The Camera/Gun & the Culture of Death

[Terrance]

"What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies
about American freedom, looking into these mug shots of the bought and
sold?" VL.195

Conflict, of which War is a specialized institutional drama, is a
recurrent fact in human societies; it is inevitable when society has
reached any degree of differentiation, because the absence of conflict
would presume a unanimity that exists only in placentals between embryos
and their female parents. The desire to achieve that kind of unity is
one of the most patently regressive characteristics of totalitarian
states and other similar attempts at tyranny in smaller groups. 

"Frenesi dreamed of a mysterious people's oneness, drawing together
toward the best chances of light, achieved once of twice that she'd seen
in the street, in short, timeless bursts, all paths, human and
projectile, true, the people in a single presence, the police likewise
simple as a moving blade-and in individuals who in meetings might only
bore or be pains in the ass here suddenly being seen to transcend,
almost beyond the will to move smoothly between baton and victim to take
the blow instead, to lie down on the tracks as the iron rolled in or
look into the gun muzzle and maintain the power of speech-there was no
telling, in those days, who might unexpectedly change this way, or when.
Some were in it, in fact, secretly for the possibilities of finding just
such moments. VL.118 

I almost all of its manifestations, war indicates a throwback to an
infantile psychal pattern on the part of the people who can no longer
stand the exacting strain of life in groups, with all the necessities
for compromise, give-and-take, live-and-let-live, understanding and
sympathy that such life demands, and with all the complexities of
adjustment involved. The seek by the gun to unravel the social knot.