Every dream has a dollhouse and every dollhouse a dream of moss creeping across the floor, like all the s’s in your words make me jittery, like nearly half the world’s refugees – 4.73 million Afghanis and Iraqis – are fleeing US-led wars and the ensuing civil conflicts in their countries. It’s just four months after my quad bypass and I’m traveling for the novel I’m writing. I lived once by the river near Chudovo when I was a boy. Now I’m reading the “tl;dr version”, about reality insurgents [and how they] usefully apply the principles of 4GW to their activities – [how] they are clearly operating on a faster OODA loop and [are] thus able to respond more quickly, with … open source bazaars – media-effective denial memes … [see post on NAR] I mean, Banksy’s “The Gorilla in a Pink Mask” was recently and “unknowingly” emulsified. So, if you got your head chopped off and your neurons took a minute to die, would you have an “off of body experience”? I get the feeling Snow White sweat a lot. This is vaguely confirmed by the lit celluloid. Return to your Sky Mall. The giant lobster has broken the railing and is chasing the crowd down the street. Everything / Glows until dull. I will emit a small thing, / like a dragonfly flapping its way out the nostril. It was a struggle switching over to a citrus flavored toothpaste. [Consider a writing limited by one’s being unable to afford the purchase of, say, verbs. Limited by necessity, not by the fashion-dictates of “constraint.”] Fashion dictates? I like hairy chests, but I’m not about to boff a 6-foot weasel. Am I?
[Note: Sources: Kristy Bowen, “On the Picturesque”, “A House Which Is A Kind of Falling”, at Requited; H Patricia Hynes, “War and the True Tragedy of the Commons”, at Truthout, 28 Jul 011; Steve Katz, “How Bilbao”, at Requited; Viktor Shklovsky, “FOREWORD”, BOWSTRING: ON THE DISSIMILARITY OF THE SIMILAR (tr. Shushan Avagyan), at Requited; JBR; “Reality as failed state - tl;dr version (I like doing this)”, at steelweaver, 28 Jul 011 (4GW: “Fourth Generation War (4GW) emerged in the late 1980s, but has become popular due to recent twists in the war in Iraq, and terrorist attacks worldwide. In brief, the theory holds that warfare has evolved through four generations: 1) the use of massed manpower, 2) firepower, 3) maneuver, and now 4) an evolved form of insurgency that employs all available networks—political, economic, social, military—to convince an opponent's decision makers that their strategic goals are either unachievable or too costly.” – Antulio J Echevarria II, Fourth-Generation War and Other Myths, at Strategic Studies Institute; OODA: “The OODA Loop model was developed by Col. John Boyd, USAF (Ret) during the Korean War. It is a concept consisting of the following four actions: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. This looping concept referred to the ability possessed by fighter pilots that allowed them to succeed in combat. It is now used by the U.S. Marines and other organizations. The premise of the model is that decision-making is the result of rational behavior in which problems are viewed as a cycle of Observation, Orientation (situational awareness), Decision Making, and Action.”—Don Clark, “OODA Loop”, at Big Dog and Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition, 7 Aug 010); reference to “America’s own Taliban” at ZS, 31 Jul 011; JBR; dreamduke, “One of Banksy’s early works, …”, at Dreamduke; Nick Eaton, as quoted in Jacob Sloan, “How Long Do Severed Heads Live?”, at Disinformation, 29 Jul 011; Del Ray Cross, “mcdxlv”, at Anachronizms, 29 Jul 011; Anthony Dinozzo, NCIS “Jet Lag” episode; JBR, ekphrasis practiced on the image embedded in Evan Calder Williams, “capable of sweeping men out of existence”, at Socialism and/or Barbarism, 29 Jul 011; Jean Day, “Undersong”, at Cambridge Literary Review 4; Joseph Goosey, “laminate rectangles” at normal words; Sara Slaughter, “a selection from Upriver”, at The The, Grace Hartigan, as quoted in John Latta, “Reading Notes (The Journal of Grace Hartigan, 1951-1955)”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 29 Jul 011; JBR; Catherine Willows, CSI: NY “Fur and Loathing” episode; JBR]
2012 presidential hopeful, Texas Governor Rick Perry (left), will be hosting a prayer meeting called 'The Response' on August 6 with many sponsors from the New Apostolic Reformation [GALLO/GETTY]
Prior to 9/11, the Taliban government in Afghanistan did not register very much on American radar screens, with one notable exception: when it blew up two colossal images of the Buddha in Bamiyan province in early 2001. But destruction of treasured artifacts isn't just limited to the Taliban.
There's a right-wing politico-religious presence centred in the US, but with a global reach, engaging in similar practises, destroying religious and cultural artifacts as a key aspect of its ideology of "strategic level spiritual warfare" (SLSW).
Until recently a fringe evangelical movement, warned against as deviant, "spiritual warfare" is rapidly positioning itself within America's mainstream political right. It's well past time for political journalists to start covering what this movement is up to.
As an example, leaders have bragged online about the destruction of Native American religious artifacts, which their twisted ideology somehow sees as a liberating act, promoting "reconciliation" between estranged groups of people. Critics, however, see it as reflecting an eliminationist mindset, while traditional conservative evangelicals have denounced the ideology as un-biblical. Some even claim it is actually a form of pagan practice dressed up in Christian clothes, according such artifacts a spiritual power that the Bible itself denies.
The ultimate goal is to replace secular democracy, both in America and around the world, with a Christian theocracy, an ideology known as "dominionism". The supposed purpose is to "purify" the world for Christ's return - again, strikingly similar to what the Taliban believe, but also significantly at odds with more common, long-standing Christian beliefs about the "end times", as well as the nature and purpose of prayer, and the roles of human and divine power.
This description might seem utterly fantastical, but copious evidence for it is hidden in plain sight, scattered across the internet, in books, on YouTube, and tracked by a small community of researchers at sites such as Talk2Action.org and RightWingWatch.org, as well as by evangelical critics. The question is: When will America's mainstream media catch up?
The missed story in the 2008 campaign
Known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), a term coined by its intellectual godfather, C Peter Wagner, this movement surfaced in the 2008 campaign, with video of one of its most prominent practitioners, Kenyan witch-hunter Thomas Muthee, anointing Sarah Palin - but the mainstream media largely missed the real story on a number of counts.
They generally failed to realise that Muthee was part of a Western-based movement, indeed, he starred in the first "Transformations" video, a pseudo-documentary series advancing SLSW, advertised as having been seen by 200 million people in 70 languages.
Media also overlooked clear evidence that Palin herself was part of an Alaskan group involved in SLSW, dating back to when she was just 24 years old. More basically, media failed to grasp the radical nature of NAR, and its departure from earlier evangelical practice. This is so new that many academic experts haven't caught up with it.
Additionally, many in the media relied on Charisma magazine for guidance - a publication deeply aligned with the NAR. Add this to the media's general skittishness when accused of bias by Palin and her supporters, and the result was a perfect storm of story suppression, much of it seemingly quite reasonable.
A rare exception, which did not occur until very late in the campaign, was Laurie Goodstein's October 24 story in theNew York Times, "YouTube Videos Draw Attention to Palin's Faith", which did discuss spiritual warfare and Palin's involvement, but barely brushed against the underlying agenda of dominionism and its more troubling implications.
The story this time
Inside USA - Christianity in US politics
This election cycle, the media will have another chance to get the story right. The NAR has made great strides since 2008, and already, NAR figures are deeply involved in organising for Texas Governor Rick Perry's August 6 prayer meeting, "The Response".
On July 12, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow did a segment highlighting some of their more bizarre claims in a series of video clips. These included Wagner saying that the Japanese stock market collapsed because the emperor had sex with a demon (the sun goddess), another leading NAR figure, John Benefiel, calling the Statue of Liberty "a demonic idol", and a third figure, Mike Bickle, calling Oprah Winfrey "a forerunner to the Harlot movement", or, as Maddow put it, a "harbinger of the antichrist".
But these aren't just a collection of random bizarre claims. As researcher Rachel Tabachnick - who's been studying NAR since 2008 - wrote the day after: "These video clips should receive much more national exposure, but they need to be viewed in context of the movement they represent."
Not your father's religious right
Encompassing a variety of organisations and networks of activist groups, the NAR is not just concerned about particular issues, such as abortion or gay rights, or even about so-called "values", which is the impression that even Goodstein's 2008 story left with readers.
Rather, the NAR is committed to replacing democracy with a religious dictatorship, which it sees as a necessary prelude for Christ's return to earth.
Consequently, the NAR is also openly dedicated to destroying religious and cultural groups who do not share their beliefs - even including others on the Christian Right. They openly denounce Mormonism and Roman Catholicism as demonic, but in the end all Protestant denominations are seen as impediments to creating one unified religious establishment which should in turn control all of society, entirely replacing America's secular democracy, and bringing about their own version of "one-world government".
This is explicitly articulated in terms of what's known as the "Seven Mountains Mandate", which seeks to establish Christian dominance over seven culture-shaping spheres of activity: business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family, and religion. On one of Muthee's several visits to Sarah Palin's church in Wasilla, he spoke for about ten minutes about the Seven Mountains Mandate.
The NAR's non-church, non-denominational apostolic/prophetic organisation is key to its recent rapid growth and its relative invisibility to outsiders, but it also departs significantly from traditional scriptural teachings long held dear by evangelicals, as do many of its teachings.
Indeed, in August 2000, the Assemblies of God, America's largest Pentecostal denomination, adopted a statement warning against a number of tendencies, under the heading "Deviant Teachings Disapproved", including, but not limited to, some prominent elements involved in the NAR. However, Tabachnick informed me that "unfortunately many in the Assemblies of God have changed their tune on this and embraced the NAR".
Yet many have not changed, and the warnings still serve to highlight how this latest development is not the same religious right wing as in your father's day.
One tendency warned against was dominionism itself, which the document called "unscriptural triumphalism". It also warned against "the problematic teaching that present-day offices of apostles and prophets should govern church ministry at all levels", and against "excessive fixation on Satan and demonic spirits". These are all major aspects of NAR theology, as is the concept of "generational curses", which the document also warns against.
In short, the NAR may be gaining substantial ground on the religious right, but in doing so, it is profoundly undermining a raft of biblical teachings that the vast majority of evangelicals have staunchly clung to until quite recently. This is, indeed, not your father's religious right. It is arguably destroying your father's religious right.
Strategic level spiritual warfare: A myth? A heresy? Or worse?
Because of the goal of gaining dominion over all of society, spiritual warfare to drive out demons who supposedly stand in the way of this goal plays a central role in NAR thinking. There are, three levels to spiritual warfare, asTalk2action.org explains in their glossary of NAR terms:
Ground level spiritual warfare is casting out demons from individuals. Occult level spiritual warfare is a confrontation with demons operating through witchcraft and esoteric philosophies (examples are Freemasonry and Tibetan Buddhism). Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare is the highest level, dealing with confrontation of territorial principalities that control entire communities, ethnic groups, religions, and nations.
While there are many evangelical critics of spiritual warfare and the NAR, and a great deal of material online, Bishop Michael Reid - who has three degrees from Oral Roberts University, including an honorary Doctorate of Divinity - literally wrote the book on the subject.
Although he's since had his own gay sex scandal - much like Wagner's long-time close associate, Ted Haggard - his 2002 book, Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare: A Modern Mythology? remains a devastating Bible-based critique, in which he writes, regarding SLSW:
"There is no foundation in the Old Testament for this practice, nor any indication that the devil has any intrinsic power or authority. Satan's only weapon is deception and his only sphere of influence that which God permits for His own eternal purposes.
"In the New Testament, the picture is similar; there is no evidence to suggest that Christians are called to engage in an on-going conflict with spiritual forces in the cosmic realm. The Scripture is quite clear in its teaching that Christ defeated Satan completely at Calvary and that Christians have been freed from his power."
Reid sees this unscriptural ideology usurping God's role and elevating mere mortals to a higher place - precisely the sort of thing that NAR's leading advocates accuse secularists of doing:
"The whole focus of SLSW is on the devil and his demonic host ... Man has become the fulcrum of redemption, holding the balance of power between God and the devil in the battle for the souls of men, and the gospel itself rendered impotent without the preliminary work of pulling down demonic strongholds ... These are serious matters which call into question the very basis of the Christian faith."
"The Harlot Babylon is preparing the nations to receive the antichrist. The Harlot Babylon will be a religion of affirmation, toleration, no absolutes, a counterfeit justice movement ... I believe that one of the main pastors as a forerunner to the Harlot movement is Oprah."
Mike Bickle, NAR
In short, SLSW is implicitly about the egos of "spiritual warriors", rather than Christian humility.
Reid also repeatedly suggests that SLSW is actually pagan in origins, and thus a form of syncretism, the very sort of mixture between Christianity and older pagan religions that biblical literalists of all stripes abhor. For example:
"Hesselgrave draws the analogy between warfare prayer and the prayer typical of Indo-European paganism with its dualistic understanding of the eternal co-existence of good and evil. The latter is viewed as a means 'to control the gods', but, in contrast, prayer in biblical thought is 'submission' to God'.
The idea that spiritual warfare as practised by the NAR is itself a pagan practice, perhaps even a form of demonic battle or that it elevates man over God are perceived examples of what psychologists call "projection", an ego defence mechanism.
But long before there were any psychologists, the Bible weighed in, Matthew 7:5: "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." We turn now to another such example.
>Oprah and the Antichrist - A case of projection?
On July 12, Rachel Maddow began the segment mentioned earlier with a video of NAR bigwig, Mike Bickle, in which he said:
"The Harlot Babylon is preparing the nations to receive the antichrist. The Harlot Babylon will be a religion of affirmation, toleration, no absolutes, a counterfeit justice movement. They will feed the poor, have humanitarian projects, inspire acts of compassion for all the wrong reasons. They won't know it ... I believe that one of the main pastors as a forerunner to the Harlot movement is Oprah."
Although Maddow naturally focused on the claim that Oprah was somehow a harbinger of the antichrist, it's arguably even more interesting that Bickle so accurately - if inadvertently - describes one of the NAR's own favourite practices, what it calls "reconciliation" between groups that are estranged from one another, be they ethnic, racial or nationalist. These often, but not always, involve the destruction of religious/cultural artifacts and are supposed to lift so-called "generational curses".
One such example revolved around Kansas Governor Sam Brownback, formerly a US senator.
"Brownback has taken part in NAR 'Reconciliation' events since 2003, and subsequently introduced Senate resolutions apologising to Native Americans," Tabachnick wrote at Talk2Action.org last year. "These Reconciliation ceremonies are not about pluralism, but about proselytising - for both charismatic evangelical belief and right wing politics."
Eventually one such resolution was incorporated into legislation. On the other side, a number of Native American NAR leaders were involved in the ritual destruction of objects said to depict false gods. Given the centuries-long history of the many ways that Native American culture has been destroyed by white America, it is nothing short of absurd to claim that "reconciliation" can be brought about by further acts of cultural destruction. Yet, that is precisely what the NAR practices.
