My Father's Dementia

He is my father’s double, an impostor, a thief, a trickster. He steals by the imposition of silence upon a man who was already silent, but in his own way, a silence marked by signs and hesitations, a silence I could read, a silence I could force into a language, the silent language of my father, a language rich in what it withheld, a silence that enclosed, it was like a seed, that asked to be found again and it gave to me the desperate need to find it. But I failed. I never heard those secret words or found the gestures and silences and hesitation and echoes by which I might have inferred them, translated them. My father, I realize now, was asking me to force speech from him, to break open his muteness which was itself some sort of unimaginable spell or curse put upon the line of fathers in my family, going backwards. To force him to speak by inventing what he would speak. But this new silence, the silence of dementia and aphasia, the demented silence of the trickster, I can do nothing with it, it is sterile, absolute in its emptiness and its sense of loss. The trickster looks at me the eyes of my father and shows me in his hurt gaze his disappointment in me, because now I will never make him speak.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Perhaps in films like “Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” perhaps in the figure of Caesar, the chimpanzee revolutionary, we have finally and completely transferred our aspirations to another species.  They need no longer burden us, or wound us, or remind us of our failure.

     

As in Charles Stross’s “Saturn’s Children,” our end is an afterthought, neither the central scene of the Terran drama, nor an instance of historic tragedy.  That part of the story is necessary only as exposition—to explain why we have gone.

This transfer of our ideals to the apes is part of a complex transactions.  We turn the zoa into a symbol of our ideals as we drive it into extinction.  The cinematic ritual is the exorcism of our wishes.  Like the chimpanzees before they are given the neuro-cognitive drug AZ-112, we are mute.  In the traditional exorcism, the subject, the subject speaks in legion voices, exchanging this mad multiplicity for a singular voice possessed by reason.  In this belated fantastic exorcism, our demons show themselves by our linguistic disarticulation.  We have nothing to say.  What we might have said has been amputated, severed.  And the marker of our redemption arrives in the voice of a chimpanzee.  Caesar becomes like that poor man in Afghanistan, peddling the collection of false legs he has found.

Presumably, as a species, we achieve a more grateful mutism.  The problem was not our inability to give voice to our ideals, but rather the obsolescence of the wish to have the voice to do this.  It is like a nostalgia for our lost gills.  To the ape we entrust this neolithic gift and move on.

There is a genealogy here, an evolution.  We begin with Julian Jayne’s idea of humanity up to the Bronze Age.  In the heroic age we had a bicameral mind.  Many voices possessed us.  We heard gods and demons.  Gods and demons spoke through us.  It was all very archaic and violent.  Then we achieved the single voice of the Cartesian subject, troubled only by what it repressed.  It was all very neurotic and violent.  Then came our resentful silence, our penultimate phase, as we grudgingly gave up the ghost.

Our teleology is immediate communication.  Without voice, without subject.  Without message or messenger.  We become quantum entangled with our own existence.  Alienation is no longer possible.  Estrangement is no longer possible.  Perhaps the desire to speak, the possibility of speaking, was born out of estrangement and alienation, as it was born also as system of signaling danger to others.

All this we leave to the chimpanzees.

Immortal Breath

America is born continuously out of a sense of obscured corruption.  We are never old, but we carry the ancient guilt.  Maddened by it, continuously repeating these same sins, we cannot bear to live within our memory.  Vietnam is not merely forgotten.  It is over-written.  It is re-imagined not as a mistake, but as prologue to further violence.  We always recur to violence.  At the margins we find a truer story.  A story whispered by the angel of history (Benjamin).  A gasp blowing backwards towards us from the future.  By this strange misdirection we are led.  An immortal breath which we mistake for our own.

Oblivion

   During commercial jet air flight, you constantly face forward, you align perfectly with the vector of the jets motion. Though you can only see the back of the passenger’s head in front of you, your line of sight is directed perfectly toward where you are going.

   It’s quite different for us as passengers on a planet hurtling through space. As I sit in my chair at my desk the planet rotates and revolves. There is only one moment in each 24-hour period when I am facing the tangent vector of the planet’s rotation around the sun. The rest of the time I am aligned to the left or to the right of that vector, looking sideways, or backwards, my gaze directed toward a space I will never occupy, or for an equally brief instance, directed backwards, towards my past. Mercifully, this causes no disorientation, no jet lag, no motion sickness. Perhaps the reason for this mercy is simple.  For all but a few seconds of our existence, we are unable to bear or keep in mind the crushing, vertiginous thought of the entire universe in its splendid loneliness.

   This is an elemental form of oblivion—we forget the universe. And this oblivion offers us a compensatory assurance. The universe has forgotten us as well. Or rather, we were never even remembered.

