LEFT CURVE NO. 29 EDITORIAL

I don't think that it's an exaggeration to say that we are living through a chaotic period, without having a clue about where things are headed. Up until relatively recently, human societies had been guided by some kind of purpose--whether religious, philosophical, cultural or political--that gave peoples a sense and direction to life beyond the brute facticity of biological sustenance. Giorgio Agamben writes: "Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity ...and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task?" And, "The traditional historical potentialities--poetry, religion, philosophy-- ...have long since been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences, and have lost all historical efficacy. Faced with this eclipse, the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burdenóand the 'total management' --of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate." (The Open, Man and Animal, Stanford University Press, 2004, p. 76)

It's a commonplace by now to view the event of 9/11 as a traumatic divide, a caesura of before and after. Why is this so? If we try to grasp the essential elements operative in 9/11, what we see is the implosion of the symbol of high modernism (World Trade Center) in a collision with a suicidal iconoclastic Islamic fundamentalism--the latter as a reactive salvo launched against an oppressive, decadent western modernity in the name of the last, unassimilated, pre-modern universal system. This is so regardless of "what really happened," because the myth of 9/11 has become an historical force as a symbolic event (Baudrillard). This sheds light on the paranoid, vengeful, violent reaction of the U. S. ruling elite and its resort to "...gross falsifications." Finally, a purpose was found: a cynical resuscitation of the defunct principles of the American version of the bourgeois revolution, as expressed by Bush's "declaration of war" speech shortly after 9/11 and restated with pompous global grandiosity in his inaugural address on January 20, 2005. Masked behind the rhetoric of "freedom and democracy" lurks raw ruling-class power-- "born again" as a retrograde, aggressive nationalism--in fear of decline. This sharp reversal of our era's task elides the most urgent problems facing humanity: the crises of life itself brought on by the dead-end reached by the "project of modernity" --the subjugation and exploitation of the human and natural world for the purpose of self-gratification, the cumulative results of which having reached a critical point. It is for that reason that the neocon-led Bush administration's offensive must be opposed (and will inevitably fail or else sow incalculable destruction) --apart from the understandable revulsion at all the manipulation, lies, torture, death and destruction that their policies have sown.

Informed implicitly by the above concerns, this issue weaves a broad, multi-hued swathe around and through our contemporary landscape. Addressed are consequences of the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq, the result of which has been over 100,000 deaths and incalculable destruction rained on that ancient land, the "cradle of civilization." The real purpose of this criminal aggression was to secure U.S. hegemony over the oil-rich Mid-East (while also ensuring the "security" of Israel) and thereby forestalling U.S. decline by outflanking the potential rise of other regional power blocs (e.g. the EU, Russia, China). Such aggression is nothing new to American history. Michael Fitzgerald, in "Manifest Destiny: American Imperial Myth, Then & Now," presents a survey of a re-occurring ideological justification for conquest and plunder that dates back to the first 17th century Anglo North American settlements. Back then, the rationale for wars had been to fulfil a "divine mission to bring civilization to the barbarians." Today, as in the case of Iraq (and as declared by Bush in his inaugural address, "throughout the world") it's "liberation from tyranny, spreading democracy and freedom."

Carol Keiter, in "Cultural Abscess," focuses on the human costs of the corporate system, a diseased abscess that oozes fear, hatred and resentment. E. San Juan's, "Consensus or Hegemony: On the Crisis of U.S. Intellectuals After September 11 & the Wake of the Empire's Decline," is a well-argued historical survey of the contradictory role of U.S. intellectuals, who, after 9/11, the author insists, have two choices: " ...try to preserve or conserve the Puritan legacy or Enlightenment heritage... (or) try to transform the basic structures inherited from the past toward an equal, just and substantively democratic polity." David Stratman's "The Triumph of Liberalism" spells out the bankruptcy of the two party system and how most of the Left forfeited its conscience by succumbing during the 2004 electoral campaign to the tired old "lesser of two evils" tactic -- and guess what? Bush won anyway, leaving progressives in disarray. Susan Galleymore's article, "Touch the Mothers, Touch a Rock," addresses the growing importance of the opposition of military families to the illegal war. Her examples of the hate mail she has received for her courageous stand is a sad comment on the blind hatred so prevalent in this country toward anyone who dares to question the governmentís war policy.

The poems on the Iraq war published here (pp. 30-35) -- from a simple, moving testament by the Iraqi exile, Nesreen Melek, on the atrocity of Fallujah; the ironic "explanation" of the war to a child by Antler; Ambar Past's epoch-sweeping meditation on the rape of the cradle of civilization; Iftkebar Sayeed's reportage poetry; to Susan Birkeland's pained cry about a woman's participation in the porn-torture of Abu Graib -- are all commendable voices raised against the immorality of this criminal war. The issue of war pornography is directly addressed by Matteo Pasquinelli's manifesto-like "Warporn, Warpunk! Autonomous Videopoiesis in Wartime," in which the author calls for a subversive reversal of voyeuristic war pornography. "If American imagery is allowing a drift towards Nazism and is offering an apology and justification for any kind of violence, our response can only be an apology of resistance and action, that is warpunk."

