roachboy

here you have it.

there is an US and there is a THEM and ustwo imagines himself personally at war with THEM.

the THEM is distinguished from the US because they are BAD BAD PEOPLE who do not play the game of conflict by the rules that conservatives have stipulated as legitimate--which i assume would entail staying in your social place, not complaining about injustice too loudly, and either confining such activity as you might undertake to interest group politics--or not doing anything because, following the bizarre logic of the right, the social order is a moral order and if you are screwed in that moral order then, well, you deserve it.

a special exception is made, of course, for the "pulling themselves up by the bootstraps" argument because it provides a reassuring myth of social mobility and an affirmation of the reasonableness of any and all status quo ante at the same time. the heroic individual plays by "the rules" insofar as if there are victims of "entrepreneurial drive" they are silent and invisible. and that, it seems, is how it should be.

the possibility that the cards in the deck that are dealt acorss any given social order might not only fuck over large numbers of people, but also give them no recourse, no way to seek redress within the system, is inconceivable for conservatives like ustwo, for whom the existing order is an unqualifed good so long as he and people like him benefit from it (and run it politically). that is one way of seeing why ustwo might prefer the obviously reductive theological interpretation of the war on terror to actually thinking about it in political terms.

but i would hazard something: there are political and economic situations all around the world, often in contexts that directly involve american interests, that so thorughly pulverize anything like a decent life for large numbers of people and whic leave them no recourse, no way to address their situation from within the existing order. these are the people who would perhaps consider desperate, occaisonally terrible act. and if you do not think suicide bombing, for example, to be an act of desperation at some level, then i do not see where any debate would be possible.

but that requires looking at what these factors might be, where they obtain, and thinking about the question of whether there might be ways to ameliorate those situations.

so maybe it is easiest to accept this kind of white hat/black hat world-as-western-film vision of the "war on terror" if you do not now any muslim people--that way the black hats/bad guys can be reduced to brown peoiple far away whose primary function it is to die in great slient number before the Avenging Hand of the Righteous (white hats, good guys). mine is not that situation, so all i see in ustwo's position is a figleaf placed before racism. nothing more. nothing less.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite