[Nettime-bold] FW: I am a person who loves my city

[Leili <nethics@cyberosis.tv>]

I am a person who loves my city
by Morgan J. Meis 

I am a person who loves my city (for all its massive failures) and is very
critical of the country in which it is located, especially as it concerns
the role that country plays in the global economic and political
environment. Strangely, the country was attacked through the city. Of
course, this is not so terribly strange. Those towers were perhaps the most
potent symbols of that tangled web that makes up American power. They were
physically imposing, almost taking on a military bearing at times. They
were, in a sense, the nearest modern equivalent to the medieval towers of
old: fortified, arrogant, hostile. They were more than a symbol because a
symbol merely stands in for the real thing, merely serves as a place-holder.
They were the thing itself, within their walls the economic motors of
American power ground out its daily product. And, like everything powerful,
their final moments were pitiful and sad. They simply crumbled, passing away
like all things. 
As a political act it was horrifying, unacceptable, but none-the-less a
political act. The American unwillingness to accept that basic fact is the
flip side of the hubris that allows us to couch our exploitation of the
populations and resources of the globe as a project of freedom and
emancipation. We simply do not want to believe that we have bred this kind
of hate; but we simply have. We are breeding armies of disenfranchisement
that have less and less to lose. The anatomy of fanaticism is precisely
that, an anatomy. This is to say that it starts at the stomach; to which,
admittedly, it does not reduce. But, if our response to this event is to
further equate ourselves with freedom and civilization and to further shove
those suffering at our hands to the other side of the divide, then I would
recommend the general avoiding of tall buildings. Those we sweep aside we
also present with a tacit gift. This gift is called political will. In the
right circumstances it can overcome all the technology and sophistication in
the world. A box cutter and an idea can puncture an empire.
These things, the event as a political event, can be understood and
analyzed. In fact they must be if one is to avoid suffocating under their
weight. 
But what of old New York? What of my precious little contradiction that is a
world onto itself. What of the jewel that is solace to those of those who
need protection from within the belly of the beast. Are you too wounded my
darling? Have you been too wounded? Perhaps you never really wanted that
dual behemoth dangling off of you in the first place. Perhaps this is a kind
of shaking it free. But this tumor was ripped out with such brutality. I am
so worried for you. We remember how much we worry about the things we love.


Morgan J. Meis 
Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal
gfpj@newschool.edu
www.newschool.edu/gf/phil/journa1.htm
65   Fifth Avenue--Room 250
New York, NY 10003
USA
(212) 229-5735


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