This is, at best, to use Bickle's own word, a "counterfeit" movement.
Another indication of how counterfeit such "reconciliation" is lies in just who represents each side. In this example, it was eventually the US government on one side, and a religious network of self-hating Native Americans on the other. If that seems a bit lopsided, it is more typical than not.
A similar pattern can be found in reconciliation rituals with "Jews" who are so-called "messianic Jews" - meaning they are actually practising born-again Christians. That's a bit like a "reconciliation" between Italian and Brazilian soccer fans, with the Brazilian fans being from the Italian embassy in Brasilia.
In another case, religion wasn't even really a factor, as a small, private reconciliation ritual in Texas was performed to bring black people back to the Republican Party. In her book, Bridging the Racial and Political Divide: How Godly Politics Can Transform a Nation, Alice Peterson describes how Susan Weddington, then chair of the Texas Republican Party, organised the ritual.
When the time came, Peterson wrote, she expected Weddington to ask forgiveness for whatever White Republicans had done - she seems to have no idea what that might have been. Instead, Weddington asked forgiveness for the Black Republicans who left the party.
Nowhere in Peterson's account is there any hint that Blacks became Democrats when Democrats renounced their racist past during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, and Republicans eagerly wooed tens of millions of White Democrats who fled their party as a result. In short, such make-believe "reconciliation" has nothing to do with spiritual truth, and everything to do with historical lies.
Work to be done
If this all seems a bit overwhelming, that's only because it is.
If the media had taken a serious critical look at Palin's religious beliefs and practices in 2008, all the above and more could have been examined and discussed in detail over the past three years. As it is, there is a lot of catching up to do.
There is no question that American political journalists are up to the task - if they put their minds to it. The only question is, will they do it? Will they dare to seriously consider the evidence of a Taliban-like movement in right-wing Christian America, seeking to impose its own form of "godly" government in place of the secular democracy established more than 200 years ago?
Journalists could begin to answer that question by taking a long hard look at the NAR figures endorsing Rick Perry's prayer event on August 6. Let's hope they do.
Paul Rosenberg is the Senior Editor of Random Lengths News, a bi-weekly alternative community newsletter.
Happy birthday, John Ashbery. It’s Thursday. We forget each time what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep, adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, “mugwump of the final hour,” lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it, and the whole point collapse like a hole dug in sand. It’s breathy, though, the giant cloud of mist swaddles an actively feeding supermassive quasar. And yes, these urban evolutionists are charting the growth of the super-strong mutant rats, fish, bacteria, and bugs that will someday overrun the town. That’s a low price. That’s a lot of water. O what book shall I read now? for they are all of them new, and used. I try to be un and faithful to the way my nervous systems handle the world. But fuck it
, O speck Of < 1% truth
Of the total empire of harm that wants To kill you, too,
compression is one of the passions, in night vision goggles
The red metronome on Letná hill.
A head transplant brings on the knowledge affect where cloud equivalents prosper on a narrow isthmus, watching the seasons float in willpower. I never understood insinuation. I never misunderstood it, either, a civilized divide teasing my attitude into an admonitory tableau sponged with saliva. All the algorithms are just fine. You can go right in. They have an open table. Thank you, Jack Kimball. “Fresh diplomatic efforts are under way to try to end Libya's bloody civil war, with the UN special envoy flying to Tripoli to hold talks after Britain followed France in accepting that Muammar Gaddafi cannot be bombed into exile.” I shit you negative. I crap you nope. I poo yoo no. Thus Mickey Rourke steps out of the gloom today, after theyre all dead, or done for anyhoo, Mickey Rourke (who BTW looks exactly like Tom Waits, post facial reconstruction) strides forth
It’s why I’m putting two dick-thick fingers In your mouth and brushing your hair Out of your eyes whispering rosebud with all my knuckles
Here is something I keep thinking about. If you want to kill a hedgehog, and the hedgehog has curled itself into an impenetrable ball, you just have to bang on the ground rhythmically with a stick. The hedgehog will open up to the beat. How is this like a poem. I’m just kidding. I am not going to kill you! It would take just a few yellow dots to do the whole thing solar. Death drop! That plastic zipper is a word that says, “Resealable.”
[Note: Sources: John Gallaher, and John Ashbery, “Alcove”, as quoted in Gallaher’s “Happy birthday to John Ashbery!”, at Nothing to Say & Saying It, 28 Jul 011; JBR; Pelliciari, “Black Hole Hosts Universe’s Most Massive Water Cloud”, at Disinformation, 28 Jul 011 (“ … the giant quasar billions of light-years away is surrounded by water vapor that could fill Earth’s oceans over 140 trillion times”); JBR; Jacob Sloan, “Uncovering The Biology Of Cities”, at Disinformation, 28 Jul 011; Staples commercial (memory quote); John Ashbery, “It Must Be Sophisticated”, at wood s lot, 28 Jul 011; Gary Lutz, as quoted in John Latta, “Marianne Moore / Gary Lutz”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 28 Jul 011; Joe Luna, “finer branding”, at All Over The Grid, 28 Jul 011; JBR; Robert Sheppard, “The Innovative Sonnet Sequence: Thirteen of 14: Three Sonnetized Accounts”, at pages, 26 Jul 011; Jack Kimball, “[A Modest Revision]”, at Pantaloons, 28 Jul 011; JBR; Kim Sengupta, as quoted in Richard Seymour, “Libya”, at Lenin’s Tomb, 28 Jul 28; Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle, “Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle on Ariana Reines”, at Montevidayo, 28 Jul 011; Heather Christle, “I went to a baseball game”, at Heather.Christle.tumblr, 28 Jul 011; JBR but see Timothy Morton, “How Much Space Would It Take to Power the World on Solar”, Ecology without Nature, 28 Jul 011; Lucas de Lima, “Crazy Bitch Aesthetics (Pt. 2): Nicki Minaj & The Death Drop of Voguing”, at Montevidayo, 28 Jul 011; Adam Robinson, “!!!”, at HTMLGIANT, 28 Jul 011]
Reblogged from Truthout:
War and the True Tragedy of the Commons
Thursday 28 July 2011
by: H. Patricia Hynes, Truthout | News Analysis
"A world that wants to make peace with the environment cannot continue to fight wars or to sacrifice human health and the earth's ecosystems preparing for them."
-Michael Renner, "War and Public Health"
The "Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin's 1968 controversial essay published in Science, essentially targeted overpopulation (read: poor women) as the prime threat to sustainable life on our finite earth. Hardin, and many who consumed this thesis, failed to single out the very small, but politically powerful, population responsible for a mammoth environmental impact - the military. Per capita, the military complex (read: powerful men) is the most polluting human population.
A well-glued solidarity between the military, national security advisors, civilian defense contractors, and elites of government has cloaked the extraordinary debt of pollution, destruction of land, and use of finite resources in the paternalistic mantle of national security.
