In the Ruins of the Future

[Dave Monroe]

>From Don DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future:
Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of
September," Harper's Magazine, Vo. 303, No. 1819
(December, 2001): 33-40 ...

   "In the past decade the surge of capital markets
has dominated discourse and shaped global
consciousness.  Multinational corporations have come
to seem more vital and influential governments....
   "All this changed on September 11.  Today, again,
the world narrative belongs to terrorists.  But the
primary target of the men who attacked the Pentagon
and the World Trade Center was not the global economy.
 It is America that drew their fury.  It is the high
gloss of our modernity.  It is the thrust of our
technology.  It is our perceived godliness.  It is the
blunt force of our foreign policy.  It is the power of
American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life,
and mind....
   "It is our lives and minds that are occupied
now...." (p. 33)

   "Technology is our fate, our truth....  The
materials and methods we devise make it possible for
us to claim our future....
   "But whatever great skeins of technology lie ahead,
ever more complex, connective, precise,
micro-fractional, the future has yielded, for now, to
medieval expedience, the the old slow furies of
cutthroat religion.
   "Kill the enemy and pluck out his heart." (p. 37)

   "The World Trade towers were not only an emblem of
advanced technology but a justification, in a sense,
for technology's irresistible will to realize in solid
form whatever become stheoretically allowable....
   "Now a small group of men have literally altered
our skyline.  We have fallen back in time and space. 
It ios their technology which marks our moments ...."
(p. 38)

   "We like to think America invented the future.... 
But there are disturbances now, in large and small
ways, a chain of reconsiderations...." (p. 39)

And a nifty (detail of a ) Mark Tansey painting on the
cover.  Unfortunately, new issue info isn't online ...

http://www.harpers.org/

... but Harper's, still in the business of being a
publication, isn't much in the habit of putting all
too much content online anyway, so ...


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