Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 08:59:18 -0400
From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <bradmcc-AT-cloud9.net>
Subject: Re: Bush caused  Manhattan destruction


Karl Carlile wrote:
> 
> Be free to join our communism mailing list at http://homepage.eircom.net/~kampf/
> ----------------
> The recent use of hijacked aircraft in an attack on US buildings involving the
> destruction of two of the tallest buildings in the world and damage to the
> Pentagon has had a serious political impact on the global situation.
> The fact that such a coordinated operation, despite the loss of thousands of
> lives, has had such a serious ongoing political impact is a reflection of the
> weakness of American imperialism.
[snip]

I was struck by the litany of "buzz-words" in this posting.  It read
to me like "The Party Line" -- the result of a propaganda generating 
algorithm/engine turning one more event into dissociated abstractions.

Surely there is a lot to understand about Tuesday's events from
a socially progressive perspective.  But I do not feel that rhetoric
which is more apt to conjure up images of Stalinism than to
motivate critical reflection is likely to be helpful -- especially
when directed largely toward [relatively] privileged persons such as
I would hypothesize are most subscribers to village.virginia.edu
email lists, except 
insofar as part of these persons' way of being privileged (having 
university tenure, etc.) is to engage in glibly ideological rhetoric
of whatever each day is the fashionable kind.

Feel free to remove me from this list if you adjudge such
observations inappropriate.  But, just as I think it is
good that The Roman Catholic Church no longer has the power
to torture and execute heretics, so too do I think it is
good that The Communist Party does not have such power either.

"American Imperialism" proved resilient enough to survive
The Great Depression of the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt
essentially said that the capitalists had to give a little
to stay in power.  I think there is still a little for
the capitalists to "give", in the present situation.
Whether the current political leadership of the United
States has the level of statesmanship to make such adaptations
again today is, of course, another question.  I personally
hope that America's current president, George W Bush,
is a highly sophisticated instrument of dis-information
warfare by the "power elite", which, for whatever reasons,
at this moment wishes to make the world think the USA
is being run by a "loose cannon on the deck".

Or maybe George W Bush is a secret agent of The Comintern?
His first act as president: enacting a huge
tax cut with the purpose of making it difficult if not
impossible for Congress to fund social reforms (New Deal
type programs...) is certainly consistent with the
hypothesis that he is trying to sabotage the country.

Global capitalism can do better. They can take knives away
from airplane passengers (they took away my Swiss Army knife
on a flight to Japan, 17 years ago...), and they can route
the Internet through dispersed geographic locations
instead of centralizing everything in lower Manhattan
because that's where the free play of market forces
would locate it (where I work -- a very hi-tech computer
company -- still does not have Internet access, 3 days
after the explosion of the WTC, and Friday they were trying to
cobble together a 33.6K dialup connection to
start getting email in and out of the organization --
like trying to pump the Mississippi river through a
garden hose in a pinch).

Finally, "the information age" of Intel, Microsoft, et al.
showed that its technologies do have some genuine
human potential, on Tuesday.  Hostages are generally deprived
of human community, but cell phones enabled some of the 
hostages on Tuesday's hijacked airplanes to speak to their 
loved one in their last minutes.  

    "....From our bitterest and profoundest darkness the cry of 
    succour comes to the helpless, there sounds the voice... 
    that binds our loneliness to all other lonelinesses... 
    raised high over the clamour of the non-existent; it is 
    the voice of man and of the tribes of men, the voice of comfort 
    and hope and immediate love: 'Do thyself no harm! For we 
    are all here!'" (Hermann Broch, _The Sleepwalkers_, p. 648)

"Yours in discourse...."
   
+\brad mccormick

-- 
  Let your light so shine before men, 
              that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)

  Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)

<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc-AT-cloud9.net
-----------------------------------------------------------------
  Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/


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