Since the origins of recorded history, war chroniclers have told of tactical environmental destruction: destroying crops, forest, and infrastructure; polluting water supply and breaching dikes to flood enemy troops and fields; salting enemies' fields; catapulting infected blankets into enemy garrisons, and so on. During the American Civil War, a handful of Confederates attempted to burn down New York City and plotted both to poison the city's drinking water supply reservoir and to spread yellow fever throughout Washington, DC.[1] The Chinese government committed perhaps the single most destructive wartime act in history during Japan's 1937-1945 war against China. To deter the Japanese advance, the Chinese dynamited a dike near Chengchow, releasing impounded Yellow River water. Not only did the floodwaters drown the several thousand advancing Japanese soldiers, they also destroyed 4,000 villages, 11 cities, and several million hectares of farmland and killed several hundred thousand Chinese civilians.[2]
War breeds environmental destruction, and just as war victims and war tactics have changed in recent times, so also has the scale of environmental destruction from war. The casualties of war in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have shifted from combatant soldiers to innocent civilians, with an estimated nine civilian deaths for every soldier death. The locus of war has moved from battlefields to urban and rural population centers, causing massive numbers of residents to flee and imminent health crises of contaminated water, poor sanitation, inadequate health care, malnourishment, overcrowding, and sexual predation in refugee camps. Nearly half of the world's refugees - 4.73 million Afghanis and Iraqis - are fleeing US-led wars and ensuing civil conflicts in their countries.
Widespread conflict in populated rural areas jeopardizes vital public health campaigns. The North-South Sudanese conflict threatened the village-based public health campaign to eliminate the human parasite guinea worm because "war and neglect have made south Sudan the worm's last stronghold." All the villages where people caught guinea worm in 2010 were suffering armed conflicts; public health campaign staff and residents fled the fighting. With the conflict ending, the government hopes to eradicate guinea worm - "the peace dividend we can give the world," says the health minister responsible for the eradication program.
Likewise, modern war and militarism have a staggering impact on nature and our lived environment - by the kinds of weapons used (long-lived concealed explosives, toxic chemicals, and radiation); the "shock and awe" intensity of industrial warfare; and the massive exploitation of natural resources and fossil fuels to support militarism. By 1990, researchers estimated that the world's military accounted for 5-10 percent of global air pollution, including carbon dioxide, ozone-depletion, smog and acid-forming chemicals. The Research Institute for Peace Policy in Starnberg, Germany calculated that 20 percent of all global environmental degradation was due to military and related activities.[3]
Larger, more powerful weapons systems, naval ships, and fighter planes usurp and contaminate huge swaths of land, habitat, groundwater, and soil. A World War II fighter plane "required a maneuvering radius of about 9 kilometers, compared with 75 kilometers in 1990 and a projected 150-185 kilometers for the next generation of jets."[4] The amount of land and airspace mandated by armed forces for war games, including bombing and shooting ranges, has increased by at least 20 times since World War II. Up to half of US airspace is used for military purposes. Millions of acres of US territory are consigned to military use, resulting in "a scorched-earth policy against an imaginary foe."[5] As for scorched earth against real "foes," one Vietnam veteran described the rain of death in the Vietnam War - with bombs, mortars, napalm and other chemical warfare pouring out of the sky - as a war against the environment, creating 20 million bomb craters and "reducing the Earth to ashes."
War between nations has intensified militarily and, thus, magnified natural resource exploitation and ecological devastation. In the early 1980's, the Center for Disarmament estimated that global military operations used more aluminum, copper, nickel and platinum than the entire Third World did for development. US military use of various metals ranges from 5 to 40 percent of civilian use.[6] During the six-week air war in the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the 100-hour ground war, "more weapons were reportedly used than during the protracted Vietnam War."[7] By US Army estimates, the first three weeks of war in Iraq in 2003 consumed 40 million gallons of fuel - the amount that 80,000 Americans would use for a year's worth of driving.[8] In the same war, the United States employed more than 20 weapons systems that contain depleted uranium (DU), in ranges from 300 grams to 7 tons. Some estimate "that over 1,000 tons of depleted uranium" were deployed, although the Pentagon is tight-lipped about amounts of DU used in recent wars.
The environment has been described as "the silent casualty" of war; one could also call it "the invisible casualty" of war. Governments at war honor the fallen and give lip service to the "collateral damage" of civilians injured and killed, while they treat military pollution as the necessary cost of waging war and disdain any responsibility for remediating environmental contamination. As the muscled-up Pentagon sees it, environmental protection laws hamstring their military training and war readiness and, thus, jeopardize national security. In retort, Karen Wayland, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has turned their "necessity for national defense" argument on its head: "The Pentagon's push for blanket exemptions from federal health and pollution cleanup safeguards makes a mockery of national defense. Using national security to sacrifice our nation's environmental security will endanger our health, leaving us less safe."
If, as many contend, the principal threat to world security in the 21st century is environmental degradation (through climate change, pollution, soil erosion, habitat loss and species extinction), then challenging the destruction and damage to the environment and the massive exploitation of oil and metal resources for the military-industrial war machine must become paramount in the work for peace. The series of articles to follow - on military hazardous waste, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, bioweapons research, nuclear weapons toxic waste, landmines and cluster bombs, and military use of fossil fuels - will provide an overview of modern military pollution and use of natural resources, with a central focus on the US military superpower, a power without precedent or competitor. The Pentagon maintains nearly 1,000 military bases worldwide, and its core budget equals that of the rest of the world's military combined. Thus, the documented environmental hazards of grievously polluted US military sites, as well as of other sites polluted from US-led wars and war-related activities, serve as the "worst-case" example of global military pollution - the true tragedy of our commons.
References:
1. Jane Singer. "The last word: the terrorists of the Civil War." THE WEEK. 2003.
2. Arthur Westing. "Conventional warfare and the human environment," in Illka Taipale et el. "War or Health? A Reader." London: Zed Books. 2002.
3. Michael Renner. "Assessing the military's war on the environment," in Lester Brown et al. "State of the World 1991." New York: W.W. Norton. Also Seth Shulman. "The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic Legacy of the U.S. Military." Boston: Beacon. 1992.
4. Renner, p.133.
5. Michael Renner. "Environmental health effects of weapons production, testing, and maintenance," in Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel. "War and Public Health." American Public Health Association. 2000.
6. Ibid. p.122.
7. Barry S. Levy et al. "The environmental consequences of war," in Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel. "War and Public Health." American Public Health Association. 2000. P.53
8. Barry Sanders. "The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism." AK Press. 2009. P.51.
[Note: "The Pentagon maintains nearly 1,000 military bases worldwide, and its core budget equals that of the rest of the world's military combined." This is the only *entitlement* that matters, really]
Reblogged from Al Jazeera (tip o the cap to K, who sent me the link): Multiculturalism does not pose a significant danger to Western values - but neoliberalism does.
Political scientist Samuel Huntington's thought revolved around the idea that a "clash of civilisations" between East and West would define the post-Cold War era [EPA]
The paranoid style in politics often imagines unlikely alliances that coalesce into an overwhelming threat that must be countered by all necessary means.
In Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington conjured an amalgamated East - an alliance between "Confucian" and "Islamic" powers - that would challenge the West for world dominance. Many jihadis fear the Crusader alliance between Jews and Christians. They forget that until recently, historically speaking, populations professing the latter were the chief persecutors of the former.
Now Anders Breivik has invoked the improbable axis of Marxism, multiculturalism and Islamism, together colonising Europe. As he sees multiculturalism as essentially a Jewish plot, Breivik has managed to wrap up the new and old fascist bogies in one conspiracy: communists, Jews and Muslims.
Like his terrorist counterparts who kill in the name of various Islamic sects, Breivik is willing to slaughter people for an invented purity. Modern Norway is a latecomer to the world of nations, becoming sovereign only in 1905. Vikings, Arctic explorers and international humanitarians all went into imagining the place.
Given how readily jihadi texts are dismissed as ravings, it is notable how much attention has already been paid to Breivik's wacky ideological brew. This is a worrying portent of the line of analysis that says that the "root causes" of Breivik's madness - immigration and cultural difference - must be addressed. Otherwise, European societies will lose their social cohesion, to choose one current euphemism for the Volk.
To the extent such a view takes hold, the far right may be forgiven for concluding that terrorism works. As for the rest of us, now facing terrorist re-imaginings from both sides of obscure battles in a mythic past, we may long for the leftist and anti-colonial insurgents of bygone days. They at least could offer plausible accounts of what they were up to.
To be sure, tactically speaking, Breivik thought through his operation. Unlike many jihadis, however, he lacked the courage to face men armed like him, and to offer his own life for his beliefs as well as the lives of others. Nonetheless he wanted at his court appearance to strut about in some kind of military uniform.
Smartly tailored uniforms, an abhorrence of cultural difference, and a desire for racial purity are all of a piece with fascist mysticism. As with jihadi ideology, it is precisely the non-rational elements of fascism that give it emotive, and hence political, power. For what Breivik and others see as under threat in the West is the vital source ofmeaning, of ultimate values, which they associate with the communion of a purified people.
Since the West faces no obvious threat of such existential scale and significance, one must be fabricated. It is here that the unlikely alliance of left wing parties and Islam plays its role, purportedly importing on a mass scale Muslims to colonise Europe. In Norway, Muslims account for less than three per cent of the population; in the UK, less than five per cent. Even so, the fantastical fear of the "loss" of Europe to Islam animates many on the right. It is part of mainstream electoral politics in Europe, and has long been an element of right wing discourse in the US.
In this vision of danger, multiculturalism plays a key role. Many will have noted Breivik's odd invocation of "cultural Marxists", folks I have only spotted in small numbers in university departments and cafes frequented by graduate students. Breivik's reference is in part to the Frankfurt School, a group of German Jewish scholars who fled Hitler for the Western cosmopolis of New York.
The idea is that "Jews" have encouraged cultural mixing in the West, fatally compromising its purity and thus its values, while Muslims and Jews retain their cultural strength and identity. Europe must therefore declare "independence" and fight the Muslim-Jewish-Marxist hordes, apparently starting by killing their children.
We can only assume that Breivik has confused the computer fantasy games he played - using a busty blonde avatar named "conservatism" - with political analysis. What is truly frightening, however, is that the core of this vision of multiculturalism as a threat to the West is shared by leading political parties in the France, the UK, Germany and Italy [AND THE USA, AND MANY MANY OTHER PLACES: JBR], among others. This is why there is every chance that Breivik's murderous and cowardly rampage will achieve some of its aims. Immigration, it will be argued, has unbalanced "our" people. It is already being curtailed in all the leading Western powers.
Shut up, obey, and collaborate
The irony is that the West brought us empire on a global scale and drew its cultural, economic, and political strength from interconnections with all parts of the world. The cosmopolis of New York, London and Paris - a "brown" not a "white" West - are more appropriate beacons of a West flush with power and confidence in its values than the imaginary purification achieved through concentration camps and closed borders.
But just what might be corroding values in the West?
This was one of the questions that animated the Frankfurt School and those who influenced it. They focused on the interaction between capitalism and culture. They noted the ways in which capitalism progressively turned everything into something that could be bought or sold, measuring value only by the bottom line. Slowly but surely such measures came to apply to the cultural values at the core of society. Even time, as Benjamin Franklin told us, is money, a doctrine which horrified Max Weber in his searing indictment of the capitalist mentality as an "iron cage" without "spirit".
Note for example the ways in which the great professional vocations of the West - lawyers, journalists, academics, doctors - have been co-opted and corrupted by bottom line thinking. Money and "efficiency" are the values by which we stand, not law, truth or health. Students are imagined as "customers", citizens as "stakeholders". Professional associations worry about the risk to their bottom line rather than furthering the values they exist to represent. Graduates of elite Western universities, imbued with the learning of our great thinkers, are sent off to corporations like News International. There they learn to shut up, obey, and collaborate in the dark work of exploitation for profit, for which they will be well rewarded, at least financially speaking.
Thanks in part to the grip of corporate power on the media and on political parties, few today in the West can imagine any other politics than those of big money. In the US, and increasingly even in Europe, the income differential between the poor and the wealthy already resembles that of banana republics. The downtrodden are asked to bear the burden of a financial crisis created by bankers. America's wealthy fly their children to summer camp in tax-free private jets amid a real rate of unemployment of over fifteen per cent.
Neoliberalism has only accelerated these processes at the heart of capitalist society. Here is a far more convincing threat to Western values and "social cohesion" than the lunatic fears of fascists. Notably, this is a threat that emanates from within, not without. It is precisely social democratic parties like Norway's Labour Party - Breivik's target - which have sought to contain the corrosive effects of capitalism and ensure the survival of the West's most humane values.
Tarak Barkawi is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge.
[JBR note: it is obvious that the far right as exemplified by the Grover Norquists, Michelle Bachmanns, Rupert Murdochs, and the lunatics in China who put a bullet train into operation without testing it, and then buried the evidence of their failure, which included living breathing humans, as quickly as they could, etc etc, is a much bigger threat to life on earth than anyone else these days, because these people have no values whatsoever, western or otherwise, just greeds and fanaticisms ...]
As a new definition of the trickle-down we witness destruction of the blues pub and its improvised scaffolding, disintegrating like flung out interiors silhouetted in acrylic behind a projection of long division, complex facticity that wounds tear open and heal slowly, a cap-and-balance that pays off if and only if/when and only when the melt re-ices. That’s what real love is. Making sure someone doesn’t have to pay for parking in the sequin guillotine. This varnished box shows nothing that protrudes, only a knob to turn to the next click, so that quite soon many little aluminum skyscrapers light up weakly. A dirty comb in the house of the recently deceased. At the third attempt to get out I saw the moon through the vagina. You go around and around the almond tree. Formally, the poem engages with one constraint: each line wants to be semantically intact—ideally, any line could stand alone, be my Last Words, my epitaph. This prediction of Marx (in the Grundrisse) is fully realised today. I don’t mean today in some general sense, I mean today. Again, emergence belies the heap. What is it to awake to find ‘your bodily eikon dematerialized?’ Still, she noted that all POPs don't react the same way to warming. Hexachlorobenzene and PCBs, the chemicals detected in increasing amounts in Norway and Canada, evaporate more easily than many other POPs, and are harder to dissolve in water. That means they're more prone to re-enter the atmosphere after they're deposited on land or sea. And then lately I’ve become obsessed with Mary Shelley, Mary Shelley who started writing Frankenstein when she was fucking 17. And I really want to conjure up a teenage Mary Shelley. I Lubriderm my mystic surfing eyes. My rice tastes like the lake. I drink some lukewarm ginger tea. “Mrs. Dondup says life is not a happy lollipop / [long long pause] / Part of the confusion lay in the way light appeared on the / horizon like a thin sheet of marmalade.” I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. “Kate to Mario. You seem so happy. How can that be, when you’ve told me how depressed you are? Responds Mario: I am so sad that I have come out on the other side.” Turn a few pages. “Wild animals have no graves.” “Stay cool” commands the cashier, “today will be over and under.” I’m ten feet out the door before that resolves to “over a hundred.” “And give us Walt Whitman’s beard filled with butterflies.” If I had 12 loudspeakers, I could produce 12 different sounds from the same input material. Try again in a couple of years with a sprained ankle. When I walk onstage you should hear my balls clank. By splitting the spectrum on this point and following where the rabbit hole goes (so to speak) into renewing the in-itself, both arrive at spectacularly different conclusions. “What? Cause I wear yellow pants you don’t believe me?” “You get the impression of the oracle at Delphi laughing or crying out as the triple-bars just line up in the slot-machine window.” “I will have created a little impossibility / that’s all I need / a way in / and then to unfold / like a bat.” Love to both of you, JERRY P.S. I'm also not sure where Engels comes into this (Probably, come to think of it, the tweets signed "Fred.") So, will Chengdu become the next Orlando, Florida, and China Construction Bank the next Lehman Brothers? The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue, which explains our fascination with violence. And a body made of moondust and fox fur can never be the light that lives on water at dusk. Sideways they’ll that f355 - replica. 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[Note: Sources: 584. Jack Kimball, “Again, I’m doing an accordion …”, at Pantaloons, 27 Jul 011; Sarah Rose Etter, as quoted in “Jamming their broken feet into skates: Sean H. Doyle talks to Sarah Rose Etter”, at We Who Are About To Die, 27 Jul 011; Francis Ponge, “The Radio” (tr. John Montague), at poempire, 15 Jan 011; James Tate, “Absences” 3, at poempire, 13 Jan 011; Myriam Moscona, “Door In” (tr. Kate Braid), at poempire, 14 Jan 011; Elva Macías, “Game” (tr. Caroline Davis Goodwin), at poempire 12 Jan 011; Robert Kelly, SPD blurb for his Uncertainties; Sander, “Will China Save Global Capitalism?”, at Mute Magazine, 27 Jul 011; JBR; Brad Flis, SPD blurb for Lawrence Giffin, Sorites; Lauren Morello and Climate Wire, “Climate Change Remobilizes Long Buried Pollution as Arctic Ice Melts: Trapped toxic chemicals are escaping from melting snow and ice in the Arctic, according to new research”, at Scientific American, 25 Jul 011 (she = Hayley Hung, a scientist with Environment Canada's Air Quality Division who studies toxic organic pollutants in the Arctic); Kate Zambreno, “anthropology”, at Frances Farmer Is My Sister, 27 Jul 011; JBR; Tesring Wangmo Dhompa, Rice tastes like the lake; Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, as quoted in Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s review of her in the absent everyday, at Verse, 9 Oct 05; Charlie Brooker, “The news coverage of the Norway mass-killings was fact-free conjecture”, at Guardian.uk, 24 Jul 011 (it may have been fact-free but it was not mere conjecture; it was utterly cynical racist and islamophobic manipulation); Kenneth Koch, Ko Un, JBR, Saadi Youssef, as quoted in JBR, “What Do You See?”, “So Many More Mornings”, “What Do You Hear?”, in The Beautiful Distractions; JBR; David Tudor, as quoted in Blake Butler, “David Tudor on Writing”, at HTLMGIANT, 23 Nov 010; Del Ray Cross, “mcdxliii”, at Anachronizms, 27 Jul 011; Judy Garland, as quoted in Sean Lovelace, “Judy Garland on Writing”, at HTMLGIANT, 14 Jan 011; Robert Jackson, “Initial Thoughts on Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making”, at Algorithm and Contingency, 27 Jul 011; Lil B, and Heather Christle, as quoted in Nick Sturm, “Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees”, at HTMLGIANT; John Darnielle, as quoted in SPD blurb< for Heather Christle, The Trees The Trees; email from Jerome Rothenberg, “Tweet from Engels”, rec’d 27 Jul 011 1:18 PM PST; Mike Davis, as quoted in “Mike Davis: crash”, at I cite, 27 Jul 011; Peter Schwartz, “humanology”, at Anti- #4; Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito, “Bordello”, at Anti-, Feature #54. 585. Exockreoxer, comment appended to JBR, “Wow. When even The Harvard Business Review smells capitalism stinking ...”, at ZS, 25 Jul 011]
Come down to the water, whisper the cripples, on the tall banks of the levee. We call what we’re doing dancing because we like that word better than some other words. It has been further established that the speed of light is unbreakable, even. Taking social antagonism as the founding event of “a community of those who have nothing in common” besides this speed of light, what we call particles are epiphenomenal. But boredom turns to melodrama when something out of the ordinary happens. Major weather pet events are structured like narrative dramas with anticipation heightened by detection and tracking, leading to the climax of real-time impact, capped by the aftermath of devastation. There’s got to be a hexagram for this. Let’s wear the Infinity Mushroom Burial Suit. Accessorize with Alternative Embalming Fluid, Liquid Spore Slurry, and Decompiculture Makeup. Have I already spoken of this? Why does it remind me of Arakawa + Gins? Pay what you can. In other letters, certain blues … take center stage. Blue black velvet I; billowing, deep-space X; soft blue B; and D, tinny and cerulean. Endowed with red amber translucence, S. Z a grape juice stain. E’s as pale and loose as runny scrambled eggs. Y leapt to the eye with the splendor of a wheat field in August. The minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier, but the assemblage. “Tiens, tiens!” Speaking against the masters becomes pure folly. The voice of those that protest, that refuse the “wisdom” of the masters, is immediately coded as animal noise. How are you today, my dear? Will you judge me with a deeper love than I could offer the staggerers and plaintiffs? Several pigeons are harassing a dove. The “ding dong” in “decay,” you said. A vacuum is actually a roiling broth. We’re out of time. Balzac did not stop writing, of course. I wonder where they keep their fresh water. Lemon meringue? It’s no good unless it falls apart. It’s all automatic, spooking the flowers. Are you asleep? The sleeper has two left sides. Things tend to roll farther when they are dropped rather than placed.
