Sunday, May 09, 2004

Posted here Sunday, May 09, 2004 at 10:44:43 AM     The article in the new yorker by Hersh may be the one that keeps the undoing from knitting itself back together. No, the reality is probably too strong, but this clarifies the direction of the coming breakdown, like the first crack in the dam.   http://newyorker.com/fact/content/?040517fa_fact2   ********

Posted here Sunday, May 09, 2004 at 10:06:54 AM     Pointed to by www.talkingpointsmemo.com http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4933882/ Leave process aside: the results are plain. On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq—troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani—Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world. Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility. ********

Posted here Sunday, May 09, 2004 at 7:58:19 AM     Some comments on http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,1205883,00.html Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which was shortlisted for the Orange prize this week, is a fascinating exploration of a world in which pornography has taken over from sexual intimacy. She writes of a dystopian future in which the needs of the body rule, and in which the mind and the soul are entirely discredited, a culture in which "Executions were its tragedies, pornography was its romance". This is a long article on the social place of emerging pornography. The trend in the media, seemingly inexorable, is to have live sex and live death on TV. We are getting close. Part of the fascination with Iraq is the nudge in that direction provided by the "photographs". What move me to write about this is what I see as confusion in the sentences quoted.. "Needs of the body rule." Death and pornography are not needs of the body in contrast to spirit. They are perversion s of needs of the body, and emerge when culture does not provide healthy approaches to sex and death. Both should be blended with positive ritual and romance and feeling. Well done they are also expressions of the body. The problem is the modern tendency to define the body as another thing. A thing among things. Georges Bataille wrote that religion begins when humans eat the flesh of an animal. The anxiety is that as we see the animal has been reduced to a thing, so can humans. To avoid the starkness of that, the death of the animal is ritualized in a sacrifice to the gods, where god or the gods take a small part and leave the rest for us humans to eat. Good love, good eating, good death, require a full range of feeling, the expressions of the heart, in some kind of community, with meaningful (meaning comes from what we do repeatedly - so chose carefully) ritual. In our modern America, marriage still works fairly well. But romance fails as a feeling, and death is filled with tubes and machines and money hemorrhage. We are on the wrong path. But some simple things: we as a species have not come to terms with photography and is impact on how we see ourselves. Current photography favors medium tones - but not white- skinned skinny types with even features. The tech has a selective bias to it. And pushes people to be seen as things (Hockney has faced this with courage in much of his writing). And before, representations of the body in drawings. Most great and (the rest )artists have played quite seriously with the open naked body in arousal. But their work remains fairly taboo. We can see this is hinting at how much moder culture is at odds with traditional, and that the move toward a successful modernity has not yet occurred. We also have to think through the possibility that modernity is not capable of being a successful humane culture because of its biased thing orientation (that is, seeing the world as made up of things rather than as experiences. Your choice of which is primary - things or experiences - is a crucial decision). ********