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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Stories and the War on Terror12/28/2005 01:54:25I just saw Syriana. It was interesting to me because after years of this War on the human emotion of Terror we have so few stories, no few narratives, to show for it. Really, the old Arab-terrorist thriller plot really died down after 9/11 for the sake of politeness and we are only now recovering our senses. Remember the night of "Shock and Awe," that horrible, powerless night as our missiles fell on Baghdad? All we saw were the odd green screens, just like in the first gulf war. Unrecognizable flashes of light in front of unrecognizable buildings. The cityscape made to look so foreign it could hardly be on earth. And those are pretty much what our imaginations have to run on. A far cry from the propoganda machinery of the World War II entertainment industry. This season, though, we've got Jarhead and Syriana - both complicated enough to be interpreted positively by either side. But the overwhelming feeling that comes from both to me is powerlessness. In the complex weaving plotlines of Syriana, only one thing is common for each of our protagonists - a spy, a lawyer, a businessman, a suicide bomber - powerlessness and naivite. Each utterly fails to become a self-conscious actor in the world-historical events that he participates in. Along the way they try and think that they have found it but at the end they all end up either dead or at home left to pick up the pieces on the smallest possible scale with their families. And one of the last scenes shows a room full of oil barons giving awards to each other, all far too shortsighted in their greed and luxuries to realize that it is they who are actually in control of all this. The War on Terror movie paradigm mirrors the situation itself perfectly - it is too complex, too baffling, to say anything at all or to mean anything at all. I think a bleeding heart dove and Donald Rumsfelt can walk out of this movie pretty much with the impression that it confirms their beliefs. I, for instance, have interpreted it above pretty much along the lines of my recent thinking on theologies of scale, which always suggest that we are far less in control than we think we are and we must both content ourselves to be victims of history and to rest our ambitions only on true scale of our impact, which ultimately dwindles to the spiritual. So we all have our polemic, and as always the complexity of the thing allows us to read it like that. In that sense, the movie is profoundly honest to the truth of the situation. For in truth, nobody knows the least thing about what they are doing and what the mass of us are bringing about. Those who feel that incredible delusion of power will be the most amazed of all when the Lord comes at the end of time or at least when a few years pass over their deeds. Good, humble repentence is really the only answer. Everyone in Washington should become a sadhu after retirement, I think. But their pensions are too good. It reminds me of Charles Larmore's critique of Strauss (the godfather of the neocons) in The Morals of Modernity - he spends so much time reading Plato and arguing with complex and intricate exegesis that moral truth exists that he never gets the chance to uncover what it actually looks like. Which, as Larmore intuits, suggests that maybe the whole project is a house of cards to begin with. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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