[Note: Sources: John Gallaher and G C Waldrep, “AND AS THEY WAITED IN THEIR BASKETS ON THE HILLSIDES IT BEGAN TO RAIN”, as quoted in “Part Two of John Gallaher and G.C. Waldrep on Your Father on the Train of Ghosts”, at BOA Editions, 26 Jul 011; Timothy Morton, “Good News for Ontological Interpretations of Quantum Theory”, at Ecology without Nature, 26 Jul 011; Diller + Scofidio, as quoted in Alexander Trevi, “(Strange Pets)”, at Pruned, 26 Jul 011; Nick Land, “Time in Transition”, at Urban Future, 23 Jul 011; JBR; Jae Rhim Lee, “Mushroom Death Suit”, at Infinity Burial Project (“‘By trying to preserve the body we poison the living.’ The garment is embedded with spores of toxin-cleaning, flesh-eating mushrooms that will consume the corpse wearing it, leaving the earth cleansed and renewed as we make our exit”—Jae Rhim Lee, as quoted in Jacob Sloan, “Mushroom Death Suit”, at Disinformation, 26 Jul 011; JBR; Pelliciari, “A Visionary Way To Bring Good Food To The Poor Is Taking Off”, at Disinformation, 26 Jul 011 (“Last year, [Panera Bread founder Ron] Shaich began an experiment in Clayton, Missouri. He opened a Panera Cares pay-what-you-can café and it has been an unqualified success, so much so that he has since opened two more locations – in Dearborn, Michigan, and Portland, Oregon. The goal, now, is to open one per quarter in diverse communities around the country – the geographical logic being that the folks with more means can help offset those with less.”); Josef Albers, on Joan Mitchell’s synaesthesia, Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature”, as quoted in John Latta, “Reading Notes: Joan Mitchell, Gilles Deleuze”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 26 Jul 011 (Ted Gorey, Barney Rossett, and Haskell Wexler, whom Latta mentions, were among my parents’ friends (my mom too went to Francis Parker)); Walter Benjamin, as quoted in Jean Selz, “Benjamin in Ibiza”, as quoted in Tom Clark, “Jean Selz, Benjamin in Ibiza”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 26 Jul 011; Levi R Bryant, “The Scandal of Political Realism”, at Larval Subjects, 26 Jul 011; Maxine Chernoff, “The Staggering Man”, in A House in Summer, at lulu/The Argotist; Jack Kimball, “Your reading was beautiful …”, at Pantaloons, 26 Jul 011; “untitled (AS DOUGLAS ADAMS once wrote: …”, at Poetry as Socio-proctology, 26 Jul 011 (canceled post); Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Jacques Rancière, “The Politics of Literature”, in Dissensus (ed. and tr. Steven Corcoran); Joseph Conrad, epigraph to Pierre Joris, “St/range: An uncertain range”, at alligatorzine 113; Larry Fagin, “No Real Than You Are”, as quoted in Simone Kearney, “Poem of the Week: Larry Fagin” at The The; Jimmy Chen, “Notes Towards a Suicide Letter”, at HTMLGIANT, 25 Jul 011]
Wheeling, the flock flattened into a cloud, rapidly thinning and elongating, then contracted again until it bulged weightlessly in the middle in order to feel the spirit of Alexander Pope’s zenless Zen. The Merzbau suddenly revealed itself as more than a single work in a permanent location; it could be a mobile, repeatable concept. Untitled (Grotto with Cow Horn). Et cet. But let’s be serious. Is, say, Leibniz’s account of the fate of the soul of a dog after death (that is, shrinking down into a microscopic organic body and floating around in the air and in the scum of ponds for all eternity) really any more viable a candidate for the true theory of life after death than the account offered in The Egyptian Book of the Dead? After waking up, the triceratops impales you. And all that’s left are the inflatable soldiers leaping through the lawn. At such high speeds, what can they really know! Define fatidic. Perhaps, it could be argued, such self-consciously non-Debordist engagements with the SI simply represent the downward curve of a product life-cycle graph for an SI industry, mining some of their less well explored, less easily accessible terrain for additional material and squeezing some additional droplets of surplus value from under-exploited intellectual territories. Possibly, but that’s not what the Ghost Whisperer says. But, they have everything at the mall, reader! They have pet massagers. They have specialty tea. Tonight, on action news at nine, we’ll tell you how walnuts may kill you. The shadow of a walnut is a baby fist, the inside of a walnut is a baby shadow, the inside of a baby is a walnut fist. 2 is a shorthand for this vertigo of the unfolding epigram, in the model sense of the word, as a house-husband delighting in the orchid in its pram. And it’s true—leaving remaining woodlands undisturbed is essential. Have you seen CSI-Wildlife? Have you seen the rhino foraging on the banks of the Jones Falls River in Baltimore, Maryland? Fukushima city officials sowed sunflower seeds Wednesday at a plaza in the city as part of efforts to remove radioactive materials from the soil. I am watching my scabs pop; they gorge the gongs. It may be that the intruder in the net is the novelist ... or the anima spilling out from behind the Lone Ranger Mask. The conference was more than adequate. Groaning kegs of nocwlby. Monsieur and Madame Precario wore pink retardant. Lindsay Herko wore Charlie’s green prom vest.
[Note: Sources: Vincent Czyzagni, Plotting Against Plot”, as seen at wood s lot, 25 Jul 011; The Roger Cardinal/Gwendolen Webster, Kurt Schwitters; Justin E H Smith, “Experiment, Culture, and the History of Philosophy”, at Early Modern Experimental Philosophy (also discovered via wood s lot); Ryan Bender-Murphy, “Wake-Up Call”, at Anti- #8; JBR, but see John Latta, “Poetry’s Wealth”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 25 Jul 011; Christopher Collier, “The Importance of Being Earnest, Or Not”, at Mute Magazine, 25 Jul 011; JBR; Jason Bredle, “Information Kiosk”, at Anti- #2; A Maxwell, at Peeping Mot; Lyanda Lynn Haupt, as quoted in an interview with The Dirt, “Interview with Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Author of ‘Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness’”, at The Dirt, 24 Jul 011; JBR, but see Alexander Trevi, “Critter News Network”, at Pruned, 25 Jul 011 (whence comes the link to the Haupt/Dirt interview, too); “Fukushima city sows sunflower seeds to decontaminate ‘hot spot’”, at Mainichi News, 20 Jul 011, via Xeni Jardin, “Japan: Fukushima sows sunflowers to soak up radiation”, at Boing Boing, 20 Jul 011; JBR; Bill Knott, “draft/undraft (unfinished”, at Bill Knott Poetry Blog, 25 Jul 011; Tom Clark, comment appended to his “Scavenged Materials: The Novelist”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 23 Jul 011; JBR, but see Lindsay Herko, “Influence Week Continues: ‘My prom dress died its death at Bill Knott’s Academic office address’”, at Montevidayo, 25 Jul 011]
Then they tried to make me go to rehab, I said, “no, no, no”, I cut a name into my stomach with a shard of glass. The sunlight in a yellow plaque upon the varnished floor is full of song inflated to fifty pounds pressure. Monad, in this era Anno Denomini, cha-ching will pair convincingly with anything, so long as the prospectus is made of gauze like an oyster; I mean, Rain, Steam and Speed is about a tomato called Ronnie who juggles on Titan. Right now it’s harder for many people to buy fruit than Froot Loops; chips and Coke are a common breakfast. The panting hung in the Tate Britain. I made a bandage from my pocket lint, I make one, I make one. The rose window above the entrance, too, is plain: a polar sun. Praha-hula-luna abh habna bhuna nabh alha muhahl una labh lihuni nihalbh bini bif hanalbh uhahalbhna bihabh funi dufalfna black tulip. Just to see the roof of its mouth. Logic, as ever, prevails. It’s an expired link and you just clicked it. Oxications and hallucinations and Peradics. This causes the magnetic field to wobble, which has a profound effect on trapped electronically charged particles, and means that tho I’ve come without a god or tow truck, my shamba needs to go fallow. A feeling now: wet wool. All non-African people are part Neandertal. All the cut-out paper dolls lean forward in their vitrines of glass and plastic. Them were the days — I remember walking down the street with Jeff Nuttall pulling a quacking duck children’s telephone toy behind him as we tried to get drinks for all, the duck included, in the local pub to celebrate. My God, the crowds on Black Friday for those Best Buy promotional joysticks, complete with a redemption coupon for a 5-years out-of-stock pump-action RPG-wielding Mogadishu guerrilla figure! The chainsaw bears are unhappy — Where will you be when you have to change your pad? That’s from the psalms, I think. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, surveillance. I am I because I am I because %$@#, which is what Case from Neuromancer says, according to Nick Land.
