STEEL TORSOS

 

A new dark age will begin with the fall of nihilism. The pornography of war is nourishing psychic food for torsos of steel. The young American culture of rockets and boredom. Soldiers file colorful reports in childlike writing that has itself become the historical spearhead of the will. The large boy posse hands down terms to the market. This would have to be seen as an attempt to achieve extremely simple goals: self-interest, political jingoism and technical neutrality. Crossing the border into the culture of cynicism that thrives by inflicting cruelties on the completely defenceless. Like a girl who likes a boy. Finally into the horrible massacres. A child who wanted only to play with extremes of ethnic hatred and religious animosity and the capitalist marbles of its older brother. It doesn't matter what their names are or what their home countries are. It takes an armature of technologies to correct societyís will to collapse into itself. Illegal invasion will invest the technology of war with the regime of well-selected choice. They will then continue with the harder cases which will follow. Invasion is also about the triumph of death-head handicraft, a more "incorporated" sense of the pleasure of cruelty. "I want to go in there and receive my private dirty nose."

 

Cities and fiery explosions and cluster-bombed children are what the United States calls a "new standard" in international relations. This new standard is invested with the war spirit only in scenes of devastating "preventive war" arranged by the charismatic presence of technologies of death. Publication suggests that when technology is weak, it does not give revenge true obviousness. The private Iraqi korrespondent, Al-Haedegger, although he was hit, penetrated Pakistan in order to terminate the exclusion of the disappeared. Technology standards are set up only by the United States because we are the sole intervening commentators, with an emphasis on the hyper-language of war games. Standards cut downward with laconic reportage by the ascendancy of the suburban-voiced will to nihilation. Young victims are bound, stuck & struck by their personal language outside of the whole. Because this kind strikes over their heads and at the end of their chins. Knowing full well the kind of substance that suffering is in an agit-prop market-image matrix. We finally know something of what it means to live inside a visual paean to power in the wrong country. We've been bombed so many times, it's not shock and awe anymore, it's after-shocks, it's boredom.

 

The correspondent was saying to me yesterday morning: This is ridiculous, we can't simply report United States' violence, its clinical obscenity of night-time scenes of energetic missile action. It is not opposite a pornographic pre-emption of the nature of warfare. There is a crucial nihilism that is bitterly expressed by the airplanes flying over the victimized bodies of the American public. We bomb, we suffer, and nothing in that war-surprised hospital concerns a culture of indifference. Saddam Hussein actually facialized the dominant movements of contemporary world-wide shopping. In war, pre-emption has a meaning, is directly responsible for the spirit of empire-consciousness. ABC emphasizes that it is "harvesting" and "objectifying" "the culture of boredom." The sustaining rhetoric of hyper-colonialism flashes back and forth across the Atlantic ocean in order to bombard a United States camouflaged in propaganda slogans. In the political language of imminent technoculture, war is a continuous answer to the improbable question of pre-emption. Get into a car, go to a grocery shop and buy water, biscuits, vegetables = nobody minds. And one evening you might actually sleep through all the red-hot explosions around you.

 

In order to pull itself down, a society assigns these details to poor soldiers driven forward by the spirit of death and convinced that the question of technology is coeval with questions which they cannot possibly respond to freely. Could it be that we are witnessing the unmasking of the ethically-indifferent manufacture of everyone? Americans dream up various moral ideas and then, ethically indifferent towards the suffering of others, believe that they're all true. This policy is characterized by the belief that the doctrine supports the facts. Extremism is comfortable stuff for the Pentagon Attack Center. If you actually look at what's happening on the ground, you'll see the world from the point of view of America's mechanism. It's an adventure, yet the phenomenal logistics of the operation actually makes a universe of it. It does mischief, but that's not the point: both sides greet prisoners with bullets and roses. We are not concerned with what you think you see happening. The strange thing is that eventually someone wakes up in the morning and says: Kneel on the ground and put your hands up. Forcing a man to use this excuse is like someone banging a drum deep beneath the ground. The long, low rumble does not have to justify its existence anymore. It exists. It is.

- Scott MacLeod


Scott Macleod is a writer and multidisciplinary artist based in the Bay Area since 1976. His most recent published work is The Trouble I Had, a visual/verbal book published by anabasis.xtant books.