<nettime> Brilliance

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

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Brilliance


What we fear most, here, is the brilliance of the plan which has been at
least five years in the making - that the machine that hit the Pentagon
was traveling at 345 miles an hour, that the planes were not only taken
but maliciously piloted after five years of subterfuge and masquerade by
people without very much experience on passenger jets.

And what we fear is also conspiracy, for, finally, our predilection
towards subterfuge, belief in surface erosion, has come true with a
vengeance: Here we are, now, suspicious of our neighbors, redefining
ourselves as a nation, as individuals, against the rot that appears
to lie within and without. All those theories about JFK, Area 52, the
CIA, Martin Luther King, LSD, the fall of the left, turn out to be
true.

It's the trouble with cancer, existing for years in the body, springing
out hard, retreating to tissues and organs where elimination is pyrrhic at
best - finally, nothing escapes destruction.

"They hide in caves," live in vaginas, pockets of bodies which are both
feared and stases of desire. They are primitive, woman-like, they won't
come out and fight like a man; we'll have to go in and get them. They have
nothing to lose, they don't have big cities, nothing to defend.

They might as well be Jews, might as well be Arabs, might as well be
Women. The West slams into nomads with firepower; the fear, the menses,
remains unspoken as we overly theorize and articulate geopolitical
concerns, strategies, ideologies, positioning.

What they did, they were good at; what they did, they are good at, and we
don't know what that is.


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