[Note: Sources: 580. JBR; Amy Winehouse, Rehab”, (i.m.); JBR (something Winehouse did during an interview); William Carlos Williams, “VIII”, in Spring and All; Amit Majmudar, “Money Shots”, at Anti-, Feature #67; Donald Zirilli, “Made of Gauze”, at Anti- #3; JBR; Timothy Morton, “Art-Critical Contradictions”, at Ecology without Nature, 24 Jul 011; Mark Bittman, as quoted in Timothy Morton, “Bittman Talks Sense on Food”, at Ecology without Nature, 24 Jul 011; Kate Zambreno, “ERRATA”, at Frances Farmer Is My Sister, 24 Jul 011 (a typo found by Rebecca Loudon in a draft of Zambreno’s Green Girl; it’s NOT a typo here); JBR; Jake Adam York, “Secession”, at Anti-, Featured Poet #5; JBR; Walter Benjamin, “Diary of My Journey to the Loire” (tr. Rodney Livingstone), as quoted in Tom Clark, “Tears in the Empty Cathedral: The Travel Diarist (Walter Benjamin: emotional Architecture of the Loire)”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 24 Jul 011; phaneronoemikon: “Roman Polanski’s Morning”, at Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 24 Jul 011; Del Ray Cross, “mcdxl”, at Anachronizms, 24 Jul 011. 581. Archibald MacLeish (?), as quoted in letter from Louis to Allen Ginsberg, 23 Aug 1963, in Family Business (ed. Michael Schumacher); ??, as quoted in Timothy Morton, “The Sound of Jupiter”, at Ecology without Nature, 24 Jul 011; JBR; Fritz Ward, “Self-Portrait in Conway, Arkansas”, in Anti- #5; Aaron Bady, “Gone Fishing”, at zunguzungu, Ralph, “All Non-African People Are Part Neanderthal”, at Disinformation, 24 Jul 011; G C Waldrep, “The Child Hood”, at Anti-, Featured Poet #58; Pierre Joris, “Finally! A ‘No Confidence Vote in Poetry Society’!”, at Nomadics, 24 Jul 011; Sampson Starkweather, “war”, at Anti-, Featured Poet #44; Erin Elizabeth Smith, “The Chainsaw Bears”, at Anti- #3; Stayfree ad seen on USA 24 Jul 011 approx 7:30 PM PST; JBR; photo embedded in “liberté, égalité, fraternité, surveillance”, at Grinding, 17 Jul 011; JBR; Nick Land, “The Ultimate Deal”, at Urban Future, 18 Jul 011; JBR]
And remember: the despot is nothing more than a “dead rat’s ass suspended from the ceiling of the sky.” And remember your Allies when the moment is right: The Yellow Serpent and The Spitting Cobra and The Blue Mongoose and Old Sarge and Shifty Sawyer the End Run Kid. And even Audrey. Because why? Because when you learn to live, finally, you will find yourself one of the junk-suturing salvagepunks whose philosophy you have been central to constructing, trying to make it thru another day in the waste zones of your teeming plague city. Amid the tsunami’s “seaspawn and seawrack”, monsieur et madame Precario, dodging the banks and cannibals and general nastiness, the apocalyptic of our daily. [Toyota Motor Corporation partner robots play instruments at the company's showroom in Tokyo on 4 May 2008: photo by Reuters/Toru Hanai] [Smoke from the Las Conchas fire turns the setting sun red over the Jemez Mountains behind the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, on 28 June 2011: photo by Jim Thompson/Albuquerque Journal via Associated Press] [People gathered in the street in Storgata, Oslo, after the explosion, Oslo, 23 July 2011: photo by Johannes Grødem] “The Tanguy piece” is really progressing. Tom is a genius, to translate Hölderlin’s “Der Neckar” as “By the Waters of Synthetica”. OK OK OK (Joe Pesci in his Lethal Weapon Leo voice), I don’t know who “you” are, but you are double-spaced and blend nicely with your environment. Environment. You also confuse the hell out of me. When does it become the importance? The first guy arrested in connection with this is a tall, blonde, white Norwegian dressed in a policeman’s outfit. For the past few years, networks have been digitally inserting ads and product placements for new products into old reruns. Shannon just noticed one in a rerun of a 2007 episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” In the background on the shelf is a magazine with an ad on the back for Kevin James’ “Zookeeper”. OK OK OK. I just heard “la voix d'apollinaire” reciting Under the Miracle Bridge Flows the Sand. The ocean is dreaming, writes Shelley. What is it dreaming of? A submerged city. The water laps around the sunken palaces and towers of Baiae. It tries to comprehend these alien, withdrawn objects in its ocean-centric, oceanomorphic way. Speedy is fast. The sky is green, and their ears pop, and they diagnose bets up and bets off the stone pole, the slit translator. I want points, I was just bumps, leaps, by way of heat … Time for a little magic. You can obtain your health. The feeble one has moved into the firing range. In hospital gown – “an eyeful” – / in diaphanous peignoir – / / The aforementioned tea set also has plastic plates, plastic chips, plastic peas, plastic STEAKS – stringing them on – shoelaces – to wear around – their necks – happy gloom rubbing (this is ALL a bunch of happy gloom rubbing AKA The Gloomy HappyRub –Notorious T.H.E.). --you-will-go-to-Indonesia---to-Bali---to-Borneo-------------------- SOMEONE: How can you fault anyone for turning into a lunatic [when we are all born that way]? My doctor applies ointments, Edmund Jabès writes that a writer is accountable also for what they choose not to write, Hiroshi Sugimoto, “just air and water”, his radiant light in time, the girl laughing ejaculates into my hand, upright in my wounds where my blood beats against the shaft of shipwreck of the cadavers of croaked dogs out of which hummingbirds are rocketing.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (trs. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R Lane); JBR, but see William Burroughs, Port of Saints; Rhonda Neugebauer; JBR, but see Amazon blurb for Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; captions to photos embedded in Tom Clark, “Scavenged Material: The Novelist”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 23 Jul 011 (Los Alamos of all places! (see Port of Saints)); JBR, but see phaneronoemikon, “The Tanguy piece now …”, at http://jellybeanweirdo.blogspot.com/2011/07/tanguy-piece-now.html Jellybean Weirdo With Electric Snake Fang, 23 Jul 011 (it really is worth seeing); JBR, but see Tom Clark “Hölderlin: Der Neckar (By the Waters of Synthetica)”, at Tom Clark Beyond the Pale, 23 Jul 011; JBR; I know nothing”, at anachronizms, 22 Jul 011; Richard Seymour, “Norway”, at Lenins Tomb, 22 Jul 011 (“More than 80 people attending a Labour Youth gathering were shot dead near the Norwegian capital Oslo when a man dressed in a police uniform opened fire. A car bomb killed seven people earlier the same day outside Norway’s main government building in central Oslo. Members of the ruling Labour Party were the targets in both cases. The killings have sent shockwaves around the world. The media and “security experts” rushed to blame Islamic terrorists. But Norwegian police have arrested a Norwegian man, Anders Behring Breivik.” – Simon Basketter, “Norwegian terror suspect looked to the English Defence League as ‘an example’”, at Socialist Worker, 23 Jul 011, as quoted in a later post of Seymour’s. The EDL, for those who don’t know, is a bunch of fascist islamophobes out to preserve the purity of the homeland); Jacob Sloan, “Television Networks Rewrite History Through Product Placement”, at Disinformation, 22 Jul 011; JBR, but see the video embedded in William Keckler, “la voix d'apollinaire”, at Joe Brainard’s Pajamas (The Sequel), 21 Jul 011 (in which Apollinaire actually can be heard reciting “La Pont Mirabeau”) (tip o’ the cap to Omo Bob, for reasons he will understand); Timothy Morton, “Holy Mystic Writing Pads, Batman! The Dreams of Objects”, at Ecology without Nature, 21 Jul 011; Peter Seaton, Crisis Intervention, Ingeborg Bachman, “Every Day” (tr. Monika Zobel), as seen at wood s lot, 22 Jul 011; Michael Magee, “123”, in “My Angie Dickinson”; Bruce Andrews, “Venus 5”, In Lip Service; JBR; Johan Jönson, Collobert Orbital (tr. Johannes Göransson); Susan Landers/Dante Alighieri, Astray (Canto 1)”, in Covers; JBR; Caroline Bergvall, “Gong”, in Fig; Aimé Césaire, “Noon Knives”, in Solar Throat Slashed (trs. and eds. A James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman)]