Volatizing the Other

Consider modern weaponry, such  objects as the intelligent drone or the artificially intelligent psyops expert.  These weapons emerge with increasing importance to the status of current world conflict.  They are weapons of intelligence and counterintelligence.  They can pacify the enemy or destroy the enemy—but this may amount to the same thing.  They define a structural relationship between the agency that deploys the weapon and the target of the weapon.  Oftentimes, but not alawys, this mirrors the structural relationship between the so-called first world and the so-called third world, the mass market global monad and indigenous local resistance.  From the perspective of the monad this relationship is called shock and awe, an asymmetric form imposed by the monad in the hope of volatizing the indigenous other. The metaphor here derives from nostalgia for the early days of atomic weaponry in which, as at Hiroshima, the figure of the other is irradiated into a poignant trace or instant memorial, such as a shadow on a wall. The global monad seeks the same result, accomplished metaphorically, or politically, with minimal violence, or no violence whatsoever. It is a question of convincing the Other, of persuading him to or selling him on that fatal post-consumerist wish, that becoming an irradiated shadow on the last standing wall was what he always wanted. Or at least, what he will end up becoming anyway.

The development of these weapons in the past quarter-century illustrates the degree to which the battlefield has become a laboratory for the study of weapon-target interaction, a normalized site of research that continues in perpetuity, just like those so-called laboratories for better living  first made famous in 1950s consumer ads. The medium of war becomes the message of the global monad. The metaphor of war becomes normalized and domesticated: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on crime, the war on cancer, the war on so-called illegal immigrants.  Each of these marks a condition that relate less to the classical notion of war and its implication of utter victory and\or utter defeat, and more to the hyper–real condition of ambivalence.  Victory is replaced by perpetuation. Indeed those quaintly old-fashioned holidays such as Victory in Europe Day or Victory over Japan Day may soon be replaced by the new holiday of Perpetuation Days.  Afghanistan Perpetuation Day or Cocaine Perpetuation Day offer a vaguely medieval sense consistent with those holidays marking the precession of a retrograde world.  We promote drugs and wage war on drugs at the same time. We create conditions favorable to cancer and wage war on cancer at the same time. These hyperreal wars mark projects in which no end is foreseen, or wanted. They prophesize instead a permanent structure of ambivalence superimposed upon binary oppositions based on false values—a structure of unconsciousness, amnesia, sterility, and violence.

Nietzsche's Lost Umbrella

Targets are reversible while the form of war is constant.  This Orwellian insight no longer causes outrage.  Instead, it becomes an issue of indifference and absurdity.  Our enemies, the people whom we are told are our enemies, change constantly, swirl around us on the inclosing circumference of our bubble media screen.  The mask of Marx becomes the mask of Islam.  All of this orchestrated by a hand we can see all too well, yet we act as if the hand is invisible: the hand of global power.  Global power keeps the gallery of masks and invents new ones constantly for our epic theater, our tragedies, our masquerades.  It is all very much like that Escher drawing in which a hand comes out of the page to draw itself and become the passive object of the drawing in an infinite loop in which no one draws and no one is drawn yet drawer and drawing takes place infinitely.  A cheap trick based upon the illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface.  A trick long since seen through, so it really is a joke to us now—a broad comedy that we enjoy all the more because we know what’s coming next.  The comedy of the vanished subject, the comedy of vanished responsibility. 

The postmodern condition is one in which we know that the worst has come true and is always about to come true again: a condition of anticipation, a condition in which we covertly long for the catastrophe that will end this interminable cycle.  But the ending never arrives.  The covert longing for an end to all this becomes a secondary drive, a drive that is teased and stretched in the prolonged consumption of itself.  The catastrophe occurs constantly but never occurs.  It has no teleology, no messianic expiation.  It is a virtual occurrence, but the real catastrophe, if it happen at all, happens elsewhere.  Our lack of reality may finally and inevitably inoculate us so that nothing so grand as catastrophe can occur—merely the peculiar interruptions and intrusions and strange signals which afflict a virtual world. Nietzsche’s lost umbrella.  The unaccounted supplement of an air current stirred by a butterfly’s wings.

UKA

Suspect admits killing US airmen at German airport

By DAVID McHUGH, Associated Press  

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — A Kosovo Albanian man confessed Wednesday to killing two U.S. airmen at the Frankfurt airport, saying in emotional testimony at the opening of his trial that he had been influenced by radical Islamic propaganda online.

Arid Uka, 21, is charged with two counts of murder for the March 2 slaying of Senior Airman Nicholas J. Alden, 25, from South Carolina, and Airman 1st Class Zachary R. Cuddeback, 21, from Virginia. He also faces three counts of attempted murder in connection with the wounding of two others.

Although Germany has experienced scores of terrorist attacks in past decades, largely from leftist groups like the Red Army Faction, the airport attack was the first attributed to an Islamic extremist.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, there have been about a half-dozen other jihadist plots that were either thwarted or failed — including a 2007 plan to kill Americans at the U.S. Air Force's Ramstein Air Base.

