Atonement
The story about the shooting of the two reuters reporters that wikileaks produced this week via the leak of the military footage of the shooting—that story—this one here.
That story. The way it was covered. The way it was presented. The way it went viral. What happened. What didn’t happen. America. War. It’s this rotating kalidiscope of looking glasses that have become so infinite that I think for me the story becomes oppressive in a new overloaded way.
The bullet points are that this is what war is, and no one should have been under the delusion that us declaring war against the nations of Iraq and Afghanistan would end up offering us any shortage of these shorts of moments—that’s one thing. Another is that for the most part what the soldiers did in this video—these things which outrage our senses—they are what soldiers do. Always. Forever. The concept of what a soldier is, the primordial archetype of a soldier—it’s some one who subjugates their own human experience to the orders of the authority of a particular state. It is about a kind of disciplined organized five fingers make a fist kind of thing. There’s a slight new wrinkle to what a modernized soldier is, that you can pick up in their language—language that you will hear on Xbox live or whatever when you play pretty much anything—but don’t let that end of it distract you from the fact that the actions and reactions that were taken here are ages old. They are old enough to be codified in all manner of training manuals everywhere. This is the robot language of “if this, then this”.
This video is also an example of how shared perceptions can be contorted by the contexts of emotion, words, and moment. The soldiers in this video as you can see convince themselves rather easily of various realities that don’t exactly conform to what we see in the videos later on—though even our perceptions are colored by the editorializing of wikilinks.
So there’s a whole bend to this story that’s about language, how it’s used, and who is using it for what purpose, and to what level of effectiveness toward what particular end.
There’s a tension between the desire of wikileaks or whatever to make a disaster horror movie out of this, and the robot orators of the military to make it into a procedural manual.
On the one hand you create the kind of folktale that much of our media is still predicated upon which as Raoul Degroot put so well:
“That’s how people like to read the world, though. Singular events. A ground of soothing tope and Boom! Out jumps disaster! Boom! Out jumps Miracles! I think it’s an unsettling idea that either the disaster or miracle is actually embedded into our daily lives. It’d be like building your house on the back of a serpent […] Those forms are built really deep into us. That’s the heuristics we evolved over 100 millenia as family/tribe creatures and people who pick a moving object out from a neutral background”
So on the one level we have this age old trope as the archetype of every story we tell back to ourselves. This is the way we the common American folk tell our stories to one another.
Meanwhile. The guys with the guns? They talk in robot languages. They build elaborate systems of behavior to operate within, that don’t really conform to the above except as an outcropping of it’s utilitarian use within the system itself.
So all that’s going on on this one level of this story, and then on another level you can start breaking down language itself and the ways in which these seemingly innocous concepts of right, wrong, justice, war, murder—how they act as checks on the ways in which we perceive the world, and allow for a certain level of predictable outcomes to occur within the language itself, which allows things to fit a certain mind flipping level of imprisonment. Sort of building our own prisons with our minds to protect us from the awful black unknown unexplainable. Which in and of itself hits at fundamental cave man reasons for being within a community.
On those levels I think things become impossible to discuss without some sort of vulcan mind meld.
The more visceral local level of things is this, and it’s about America. America is somewhat diffrent from most countries in that it’s not really built around a shared nationality, but a shared belief in certain principles. The main one being the idea that by buying into the American system of gears and whirligigs, we can transcend our origins and be better than we were before. But something happened when we dropped the bomb on hiroshima. A whole era began of horror. That horror horror horror that Kurtz mutters about in Apocalypse Now(Apocalypse Now is about America in ways that Heart of Darkness is not). We through modernism and post-modernism became aware of the running atrocity factory that is our American history. Slavery, manifest destiny, the atomic bomb, the Civil War—our transcendence became weighted by the reality that it was on the backs of the oppression of others that we “transcended” and in those ways became no better than our origins. No more high idealed than the persecutors we left. Fundamentally since those bombs dropped has been the notion that America is a lie. In fact, this has become the new national identity for America this notion, this guilt, of living with a horrible lie. We’ve become a nation of brutish rubes, raging futily against the wind, tearing anything that comes within the grasps of our teeth.
For this to be overcome we need to learn a new way of telling the stories of our history. We need to accommodate a larger scope, a more mature approach, into our national subconscious. I don’t know if it’s possible though. My mind reels at trying to reconcile our history with our own people. But I think that speaks to the insane level of the permutation of this particular narrative.
This is if you don’t want to spend your time thinking about the pinewood box your whole life is spent in and geared toward.
