[Nettime-bold] <Reflections on this week's terrorist attacks in USA>

["Nicholas C. D. Fry" <fried.nicky@virgin.net>]

Reflections on this week's terrorist attacks in USA.

The recent events in USA have proved both terrifying and fascinating to
anyone watching or listening from a 'safe' distance. Receiving such
extraordinary events over the television made them perversely familiar. As a
number of journalists have pointed out, the images resembled Hollywood's
favourite, 'explosive' film dramas, with aeroplanes crashing out of control
and enormous explosions sending cities into chaos; not unfamiliar fantasies.
I imagine many people repelled by that kind of Hollywood drama would have
felt some strange sense of satisfaction when witnessing what could be
described as the world's most severe example of loss of innocence. Many news
broadcasters drew attention to the fact that it was going to be another
'perfect day' in New York under clear blue sky; the sublime cleanliness of
wealth and order. The certitude and pertinence of the multiple, terrorist
operations resembled in some respects a most merciless chastising.

The tarnishing of America's domestic innocence and economic sanctity was
fast becoming an inevitable and, some may deem,  necessary event in the
unfolding history of global politics. The dramatic increase of activity by
the western anti-capitalist/ anarchist movement, and the pronounced
intensity of their actions has been a strong foreboding to anyone with any
interest in diversity of political opinion and the conventional hypocrisy of
enduring bureaucracies. It has become increasingly clear that changes across
the world have to be made and that the governing bodies responsible for
initiating these changes simply aren't effective. Since President G W Bush
came to power on the backbone of his 5 billion dollar election campaign
there's has been nothing but contempt for American foreign policy. He seems
destined through stupidity to lead the entire western world even deeper into
the hatred of middle eastern nations and currently, into an international
exchange of body counts. But, I guess as Blair says it's the duty of the
'free and democratic world to eradicate' this new breed of 'Evil'...
evidently we can conclude from this proclamation that,
a) Western democracy is a farce,
b) this so-called 'Evil' is indiscriminately infectious, and
c) that logic is no longer something contained by the rules of language.

All the Media lean in favour of preserving illusions of ideological
invisibility; the terrible attack was a terrible attack, no more, no less.
The media have predominantly failed to illuminate anything more than a
powerful blow, there was apparently nothing of any educational value to be
teased from the event. The sleeping lion took a blow to the head, and will,
after figuring out what the hell happened, shortly begin flailing his
drunken arms about in the vain hope of chancing upon his long-gone
tormentor.

The selected, media images emulated this paradigm in a number of peculiar
ways. I was amazed at how little of the actual human casualty was televised.
Images of the aeroplanes and buildings played (as we all know) over and over
again like matchbox toys in a child's game; (a remarkable irony where the
media suddenly found itself struggling to arrest it's incredible moving
images, as if the video of the disaster, if it were played enough times,
would establish itself as a static form. For as soon as the apex of an event
(a crash) were set in motion, it would be over. The moving image, by it's
temporal frivolity was inadequate, and the way in which the media looped the
footage endlessly showed their fruitless attempt to evoke the unmoving
historicism and unambiguousness of the Photograph.) The images were
reassuringly ordered. And, although the most incredible and disastrous loss
of life took place, there were very few images that explicitly revealed this
fact. When the TV news broadcasters were attaining to shed some light on the
history of Osama Bin Ladin and showed scenes of the destruction and carnage
that ensued when the American embassies in Africa were bombed, countless
images of mutilated, bleeding and dead Africans filled my screen. The
gratuitousness of images representing African, Asian and Middle Eastern
disasters strikes a stark contrast with the remarkable censorship pulled
over White disasters. The veneer of control and orderliness sustained and
maintained by Western Media held fast. We were yet again protected from the
fact of Death 'in our own back yard', for the gratuitousness by which it is
conventionally symbolized, was absent from this most coarse and tragic event
of destruction. 


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