File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0110, message 324


Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2001 09:31:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: Wolf Factory <wolf_factory-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: peanut butter and strawberry jam


I am glad you wrote this message. We are living in
strange times and it is good to articulate the
confusion. 

For me, the bombing of Afghanistan accompanied by the
dropping of 'peanut butter and strawberry jam' as you
put it, brings together the two sides of the United
States. The side that gives millions, perhaps billions
in aid and the side that has been engaged in the
business of war for many decades; what I would call
the Norman Bates and his Mother (NBM) mode of
politics. 

I am being facetious but I just wanted to reiterate
the point that it is very hard to know what to make of
this ‘new war’.




--- Samuel Durrant
<durrant-AT-english.novell.leeds.ac.uk> wrote:
> Please excuse the following meanderings, half
> journal entry, half 
> response to the listserv, which I post only because
> they ultimately 
> bear, I suppose, on the ethics of contemporary
> citizenship, on how 
> to relate to 'unfolding events'.
> 
> How does one respond to the news that the US (or
> perhaps I should 
> say we) are dropping strawberry jam and peanut
> butter into 
> Afghanistan?  How then can one have confidence in
> the 'precision' 
> bombs or believe that there is anything resembling a
> coherent plan 
> of action? 
> 
> I used to think I was a pacificist.  My first
> published article--in a 
> school magazine--was against the hypocrisy of
> Remembrance 
> Sunday and the failure of the Christian Church to be
> true to Christ's 
> own pacifism (not that I was actually a Christian
> myself...). I 
> opposed the Falklands war, but when subsequent wars
> have come 
> up--in the Gulf, in Afghanistan, its difficult not
> to get sucked into the 
> idea that there can be, if not a just war, then at
> least a necessary 
> war: one cannot allow one country to overrun
> another, one cannot 
> allow terrorists a free hand etc.  And then one
> realises the huge gap 
> between these justifications for war and the real
> reasons why wars 
> are fought--oil, national interest etc--and the
> similarly huge gap 
> between the declared aims (liberate Kuwait, destroy
> the Osama bin 
> Laden network) and the actual consequences (1/2
> million dead Iraqi 
> children, mass starvation in Afghanistan . . .). 
> One begins to feel so 
> incredibly disenfranchised, so completely powerless
> even to 
> ascertain what is being done in one's name.
> 
> And then again, you get sucked into believing that
> there is a 
> continuity between your own reality and what happens
> on your tv.  
> Blair's speech at the Labour Party conference (of
> which, of course, I 
> only got snippets) seemed to suggest that Sept 11
> was indeed a 
> wake-up call, that the inequalities and injustices
> inherent in the 
> West's relation with not only the Arab but also the
> African world 
> need to be addressed urgently if there is to be any
> semblance of 
> peace and security. You got the sense that he
> actually believed 
> what he was saying, which for some will always mean
> simply that 
> he is a good actor, but for me answered some
> deep-seated need to 
> identify with someone who was not entirely powerless
> or ignorant 
> (unthinking),  a luxury thinking americans are
> denied, I imagine, 
> when they listen to Bush: to be American now must be
> as 
> alienating and distressing as it was to be British
> in the 80s (Marjorie 
> Perloff's letter would, of course, indicate
> otherwise)  
> 
> And then there is the remote possiblity that Sharon
> will be forced 
> into accepting a 'viable' Palestinian state, that a
> new world order 
> might truly emerge... 
> 
> And so I veer violently between cynicism and
> idealism, despair and 
> hope, detachment and connection, while events unfold
> and bombs 
> continue to drop in my name.
> 
> Sam.
> 
> Samuel Durrant
> Lecturer, School of English
> Leeds University, Leeds LS2 9JT.
> Tel 0113 233 4768
> Fax 0113 233 4774
> 
> 
>      --- from list
> postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---


===="All the wolves in the wolf factory paused at noon, 
for a moment of silence."
........from laughing Gravy by John Ashbery.
---------------------------------------------------------
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