Shoot to Still

Now this is funny, but when Thoreau says that indiscriminate slaughter is what al Qaeda does, I am a little too closely reminded of the terrorism is civilians line trotted out when reluctant radicals seek to avail themselves of the chauvinism that insists our killing of so-called non-combatants is unintentional and therefore less morally egregious than their killing of so-called non-combatants, because dead babes in the marketplace are precisely their point, not merely a regrettable side effect. Now I just want to point out how morally dubious is this claim, not only because it takes the claims of an immense aggressive military empire at face value, but also because it is a claim made by those who both admit and understand that civilian death on a large scale is a completely and wholly foreseeable outcome of your bombing campaign in Tripoli or wherever. Oh, uh, well, we know with certainty that we will kill civilians but we do not intend to kill civilians. Yuh. Um. I will take moral casuistry for two hundred, Alex. You are basically making distinctions based on your own susceptibility to a PR campaign; you are choosing Crest and insisting that Colgate is not even toothpaste.

In any case, what you must do is escape the teleology of "combatants" and "non-combatants" and "civilians" and all that altogether. As a matter of general principle, it is necessary to adopt a fundamentally pacifistic position; to view violence as violence, killing as killing, and to simply reject it, uniformly, as the wages of evil. Now perhaps you will be called upon one day to violate those principles; Space Nazis have invaded your town; a bear in a lobster suit is raping your wife in a hot air balloon and you have just one shot with the breech-loaded muzzle that happens to be lying powdered and ready at your feet. As my friend Adam says, Hypothetical Is The New Real! It is an infinitely entertaining game, the invention of new and Byzantine circumstances in which the only solution is violence and death, but it serves no end but to justify via unreality those things which reality obliges you to condemn.

A Virtual Fence

Oh, lord. Personally, I think the little fuckers should have to show their papers before we let them, ahem, cross the border.

Droves of the Academe

There are few entertainments as . . . entertaining as the Herren perfessers weeping over the decline of their discipline, but this piece from Bill Deresiewicz in, of course, La Nation, has a couple of stupendous paragraphs, like this one:

Still, there’s a difference between a Roger Smith firing workers at General Motors and the faculty of an academic department treating its students like surplus goods. For the CEO of a large corporation, workers are essentially entries on a balance sheet, separated from the boardroom by a great gulf of culture and physical distance. If they are treated without mercy, that is not entirely surprising. But the relationship between professors and graduate students could hardly be more intimate. Professors used to be graduate students. They belong to the same culture and the same community. Your dissertation director is your mentor, your role model, the person who spends all those years overseeing your research and often the one you came to graduate school to study under in the first place. You, in turn, are her intellectual progeny; if you make good, her professional pride. The economic violence of the academic system is inflicted at very close quarters.

You have to marvel, really, at its grossness. It's one thing for some CEO to fire a bunch of uneducated workers, quite another to perpetrate such horrors upon members of the same class! My god, it's a mere pond of cultural difference, naught but a leaky faucet of cultural difference that divides them--no gulf here!

A few paragraphs later, Bill makes a point I do consider essential:

If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore.

Bill means it as a Hosanna, but I read Hallelujah in every word.

Too Much of a Good Thing

We sure protected the shit out of those civilians.

Devils in the Details

Are there four more boring words in the English language than Tony Kushner's new play? If there are, I am sure he has written them as dialogue. I happened to catch him kvelling with Kurt Andersen over the weekend--I was in the garden, and I nearly stomped a tomato: Andersen makes some banal comparison between a bit of scripted crosstalk and a Twitter feed, and Kushner pushes his glasses up his nose and says, Well, I have never seen a Twitter feed, and then they both laugh, even though this suggests a playwright whose, ahem, political consciousness is frozen right around the opening scene of Bye Bye Birdie. The new play is called The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, a title that makes a whalesong of anachronism. Is that 1989 calling on the landline? The whole thing suggests a 4-hour-long craiglist m4m post in which some dusty thirty-nine-year-old laments his invisibility to the shining abdominals at the gay bar, a complaint made all the more pathetic by his having totally missed the fact that these little Adonises are losers too, and all the cool gay kids, like their straight counterparts, are wearing bad moustaches and showing off their first season of chest hair. Well, the Intelligent Homosexual is some sort of cryptoarthurmiller thingamado in which an extended family--yes, a kitchen-sink extended family drama, yoy and double-yoy--gather together to confront Life In the Gloaming of Old Certainties. Talk about a one-trick pony. The idea of a fading world of theoretical certainty being supplanted by a schizo, dissipated modernity is like the power chord of serious drama. It fails both as history and prognostication; its modern times are a flawed prediction extrapolated from a past that never existed.