(2002-04-23) b

Curtis White on Dealing With Terrorism, quoting heavily from Paul Virilio's Pure War: These technological "prostheses" are, for Virilio, completely alienating. And yet they are at the heart of what our involvement in the Middle East is really about. The relation of past, present and future wars in the area are all too clearly related to our automobiles. But the car is only part of what our "sacred Life Style" involves. I've been wondering lately what would happen if you could call these issues to consciousness and resolve them through a democratic and political process... At that point it became luminously clear to me that this machine was training me (Program Or Be Programmed). And so I concluded by thinking, "What habits of mind are required in order to live in accord with my car, my television, and my computer? And are these new habits of mind good or bad things?... Fortunately, Virilio does offer an alternative and a way of confronting the present madness, but it is a strategy of resistance that is addressed not only to the Taliban but also to our own techno-military state. What he offers is this: a pacifism that works religiously in that it returns us to our "identity as mortal beings." One of the most revealing news clips I've heard since September 11 was an analysis of "ConsumEr confidence" that pointed out that one of the hindrances to a return to normal by American consumers was precisely that the destruction and death involved in the World Trade Center had turned people away from the superficial Happiness of consumption and had made them all too aware of their human vulnerability. The destruction of the World Trade Center turned people toward marriage, church and commitment to others. That turn, oddly enough, is what Virilio sees as the beginning of the internal dissolution of the empire of Pure War and the religious fanaticism it has empowered. The Soviet Union was not confronted and defeated; it was dissolved internally by its failure to provide for the human needs of its own citizens (and I'm not talking about the need for television sets and satellite hookups). Perhaps it is such a spiritual turn that can undo the grip of the military, the technocrats and the multinational vision of the New World Order.