It’s an opportune moment, I think, for me to mention an extraordinary document that I was alerted to a week ago — a press release from President Obama announcing that he is continuing the state of emergency declared on September 14, 2001 for one more year. I thought it was a spoof at first, as I had no idea that the United States was about to enter the ninth year of an unbroken period of national emergency, but it appears, indeed, that, based on terrorist attacks that took place on one day eight years ago, the United States is officially in a state of eternal war …

This is what the press release says:

NOTICE
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CONTINUATION OF THE NATIONAL EMERGENCY WITH RESPECT TO CERTAIN TERRORIST ATTACKS

Consistent with section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act, 50 U.S.C. 1622(d), I am continuing for 1 year the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, in Proclamation 7463, with respect to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency, must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2009. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency the former President declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

And here’s the link: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Notice-of-continuation-from-the-President-regarding-the-emergency-declared-with-respect-to-the-September-11-2001-terrorist-attacks/

You know what the worst fear of a torturer is? The ones whom they couldn’t break, who heal and return.

Take a look at it this way: don’t we use the same methods, of extreme confinement and concentrations of energies, in say nuclear weapons?

Just so, at the same time, didn’t we also create high-intensity reaction chambers for producing Muslims whose heroism is of equal or greater intensity? It was assumed that our mechanistic social sciences would break into, discover, and remanufacture the contents of their psyches.

Isn’t that the myth of John McCain’s alleged heroism? So what makes us think we can create and use extraordinary rendition to torture as a Sorcerer’s Apprentice, when we know it has the opposite of the intended effect on us?

It’s the mythology!

What’s the ultimate punishment, in the religions of the Levant? Lock ‘em up and throw away the key. Col. Wilkerson alluded to this method of cosmogenesis, noting how so many processes were started without any idea of how to end them.

That’s ‘cuz they believe either the cosmos is god’s own justice-dispensing cash register, on the Right; or that it’s fully automatic, no one’s own justice-dispensing cash register, here on the Left. Either way, we get to play god by starting things and expecting to reap their rewards ad infinitum without any more effort.

It’s like a famous home rotisserie commercial here in the States: just set it, and forget it!

Except there are these awfully messy organic systems in the way of our nice clean sterile plans for full-spectrum dominance. And our high priests of the temple of kinetic force keep coming to Congress saying, ‘We’re doing great things, ridding the world of ‘evil-doers’ and so on, keeping you safe “over here” by creating hell on earth “over there.” But you’re all gonna die horribly if we don’t escalate the effort. It’s us, your military priests of kinetic force, who keep the devil at bay.’

Tom Engelhardt has a great article out recently, have you seen it? War is our American way of being in the world.

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Consider this: War is now the American way, even if peace is what most Americans experience while their proxies fight in distant lands. Any serious alternative to war, which means our “security,” is increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian terms then, war is indeed peace in the United States and peace, war.

American Newspeak

Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was an ever more constricted form of English that would, sooner or later, make “all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended,” he wrote in an appendix to his novel, “that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable.”

When it comes to war (and peace), we live in a world of American Newspeak in which alternatives to a state of war are not only ever more unacceptable, but ever harder to imagine. If war is now our permanent situation, in good Orwellian fashion it has also been sundered from a set of words that once accompanied it.

It lacks, for instance, “victory.” After all, when was the last time the U.S. actually won a war (unless you include our “victories” over small countries incapable of defending themselves like the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in 1989)? The smashing “victory” over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to a stop-and-start conflict now almost two decades old that has proved a catastrophe. Keep heading backward through the Vietnam and Korean Wars and the last time the U.S. military was truly victorious was in 1945.

But achieving victory no longer seems to matter. War American-style is now conceptually unending, as are preparations for it. When George W. Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror (aka World War IV), conceived as a “generational struggle” like the Cold War, he caught a certain American reality. In a sense, the ongoing war system can’t absorb victory. Any such endpoint might indeed prove to be a kind of defeat.

No longer has war anything to do with the taking of territory either, or even with direct conquest. War is increasingly a state of being, not a process with a beginning, an end, and an actual geography.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/17-12
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That’s exactly what I’m on about. Our body politic, and the earth from which we grow, are not mechanisms governed by kinetic activity alone, but that’s how we conceive of and engage with them. That right there is the power of myth: the power to shape our world before we go out and act in it.

It’s the power that keeps caged Muslim men with well placed faith in Allah praying for deliverance, and Americans with misplaced faith in machines praying for their eternal confinement.