Uka went to the airport with the intent "to kill an indeterminate number of American soldiers, but if possible a large number," prosecutor Herbert Deimer told a state court in Frankfurt.

No pleas are entered in the German system, and Uka confessed to the killings after the indictment was read, telling the court "what I did was wrong but I cannot undo what I did." He went on to urge other radical Muslims not to seek inspiration in his attack, urging them not to be taken in by "lying propaganda" on the Internet.

"To this day I try to understand what happened and why I did it... but I don't understand," he said.

Cooperating with authorities and confessing to a crime can help reduce a defendant's sentence — but Uka refused to tell the court where he obtained the gun used in the crime, which Presiding Judge Thomas Sagebiel said meant his confession was not complete.

Uka described becoming increasingly introverted in the months before the attack, staying at home and playing computer games and watching Islamic extremist propaganda on the Internet.

The night before the crime, Uka said that he followed a link to a video posted on Facebook that purported to show American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It turned out to be a scene from the 2007 anti-war Brian De Palma film "Redacted," taken out of context.

He said he then decided he should do anything possible to prevent more American soldiers from going to Afghanistan.

"I thought what I saw in that video, these people would do in Afghanistan," he told the court, his voice choking with emotion as he wiped away tears.

Uka conceded when asked by prosecutor Jochen Weingarten that the airman driving the bus had not been going to Afghanistan. On the bus on the way to the airport to look for victims, he said he listened to Islamic music on his iPod while nursing doubts that he'd be able to follow through with his plan.

"On the one hand I wanted to do something to help the women, and on the other hand I hoped I would not see any soldiers," he told the court.

Six months later, he says he now does not understand why he went through with the killings.

"If you ask me why I did this, I can only say ... I don't understand anymore how I went that far."

The indictment says Uka went to the airport armed with a pistol, extra ammunition and two knives. Inside Terminal 2, he spotted two U.S. servicemen who had just arrived and followed them to their U.S. Air Force bus.

After 16 servicemen, including the driver, were on or near the bus, Uka approached one of the men for a cigarette, prosecutors said. He confirmed they were U.S. Air Force members en route to Afghanistan, then "turned around, put the magazine that had been concealed in his backpack into his pistol, and cocked the weapon," the indictment read.

He first shot unarmed Alden in the back of the head, the indictment alleged. He then boarded the vehicle shouting "Allahu Akbar" — Arabic for "God is great" — and shot and killed Cuddeback, who was the driver, before firing at others.

He wounded two others — one victim has lost sight in one eye permanently — before his gun jammed and he fled, prosecutors said. The shooter was then chased down and caught.

Some of the American airmen are expected to testify at the trial. At least one relative of the victims — Cuddeback's mother — has joined the trial as a co-plaintiff.

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Comment—by Bill Purcell

It is difficult to regard these murders as acts attributable to fundamentalism alone, or to the pathology of fundamentalism, or to the pathology of one culture as opposed to another. The hyper modern context seems crucial here, especially the presence of multiple, operationalized or virtual fantasies that are subject to continuous splicing and recontextualization. Where does the violence begin? Does it even have a beginning?  Or is it a supreme obsession, saturating each interstice of this murderous event? Everything is virtual. The fundamentalist propaganda was actually spliced from a film intended to decry the Western thirst for war.

The Uka who is present in the German court nearly 6 months after the murders presents himself not as a fundamentalist soldier, but as an inexplicable subjectivity in a quasi-state of remorse and rehabilitation. He speaks of himself with an extreme form of objectivity, as if his dual nature reflected simultaneously his possession by and as an avatar of some evilly intelligent game.  And indeed he was capable of encasing himself digitally in a refractive shell permeated by violence and the constructed identity of ideology.  Against the pervasive global deconstruction,  this shell maintained a kind of integrity, like a hazmat suit. An avatar has no interior aside from the hidden code of the game itself. The genius of the game’s code is simultaneously the illusion of the game environment by which it secretes itself, and its total hegemonic presence within each pixel of the game screen.

The difficulty for us in the West is that this evilly intelligent game has replaced our fading and now deconstructed notion of an absolute reality. Which is to say that we are no longer wholly contained by an ultimate real. We have been released. By our own desires we have accomplished the impossible. We have released ourselves from reality.  Yet what ever is left outside of  ourselves races to contain us. Instead of the symbolic position of submission to the real, which was always an oppression to our desires and our fantasies and as such became the negative form of our fantasies, we are released to the now larger and more absolute world of an intelligent game. It confounds us with the infinite reflection of evil, which we had once hoped would prove to be an empty form. We race against emptiness. We race against an empty intelligence  that cannot be beaten to any location within the game because it is always already there.