roachboy

i had thought about posting something further, jorgelito, but accidentally put that one up and then wandered away to do something else--when i got back, i read some of the stuff that followed and got disgusted with the thread. most of the gun toting fantasies i read seemed to me funny until i began to think that folk seriously imagined they'd act that way in 3-d, at which point they just seemed psychotic. that lead to one of those "who the fuck are these people?" moments...

now the ringing in my ears from a show is loud enough that i dont think i can sleep quite, so i checked in. glad to see your posts and barakas...

one other preliminary--the post i put up was cut up, so the direction i was heading in got blurred.
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i wasn't so much thinking about guns and gun fantasies per se---i was thinking about no. 50 because i dont remember reading anything from dk that tipped the written persona to the side a little and gave a glimpse of dispositions/background, which i thought opened up another way of thinking about, well, politics first and then responses to stuff like the mall shooting second (there's little difference, really, apart from scale).

alot of politics is about projection--people gather/cut up/organize information around frameworks that "fit"--and this fit seems often to have more to do with temperment, dispositions and experience than argument---it seems that what makes argument compelling past a certain point is this sense of fit--which means that political premises are evaluated aesthetically, not logically. or rather, that these aesthetic evaluations and logical evaluations get tangled up--the degree of entanglement is a function of self-awareness.

i'm interested in what motivates people to order their understanding of "the world"--which is everything outside their immediate experience--as they do.


why is it that someone would imagine a compensatory scenario about something like the mall shooting and would project themselves into the position of a guy with a gun who was in a position to start shooting?

why would i immediately project myself into a role as someone who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?

at one level, the former is obvious: to take 50 as a point of departure because i found it interesting.... the fantasy is about control, its compensatory character derives from a fear of chaos, it seems background functions to generate a war-scenario as the paradigm for a chaotic situation, and from it kinda follows that if everyone had a gun, and everyone reacted the same way to chaos, then the result would be an inverted war. war without the war part--a kind of stand-off.

chaos doesn't particularly bother me---i generally understand it as ordered in ways that are outside my usual perspective, so not as chaos. so i'm in general more curious about fluid situations, and partial structures etc, than i am put off by them.

but violence bothers me, because i dont understand it as an abstraction, but i also dont have a frame of reference for war, not experientially--so i think of violence as immediate...personal. i link violence to the most primitive and unthinking types of dominance--this follows from my experience--i find it repellent, stupid, a last resort available of all thinking fails.

so it follows i would see the idea of someone with a gun as someone who is using a crude instrument to avoid looking at a situation that lay outside expectations----and my frame of reference prompts me to see violence as particular--so maybe that explains why, when i imagined the mall thing, i without even thinking about it projected myself as distanced from it.

but because i see violence as primitive and a gun as a crude instrument, the combination seems to me an expression of a simplistic, unthinking attempt to impose a primitive order on a chaotic situation. so i see it as doomed, as failing, as impotent and ultimately as weak. but as i am writing this, i realize that i already slid from the mall scenario into more political situations--distancing myself from violence again.

so i imagine people with guns shooting and missing--i dont believe that anyone faced with an unexpected violent situation on the order of the mall shooting would remain calm. they aren't calm in a war situation---people miss alot, and folk who are killed as a consequence are folk who are in a war zone--however in a war, violence is itself not arbitrary----while a kid who opens up with a gun in a mall does so arbitrarily.
the distinction lay in how the situation is defined up front.
you might not expect exactly what happens to you in a war, but you know in a general sense that its possible because the situational definition tells you that.
shopping in a mall does not tell you that violence is something you should be thinking about.
it just doesn't.

so it seems to me that the percentage of people who would remain entirely cool and collected in a mall shooting situation is pretty fucking minimal---because i think that folk who are strapped are tempermentally the least likely to be able to handle arbitrariness--if they were cool with unexpected situations in general, they wouldnt be strapped in the first place. so i imagine innocent people getting shot up.

on the other hand, it seems that others have a different relationship to violence. i can see how it functions in what they write, but i dont understand it. i dont understand how anyone embraces violence. in this bizarre-o thread, you see alot of posturing on this. you even get treated to some folk ridiculing the imaginary scenarios of others, as if their ability to imagine themselves acting in a sociopathic manner in a violent situation means that they are more manly. i found, and find, that to be surreal.

the trick is that neither type of projection is more rational than the other.
both are shaped by disposition, preference, background.
how powerful these factors are in shaping your views still manages to surprise me.
that's more what i was thinking about.

i suppose its unnecessary to say that i find anything good or desirable in the idea of lots of people wandering around with guns.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite