Glad to Mutate

Chris Nakashima-Brown has a piece on Strange Horizons called, "Nomadology". I could describe it, but maybe it would be better if I just let you read an exerpt:

"At the Royal Brisbane Country Club, the lower level of the clubhouse has been converted into interrogation facilities. Portions of the men's grill and locker room allowed to realize their immanent potential when the Homeland Guard recaptured the western suburbs and set up a beautifully landscaped gulag here, a mile or two outside the area under the control of the insurrection.

I am strapped to a banquet chair with hard plastic ties. On the wall opposite, the elusive face of Tiger Woods watches over his shoulder as my interrogator attaches the electrodes to my testicles. Is that a Mona Lisa smile the golfer wears, or some darker aspect? The predatory seduction of the child star.

The empty swimming pool through the window is a detention area surrounded by concertina. A thousand putative rebels rounded up at night from the surrounding municipalities shamble in the shallow rain puddles of the deep end, watched by black-uniformed sentries perched atop the lifeguard towers with assault rifles that intermittently glisten in the light of late dusk.

As the current starts to run through me, I hear the battery of lawn sprinklers kick in. The cascading shook-shook of watery machined spurts ejecting over the greener-than-real turf, unexpectedly synchronized with the waves of high-voltage spasms as they seize my corpus in a rictus of new pain."

Actually, I totally can describe it. It kind of reads like a soft-core "Roosevelt After Inauguration", by William Burroughs. This doesn't appear to be quotable online, but you can read an exerpt of it via a Burroughs Reader on Google Books here.

I like Nakashima-Brown's piece. I'm not the biggest fan of the enviable Burroughs; perhaps better to say that for me he has his moments, and then he also does not. Nor am I a really big supporter of topical subject matter in fiction. It's the atemporality thing--I personally stray away from anything that could date a piece of fictional prose. Like a friend of mine mentioned about rap songs and videos, you can tell instantly when they were outdated by the cell phones that cameo in the song. Fiction shouldn't strive to be universal necessarily, but it certainly shouldn't be looking for the thong-covered ass crack niche that is "current".

But "Nomadology" on the other hand, already feels dated, but in a powerful way, not one of obsolesce. It imparts the brittleness of history in the same way as these current events did when we first learned of them. It's all stuff that happened elsewhere to Americans, in another time and place. Maybe even a different world. Sure, we heard a lot about Darfur for a while. But atrocities, in the United States, always happen in the past tense. Facts always come to light after the fact, and then we condemn, and resolve to have it never happen again. Until the next time that breaking news uncovers what someone else was living with for days, weeks, or years, up until only recently.

And I think this is the real connection to Burroughs, not the shock value. "Roosevelt After Inauguration"... what, people were pissed about Roosevelt? Which one? Why? The whole thing sounds like fictional history, like Burroughs delusions of current events only existed in some drug-addled alternative dimension. But the real drug-addled alternative nightmare is real life, and history is the delusion. We know now that Roosevelt was a good president, because it says so in the history books. We know that Abu Grahib was a bad place, because we are told it is not so anymore. The truth of history is defined by it's nonexistence, and its segmentation to a volume of time and space that are divorced from the present. Both Nakashima-Brown and Burroughs bring the past to life in a way that can never die, because it is too bizarre to be killed. It's been zombified, and given chainsaws for hands, and had a clown mask sewn to its skin, and been installed with a 10,000-year rated deux-ex-machina-brand atomic power-cell, making it impervious to the ravishings of age and nearly unkillable. This horror has been inaugurated, and is going for four more years. Or is it four less years? History never actually happened if it's too horrible. We simply deny it by dating it; or does it do this to us? The story doesn't say, but I have a feeling those terrorist parties happen ever weekend, and on Tuesdays for Service Industry Night. You just need a flyer to get in.

The new Internet world is a strange place, and perhaps what is strangest is that things like car bombings still happen all the time. I'm glad someone is willing to document the strangeness in a way that can deliver the magnitude of history, without falling prey to the glossiness of aqueous-coated magazines, or the tiny fascisms of time, space, and plot. This is the job of literature, if ever it had one. As Roosevelt said, and I quote, "I'll make the cocksuckers glad to mutate."

From Your Living Room to Your Lebensraum

Let's take another fun Interdome field trip to... the Headlines!

Well, what have we today? Some auto union is striking... ooh, Lindsay Lohan isn't going out this weekend... (guess I'll stay in too)... and, well, hmm... but what have we here:

BUSH URGES CONGRESS TO REJECT ARMENIAN GENOCIDE RESOLUTION

Color me a-news-ed.

"But wait," ask the doe-eyed children gathered 'round the Interdome, "What does this mean?"

Let's delve into it, shall we? From the International Herald Tribune's 690 words on the subject, we learn that this resolution to name the murder of 1,000,000 Armenians in 1914-1918 a "genocide" could hurt our political relationship with the modern Turkish state, and therefore we shouldn't do it. It appears that the resolution is simply a push from some "interest groups" whose interest is that considering their cultural heritage, they would have qualified for the death camps back then.

This isn't the only recent time that American government has struggled to figure out what the definition of "genocide" is. In fact, the American government seems to have lots of trouble with definitions of words. But, I digress.

If we only read the IHT's article on the vocabulary discussion, we might just move onto the next headline, because, frankly, "genocide" is not a very happy word of the day, and there certainly is a big Interdome out there to read. But, for some retarded reason, I guess we are going to dig a bit deeper.

Turkey, as the IHT tells us, is one of the main transit points for American war supplies heading to Iraq. Therefore, improving relations with Turkey allows the Americans (let's try and pay attention so we don't get "Armenian" and "American" confused, eh?) wage war in the Middle East.

However, the actual way of things is that American-Turkish relations have been declining. After the Truman Doctrine established that Turkey was seeking support of America against the USSR (and other pro-Communist groups like the PKK--remember this, we'll come back to it!), an American military base was established in Turkey in 1954, that is used to the present day. But, ever since the end of the Cold War, and the end of the nice balance between East and West to divide the world, relations have been strained. Turkey has continued to be pro-US in order to support their foray into the EU, among other things, and they have backed this up by supporting American wars in the Middle East and recognizing Israel as a state despite how this has hurt them in their Middle East/Islamic relations.

So, for a country through which "the bulk of U.S. air cargo and about one-third of the fuel headed for Iraq passes," quoth the IHT, it would be important to keep them happy. So would a resolution about the Armenian genocide really be a thorn in the Turkish thumb?

Well, Turkey is not only a convenient conveyor belt to the hole in the desert into which we're currently pouring money. Like most so-called "resolutions", the matter itself is less resolved than other, more important, "strategic" things are alluded. Turkey is also the primary target, and major operating base of a group called the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The PKK started in the 1970s as a Kurdish nationalist political group, and escalated to the level of a paramilitary organization. It's philosophy was Marxist-Leninist to begin with, but now has shifted to the Islamic hue post-Cold War.

These days, they are a "terrorist-organization"--a vocab word that was agreed upon by the US. The US has helped Turkey fight the PKK, allegedly with the CIA, and also through NATO paramilitary "stay-behind" forces that were placed in Turkey. The object of these forces was to remain hidden in the population so as to "stay behind" to conduct guerrilla operations in the event of a USSR invasion, but they were often utilized, at who-knows-who's behest to conduct paramilitary or domestic terrorism operations.

But, oh-so-surprisingly, in this crazy post-Cold War world things seem to have been getting confused. It seems that some of the weapons that the US has sent to Iraq (most likely through Turkey), you know, those weapons the US can't find, have ended up in the hands of the PKK.

And what's more, that very-lucrative-and-increasingly-popular contracting company Blackwater USA has been accused of directly smuggling weapons to the PKK! Horrors!

Now, why would the USA be smuggling weapons to a formerly Communist, avowedly terrorist, separatist group that they are simultaneously fighting in order to court their allies?

Why indeed!

Although I hardly claim to be in the neo-cons' brains, I would say that it is something along the lines of...

The PPK is a separatist nationalist group that while not having much of a positive effect for its own policy, is currently involved in destabilizing the ENTIRE Middle East region, and specifically the governments of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

Why would it help US policy to destabilize the region? Well, they've certainly done a good job of it so far, I don't see why they would not use any tool available to them to continue. Regardless of other positive and negative outcomes of the Iraq War for American interests, destabilization is an outcome that has only benefited the economic, political, and ideological status of the United States. And, if they didn't want to destabilize the region, there are certainly other ways they could be going about this project. Intimidation, fomenting armed conflict, and cross-border operations just speak so loudly, you know.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Congress is occupying its time with a history lesson on whether the killing of 1,000,000 or so constitutes a certain word, something that the New York Times had reported some 90 years ago. That's a pretty good way of avoiding a current problem.

It really boggles my mind that it so easy to hide the killing of millions in plain sight. I guess that the typical person, and by this, I mean the overwhelming majority of the population, just doesn't care about these sorts of deaths, especially if they occur on the other side of the globe.

It certainly never stops. Turks kill Armenians, Germans kill Jews, Poles, and others, Sudanese kill other Sudanese, Americans kill Iraqis, and others. You know what the estimated numbers are dead were for the Iraqi Economic Sanctions, even before the war started? The same as the Armenian Genocide, 500,000-1,500,000. It never stops.

I guess we'll conclude this field trip with a quote, from a guy of whom you may have heard, who goes by the name of Adolf Hitler. It was said during a military meeting in 1939, before the invasion of Poland.

"I have issued the command -- and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad -- that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness -- for the present only in the East -- with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

Where does American economic-lebensraum lie today? You can manifest that destiny for yourself, but one thing is certain, that were certainly have trouble to-day speaking of the annihilation of the Armenians.

Not a Whole Lot

Not a whole lot going on today. There's nice weather outside. I'm wearing a T-shirt with an image of a dinosaur stopping on a person. A lot of tech sites are talking about the story I talked about yesterday. That means I'm fresher than they. My T-shirt also means I'm fresh. And when I was walking outside in the fresh air, look out boy/girl, there was some poppin' freshness going on.

You seem skeptical. I can tell. Fine, I will show you.

Here's the weather:



Nice!

Here's yesterday's post and a zillion other articles saying the same thing:

Fresh / Not so Fresh

Eight people read this blog!

And here's my sweet dinosaur T-shirt.


Stomp!!!

The shirt is from these comics that also have dinosaurs that stomp. They also talk, which is not quite as historically accurate. The comics look like

This!!!

They're not very funny at first, but after you sit at work not working and look at a lot of stuff online and then look at a lot of dinosaur comics then they are pretty funny.

I'm normally not the kind of guy to buy a T-shirt of anything off the internet, but I really wanted a shirt with a Dino on it for a long time, and here was one, not only on it, but also stomping. A friend once told me that I walk like a dinosaur. I don't think it was meant to be a compliment.

I also wrote this post with the text centered. Pretty fresh.

Except, I guess, I stole the news story from someone else. And the T-shirt is kind of nerdy. And the weather doesn't really reflect upon me at all. I guess nothing is that fresh here today. I wonder why I even thought to use that adjective. It's a bit lame, even without me attached to it.

Shit. Well, forget all that garbage. Nothing is new, nothing is fresh, nothing is happening. Now see why, if I was actually a dinosaur, I would stomp on everyone. End of post.