Zizek re September 11

[David Morris]

Joe,

If you have people you love in Iraq or Afghanistan, you are in the
minority.  That's because the majority of service people are
"volunteers" due to their low income status.  Some others volunteered
just after 9-11 out of a patriotic urge, but most just needed an
education or an income and became soldiers in the bargain.  Until this
"war" is fought by all US citizens, until there is a draft, this will
always be a war that most can forget, except for a few inconveniences.

That's why this isn't a real state of war.

David Morris

On 9/20/06, Joe Allonby <joeallonby at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's strange. I feel like I'm in a state of war. I worry daily about my relatives in the service. I skip over the pages of the papers  listing the casualties and bombings of the previous day. I watch what I say in pubs until I know that I'm in sympathetic company - even Republicans seem to think that Bush has blown it and Cheney, Rumsfeld etal are assclowns. It's a little easier living in a the most notoriously liberal neighborhood of a notoriously liberal capital city of the arguably the most liberal state (I know Vermonters who insist on their leftist primacy). The war is everywhere I look. There are signs on every overpass welcoming someone home. The signs are often side-by-side with signs saying "Bush lied." The war is om my radio. It's on my TV. It intrudes on my beloved baseball games when yet another third rate singer is trotted out in the seventh inning to sing a bad rendition of a maudlin Irving Berlin song. If I hear "God Bless America" one more time I think I'm going to hurl. I live in a state of war. I wonder why gasoline costs so much when we just took over a major oil producer. The business that I work for is adversely effected by the price of diesel. My friends worry about home heating oil. I go out on the harbor in a friend's boat and see Coast Guard Zodiacs with machine guns mounted on the bow out on routine patrols. We can't go fishing when the LNG tankers are coming through. We have staged disasters involving hypotheticall bombs going off in the mall. How is this not a state of war?
>
> On 9/15/06, pynchonoid <pynchonoid at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > "[...] As President Bush said after September 11,
> > America is in a state of war. But the problem is that
> > the US is not in a state of war. For the large
> > majority, daily life goes on and war remains the
> > business of state agencies. The distinction between
> > the state of war and peace is blurred. We are entering
> > a time in which a state of peace itself can be at the
> > same time a state of emergency.[...]"
> >
> >
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1869353,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=27
> > On 9/11, New Yorkers faced the fire in the minds of
> > men
> >
> > Hollywood's attempts to mark the 2001 attacks ignore
> > their political context and the return to history they
> > symbolise
> >
> > Slavoj Zizek
> > Monday September 11, 2006
> > The Guardian
> >
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>


-- 
David Morris