Night after night throughout the wrecked city contingents of US troops in cartoon new-age uniforms hunt for hidden roadside bombs.
On a recent night, a unit from Company B of the Fifth Engineering Battalion, out of Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., met in a darkened tent to prepare for their road-clearing mission in a 27-foot armored vehicle called the Cowpoke.
At the end of their meeting, Staff Sgt. Jessie McGah, 31, of Greenville Arkansas, led his team in prayer . . .
Out on what passes for a road, crawling along at five miles per hour, the unit peer through blast-resistant glass windows, using giant floodlights and a remotely operated steel arm to help detect any telltale disturbance in the pavement or median below that would reveal a buried bomb.
To accomplish their mission, the engineers, or sappers, try to get into the enemy's mind.
"When we're out," Sgt McGah said, "we're thinkin' like how the bad guys think, even how we'd blow ourselfs up to keal Americans."
Wolfing trash food, the bright American male 17-year-old sits cross-legged on the floor, pavement, tarmac, astroturf playing warr games.
Video velocity, hand-eye coordination, game-theory-fantasy-slaughtering- cartoon-state-of-the-art weaponry.
Speed speed.
In warr games the fierce-eyed baddies wear long beards and turbans.
Make agitated gestures and scream Jihad! Jihad! when they're not sticking their collective butts in the air praying to Allah.
Meanwhile the bright male's 17-year-old's older brother and National Guard dad and uncle are murdering the fierce-eyed baddies in their long beards and turbans.
In what used to be called "real time."
Murdering the long beards' wives and children.
Infinite children, since the phrase "birth control" has never been translated into Arabic.
There is no corresponding phrase in Farsi.
In Urdu.
No corresponding phrase in the million and one regional dialects of tribal Africa.
Hyper-brained male 17-year-olds play warr games in their techno-caves
while their older brothers and sisters and National Guard dads and uncles are killed and maimed by roadside bombs.
Poisoned by xenophobia.
Sickened unto death by depleted uranium.
Zombied home with PTSD.
Resume a life of legislated dysfunction with sharply reduced benefits.
Migrating patriotism.
40 years ago, before Starbucks, the internet, and boutiqued angst, 20-something males refused to kill while contesting the real-time war, and (no matter what the Discovery Channel tells us now) raised consciousness, as the phrase went, helped end the holocaust.
End the war that in hindsight nobody wanted, not even one of its chief architects, Defense Secretary McNamara, previously a car salesman, president of Ford Motor Company, who long after the war received a seven-figure advance for dictating his old man's recantation to a ghost writer.
In Retrospect, 1995, Random House.
Then gave contradictory lectures based on the book he didn't actually write for big $$ where he bristled when the audience interrogated him.
"Mr. Secretary, you say you objected early in the campaign to the bombing, napalming, wanton murder of innocents, carpet bombing of neighboring Cambodia which was not even a player in the war.
"Mr. Sec, if you had these objections early on, like you say, why didn't you make a case for stopping the war to the president, to the congress, to the American people?"
Mac's peeved response: "I was a member of the team.
"I was not in position to instruct my President."
From the audience: "What about after you left Defense and headed the World Bank? It was 1968; the war was still raging."
Mac's response: "As president of the World Bank I had pressing responsibilities, too many to deviate."
"Mr. Sec, are you calling the genocidal Vietnam War a deviation?"
Do the 17-year-old males playing video warr games in their techno-caves constitute a deviation?
Are "real time" wars a deviation from accountable reality?
What counts more than Reality (TV) in your palm in a shopping mall in anywhere, America?
More than the NFL with a GDP higher than any two countries in Sub-Saharan Africa?
More than Extreme Games?
More than triple-X-rated "games" online?
With God, family, hedge funds, and extreme patriotism, McNamara, an advocate of game theory and the technological "revolution," has never (he says proudly) found time for play.
Play slides out of dream into a world.
Intelligence officers of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) have been studying postmodern theory.
You're lying.
They recognize that the principles of waging warr must change in the new millennium.
For Israel to contain its enemies on every side without taking big losses, the intelligence officers have studied Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Althusser, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Bourdieu . . .
Whole lot of Frogs.
The French and Israelis don't even like each other.
They've read PoMo architects and scrutinized their erections.
That's cool.
Origins are out.
Except for the origin of the disputed territories, which belong to the Jews, indisputably.
Perpendicular is out, swarm is in.
If insurgent street fighters have mined an alleyway and are wedged into sniper positions in the buildings lining the alley on either side, the Israelis don't enter the alley from the front and proceed forward.
Instead, small contingents of Israeli commandos break through the walls of apartments in the buildings lining the alley.
What do they do with the families living in those apartments?
Lock them in a room, bolt the door.
The commandos unwall the walls, collapse the space, swarm into the alley from either side.
In medias res.
Like ants, like killer bees.
They blast the insurgents.
Or they disrupt them, startle them out of their holes.
I didn't think freedom fighters startle that easy.
Not easy.
Reading postmodern culture theory isn't easy.
Applying postmodern culture theory to warr ain't easy.
What happens if the freedom fighters are not in the alleys?
Then Israeli intelligence hacks into their technology.
PoMo warr is fundamentally a discourse between enemies.
They discourse in different languages.
Incidental.
If the enemy's lines of discourse are impeded they can't communicate.
An isolated, incommunicable enemy cannot warr effectively.
You're saying that the IDF, with their ruthless reputation world-wide, wage warr on their computers?
PoMo battle-space is various.
Situational.
A network of interfacing but also unlooped spaces, offline and on.
Battle-space is inseparable from living space.
The souks, sewers, streets, mosques, kasbahs are where the enemy live, shit, pray, terrorize.
How does the IDF distinguish combatants from innocents?
Vermin is vermin.
Nobody is innocent.
Nobody on the insurgents' side, you mean.
It's all in the mind.
Which is the technology.
Space is relational, subject to interpretation.
So is innocence.
We have the technology.
Uh-huh.
The principle is if you can't kill or brutalize the enemy, impede him.
While the enemy moves haltingly, the IDF glides effortlessly.
Online, off.
Smooth, liquid, permeable movement vs striated, opaque, impeded movement is how the texts put it.
The PoMo culture theory texts?
Previously, the IDF, like other well-equipped, rigidly organized armies, warred strictly off-line via a traditional, Euclidian -- so to speak -- perspective.
Now that centralized perspective has been put under erasure.
Torqued, ruptured, shattered.
If the freedom fighters are not murdered they will regroup.
Resume fighting.
Less effectively.
Confidence shattered.
An enemy does not have to be annihilated to lose a battle
Lose the warr.
When the battle resumes the IDF "reads" and analyzes the dynamic; it kills with hardware, disorganizes with stratagems, reorganizes with software.
One can win a post-millennial battle purely by reorganization.
Were-are-any of those postmodern theorists soldiers, fighters?
Postmodern theorists are pussies.
They'll murder their wives.
Or themselves.
They do what they do.
So long as they leave their texts behind.
So what happens to the unwalled walls?
The inhabitants bolted into their rooms?
What happens to the buildings the IDF breaks through in order to swarm like killer bees, reorganize space?
The buildings remain unwalled?
The inhabitants are not a factor.
It could be they don't even notice the unwalled walls.
That is one of the advantages of warring with an impoverished enemy.
You talk of the new post-millennial battle plan.
Startle, swarm, disrupt, rupture.
Battling situationally, with knowledge gained by studying the postmodern culture theorists?
But isn't this the way the most impoverished guerrillas on every bedeviled continent have been warring all along?
Without having to read those French pussy theorists?
Maybe.
But without our technology.
Part 2 is drawn from Eyal Weizman, "Walking through Walls," Radical Philosophy #136, March/April 2006.
THE END
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Jessica Wineteer / The Sharpest Tool in the Shed
Harold Jaffe / Revolution Post-Mill
m. benedict / the fountain
Shane Jesse Christmass / Case Report into Clairaudience
Tantra Bensko / Clock
Jessica Hayes / Notification
Shane Jesse Christmass / The Modern of Tongues
Daniel King / The Interpretation of Life
Juventino Manzano / Back on the Home Front
Ashok Rajamani / White Men Can't Jump, Er, Tie a Sari
Harold Jaffe / Excerpts from Paris 60
John Darling / There Must Be Cowboys
Edwin Decker / Armageddon of Queer
John-Patrick Ayson / atrophy
Stephen W. Potts / Zone of Silence
Harold Jaffe / Warr Games
William Terry / Affection Interchange Program
Juventino Manzano / Vestige to Visage
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky / A Beetle in an Anthill
Harold Jaffe / Bela Lugosi
Tyrone Nagai / Lola and Jean
Jefferson P. Swycaffer / In Search of The Fuehrer
Don Traverso / Dysecdysis
Thomas Logan / Ghost Dance Soliloquies
B. F. Price / Animals Were Harmed
Jefferson P. Swycaffer / The Gift that Keeps On Giving
Harold Jaffe / Cho
Jefferson Swycaffer / Leviathan of the Blades
Devin Walsh / Felix Culpa
Tony Zurlo / What Did You Do During the War, Daddy-O?
Stephen W. Potts / One Thousand and One Nights
Juventino Manzano / Epiphany in Hell
Don Traverso / Tuesday 10:30 AM
Frank Norris / Comida
Don Traverso / Mist
Juventino Manzano / Suburban Passion In Three Acts
Stephen MacKinnon / Triptych
Juventino Manzano / Requited Ecstasy
Stephen W. Potts / Loose Ends
Kirsten Noelle Hubbard / An Elegy for the Uninvited
Conor Murphy / Think Nothing of It
Jefferson P. Swycaffer / The Lifeboat Game
H. G. Wells / A Dream of Armageddon
Chris Tannhauser / See-Through
Stephen W. Potts / Apocalypso
Mark Twain / Letter to the Earth
Morgan Lockhart / Coyote and the Faceless Cowboy
Brad Lyke / Murder Takes Your Wings
Stephen W. Potts / The Lord's Work
Conor Murphy / Two Poems: After the Smoke Sermon and Inundation of a Rat
Stephen W. Potts / A Sad Story
Jessica Hayes / Above the Ed Sullivan
Chris Tannhauser / Zoroaster's Conundrum
Jessica Wineteer / Fashion Statement
Stephen W. Potts / The Commuter
B. F. Price / Levels of Comfort
Stephen W. Potts / United We Stand
Jefferson P. Swycaffer / The God Monologues
Alan Wade / Wonder Woman, Hungry
Chris Tannhauser / Sadhus in Trouble
Stephen W. Potts / In Your Dreams
Chapter 9: A Patient Darkness
Chapter 8: Backflash
Chapter 7: Scars and Angel Wings
Chapter 6: PR1Σ$+
Chapter 5: Fierce Orbits
Chapter 4: Dead Playboys
Chapter 3: Tabula Rasa
Chapter 2: Blood Sneeze
Chapter 1: Screams Like Meat
Prologue: God's Dogs