Laurie Calhoun's review of Errol Morris' film, Fog of War: Eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) offers a multi-faceted analysis of Morrisí portrait of the chief architect of the Vietnam war. Avoiding simplistic moralizing, she underscores that the problem lies not so much in the minds of evil men but in " ...a system with unlimited potential for destruction placed in the hands of fallible human beings."

Noam Chomsky's contribution to a forceful critique of the unsavory record of U.S. foreign policy is well known. Less well known are his contradictory views on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Jeffrey Blankfortís article, "Damage Control: Noam Chomsky & the Israel-Palestine Conflict," takes on this icon of contemporary progressives and demonstrates the shortcomings of Chomsky's analysis that "Israel serves a strategic asset for the U.S. and that the Israeli lobby, primarily AIPAC, is little more than a pressure group like any other trying to affect U.S. policy in the Middle East." Much fuss is currently being made in the mainstream media about Ariel Sharon's "farsighted" decision to dismantle the Jewish settlements in Gaza. But as Ronald Bleier's essay, "Sharon's Disengagement Charade: A Screen for Oppression" demonstrates, it is but another smokescreen in the continuing Israeli campaign to gain control over all of historic Palestine and in so doing implement an ethno-genocide against the Palestinian. As the poem, Lament, by Amaranth Pavis (p.49), in alluding to the Zionist mindset, says: "If only they would all go, if only they would disappearî/as if the smoking chimneys do not come to mind,/as if not speaking the word ìsolutionî stops the shadow..."

Contemporary ordered disorder can be seen in major global cities. John Armitage, in "Cosmopolis or Chaosmopolis?: Hypermodernismo in Bogota" contrasts the concept of "cosmopolis" as the global postmodern "...emergence of the network society and global informational capitalism (that) combine to form the 'culture of real virtuality,'" with "chaosmopolis," which the author sees as, "the 'fall' of modern architecture... and the production of 'wasted lives,' on remote-control technologies in 'panic city,' and on pervasive socio-political breakdown and turmoil' ...and uses the 'near-lawless and globalitarian characteristics of the hypermodern city of Bogota, Colombia," as a case study for his thesis.

I would also like to draw attention to the poems on pp. 89-94, particularly to those of the political prisoner Marilyn Buck; Jack Hirschman's meditation on the meaning of the Tsunami disaster as: It's not a natural disaster, after all:/ the human body's been in a sheath/ of Tumah, the energy of Death,/ for 60 atomic years wrapped in Tumah, / and finally Earth's revolted, strapped/ a quake to its depths, exploded...; and Amber Tamblyn's passionate cry, Paper Tiger. P. J. Laska's article on the poet, Don West, recalls the progressive legacy of the Old South that has been pretty much erased from historical memory. Laska notes that West was a poet, "...whose radical and activist persona was not a literary fiction but the embodiment of a life-long commitment to revolutionary social change." There is much buried past that is in need of recovery.

With this issue, our Associate Editor, John Hutnyk, inaugurates a special section, PUBLICity (pp.102-136), the intention of which is, "...to publicize aspects of global public life... that might otherwise be missed, buried ...or be passed over without murmur." Send contributions (@ 1,000 words) for future editions of PUBLICity directly to: John.Hutnyk@gold.ac.uk

We conclude this issue in a more meditative tone. Janet Yoder's "Where the Language Lives," profound in its simplicity, tells the tale of her work preserving Lushootseed, the language of Chief Seattle and the First People of western Washington State. It reminds us, in this increasingly mechanical, homogenized world, of the importance of re-kindling the ember-breaths of the most ancient, when the world was whole and noble, as we search for a vision that might eventually reconcile us with the whole of creation. A theme not uncommon these days is that "nature is over," replaced by the cyber-network mega-machine that will finally "liberate" humanity from its bondage to natural forces. Rebecca Dicksonís unassuming meditation, "Some of My Favorite Things," reminds us of all the varieties of life and forces that quietly, inevitably, persist in the midst and irrespective of human wantonness and arrogance; and that "...our fight against the Earth's forces is only a phase ...our several hundred years of enemy occupation on Planet Earth is but a beginning of a blink of the universal eye..." A not unrelated theme echoes across the centuries in the poetry of Friedrich Hoelderlin. Born of the first generation that received intimations of the profound crisis that the modernization process was unleashing, Hoelderlinis poetry radiates a purity and intensity -- as these examples of Nick Hoff's fine, new translations show -- that "...call to our fractured lives with intimations of our higher selves."

As always, we encourage critical responses and contributions.-- the editor