jacked in
I’m jacked into BBC World on the dish. I can’t drag myself away. It’s kind of an extended play version of ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. I am watching American armoured personel carriers crawling up the banks of the Tigris, the ancient lifeline of Mesoptoania. The venerable date palms are covered in dust and oil and black clad Iraqis are stripping to their underwear and getting blown to pieces by unseen aircraft. Other people seem to be commuting to work in their cars, a few hundred metres from the battle fields. Who knows what is out of the camera frame? Yesterday at about 2 in the morning there was a BBC report from behind a camera lens smeared in the camera man’s blood from a location in which Americans bombed themselves in Northern Iraq.
We should all re-read Karl ( Marx.) My minimal knowledge of Marx is mostly due to the influence of my McLuhanesque suburban Toronto high school, where in addition to doing away with walls, we studied revolutionary history from the French Revolution to Ho Chi Min. It was of course the 70’s. Only lately have I begun to value of this educational opportunity, which I had long taken for granted. I remember some enlightened history teacher organizing a bus trip for us to Madame Tussaud’s Wax museum in Niagara Falls to study the Chamber of Horrors, as a kind of pedagogical trope for world history. I remember visibly the drawing and quartering, the scalping, the flaying and the beheading. We got it, I think.
In social studies, we travelled to TV stations to watched banal afternoon game shows being filmed. I remember one chat show called ‘Party Game’, where a bunch of polyester-clad third tier celebrities yucked it up in an inebriated game of charades. They were so drunk, they could barely stand up to say, “sounds like . . . . BUNT.” It was around 11:00 am in Hamilton Ontario, ‘STEELTOWN.” As a souveneir, I was given a 16 mm film clip of a ‘Cool Whip’ commercial, which became one of my prize possessions, taped to my basement bedroom window the afternoon light shining through the Ektachrome cells. It was a good introduction to Eisenstein’s theory of montage..
More soon. . . .
(More) I am simultaneously, sickened, mesmerized and angry as I continue to watch the war unfold. Susan Sonntag wrote a good essay about the power of images to overwhelm us and make us passive. The quintessential modern experience is to watch atrocities being committed in real time, in the other half of the world. (Baudrillard) (His ‘l’esprit du terrorisme’ is a must read)
