roachboy

by this point, the question really should be changed away from does the right have anything like a sane view of "terrorism" (--which has been answered conclusively--no they do not--and with abundant evidence, even in this thread--read their posts----)
to:

what are the pleasures and benefits of uncontrolled paranoia for conservatives?

we know the political benefits of generating and maintaining an environment that encourages bouts of uncontrolled collective paranoia for the bush administration.

but the reasons that conservatives seem to so eager to join the paranoia show individually remains a mystery.

what pleasure is there to be had in fantasizing nuclear warfare scenarios involving major american cities?


based on no effort to gather and process data on who the various groups that might undertake attacks on the us are, what drives them, etc--on no historical understanding, on no socilogical understanding, our heroic conservatives nonetheless imagine that they are operating on the basis of a coherent category "terrorist" or "jihadist"--this category has the peculiar characteristic of being endlessly persecuting, something like the types of split superego you see talked about in psychoanalytic writings on schizophrenia. it is like an angry wasp that follows you around and that you fight, wooden sword in hand, by waving the sword around and bellowing slogans about smashing "terror"...

if you are concerned about the emergence of arbitrariness in an otherwise perfectly manicured bourgeois life, why are you not equally freaked out by moving objects in general, automobiles in particular, which are statistically a much more clear and present danger to you personally than the phantom "terrorism"...automobiles envy your organic status, your hair, your curvy lines....

well so it can't really be about fear of death, this undirected, unfocussed and permanent resoluteness....there has to be some positive charge to be had from simply moving into the space of unlimited paranoia....is it about attrtibuting to yourself a sense of importance by being able to imagine that your "way of life" and by extension yourself as an individual (individuals being interchangeable within the context of capitalist markets, all little rational actors doing rational things because cash is at stake o yes) are under threat directly by people far away?

i ask these questions because it is evident that the category "terror" is a priori worthless as a descriptive or analytic tool. no way to get from it to any idea of who might carry out and action or why--or even what might be done. "terror" is empty, does not refer to the world, but refers to the world as (thesedays) conservatives would prefer to see it--a place at once dangerous and hunky dory--the hunky doriness is always a function of market metaphors and its disruption always the result of some Evil Outside Force--so if we were going to try to understand the appeal of the category, and that appeal cannot be analaytic, and cannot be coherence, then it must be political--but we have covered that so many times---and within that, adopting this kind of total panic mode and then routing it through some johnwayne apocalyptic war fantasy must be good clean american fun.

so how and in what way is adopting this fantasy structure "terrorist" fun and exciting?
what is the affective payoff?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite