is freed the moment its author is imprisoned.

"Kaczynski" is now an abstraction of the man who attacked society by sending bombs through the mail while hidden in a remote Montana cabin. When the name is attributed to the text, "Kaczynski" appears in faded print in its margins, and can be found scratched in between the lines, where it adds or invokes a certain character in the work. This character says, Yes, these words are dangerous, these words are of consequence to you and to the establishment. These are fighting words.

This is not to say you can't or shouldn't remove the author from his text (in a sense I'm all for it). It's just that, given the current practice of (critical) literary theory, if you try, you might expect the text to change. After all, the fact that the professor consciously has to remove the author, and that the Chronicle wrote about his trying to do so, shows current theory's unrelenting emphasis and reliance on the author function.

A thing on "The Spirit of Terrorism", essays by Jean Baudrillard

Was disappointed with these essays. Baudrillard alternates between skin-deep pontifications on the symbolic meaning of terror and basic leftist moralizing against the methods and consequences of US hegemony. Too bad: despite the volumes of writing on the attacks, I expect there's a real dearth of good literature on the subject.

Baudrillard doesn't argue points so much as reflect on them, so his writing is loosely structured. The edition I read was translated by Chris Turner.

On the helpfulness of health news

The New York Times article "Journals Asked To Cut Details Of Flu Studies" reports that

a government advisory board is asking scientific journals not to publish details of certain biomedical experiments, for fear that the information could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics.

At first I read this as the story of an unserious government response to a serious problem: the threat of bioterrorism. But more likely it's just bad reporting--unhelpful and uninformative at best, borderline alarmist at worst. The reason is that by emphasizing this one advisory board request, the reporting (similarly appearing in other publications) de-emphasizes other government-coordinated efforts at preventing and monitoring bioterror threats. As a result, the reader comes away thinking that the editors of a few scientific journals play a larger role in the drama of national security than they actually do, and that bioterror is a more imminent threat than it actually is.

The financial bleeding won’t stop with bin Laden’s demise

The author of Bloomberg's article "Bin Laden’s Death Won’t End Toll on Taxpayers" took dramatic license. I especially appreciate these lines:

Even in death, Osama bin Laden will be taking revenge on American taxpayers for years to come ...

... One of every four dollars in red ink the U.S. expects to incur in the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 will result from $285 billion in annual spending triggered by the terrorist scion of a wealthy Saudi family ...

... Indeed, the meter didn’t stop running May 2 when bin Laden’s corpse slipped into the Arabian Sea ...

...  The government’s finances also will groan beneath the weight of the Department of Homeland Security, the 216,000- employee bureaucracy created to protect Americans from additional terrorist attacks ...

... And small erosions of personal liberty, conceded in the interests of security, may yet deepen ...

And, finally,

... Not since the early days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union threatened, has an enemy so bedeviled Americans and their leaders. Where once children prepared for nuclear war with “duck and cover” drills, Americans after Sept. 11 stockpiled duct tape and canned food ...

While the prose here is unique among political articles and the numbers therein are stunning, the validity of the decisions behind these outrageous expenditures goes unexamined. The author treats the costs as a natural occurrence rather than symptomatic of bad, corrupt politics. Worse, the conclusion whitewashes the last decade by pretending the nation's middle and lower classes are not right now suffering from unemployment and inflation as city, state, and federal budget gutting hacks away our standard of living. If bin Laden hoped to bankrupt the country, the monies spent in his name combined with Wall Street's crimes may just well do the job.


* The title is taken from the article discussed: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-12/bin-laden-s-death-won-t-end-toll-on-taxpayers.html