9 (9/14/09)
If it’s lacking the technological splendor of a film like Beowulf, and it’s not nearly as disturbing or magical as a Quay Brothers’ short, what can one really say about the latest animated flick 9 which is marketed primarily off of the name of the formally visionary director known as Tim Burton, and which seems to be neither visually nor textually related to said director’s former works of brilliance save for the repeated appearances of skulls? How about, “Can you believe that a small popcorn and small Diet Coke® literally costs more than nine dollars?
History and the Dolts of Time in the Age of Opinion Journalism
To give you a foreshadowing of the ignorance and false claim to historical authority that you will find in Tony Karon’s 9/11/09 Time.com article Eight Years After 9/11: Why Osama bin Laden is a Failure , I offer you the sub-title of my essay, Two Hours After Reading Karon: A Generation of Students Condemn his Idiocy. I am jumping to a hasty conclusion and exaggerating the importance of my personal perspective?
Exactly.
Karon begins his article by throwing a few prototypical bones to his presumed opponents by granting…
“He may have eluded justice and the long reach of the world’s most powerful military force; his followers may (and probably will) strike again at some point in the future, near or distant;…”
Eluding justice and retaining the ability to generate belief in a future attack is actually quite a feat. If the apical commanders of the largest terrorist attack in US history have basically escaped, and there remains the probability of another attack, I would at the very least deem this a failure that could at any given minute be transformed into another tragedy—I’d hate to see what a victory looks like in Karon’s cosmology. He then lays out his brilliant premise…
“…but history’s verdict on Osama bin Laden has been in for some time, now: Al-Qaeda failed.”
Wow, I have been spending way too much time on my thesis. Not only have I completely missed the sweeping epic and passage of “history” in the EIGHT years since the tragedy of 9/11, I apparently missed it “some time” ago. Perhaps my concept of time isn’t even functioning. What qualifies for history in the age of opinion journalism? About the time it takes an Alaskan Governor to fulfill one half of her elected time commitment? Twice the time it takes to watch the complete and up to date collection of the television program 24? Or maybe the use of the word history in Karon’s article is just a feeble attempt (recognized by the ancient greeks as a fallacious form of reasoning) to claim even a modicum of authority and gravity, the likes of which is wholly absent from his argument.
It is a ubiquitous phenomenon within the current trend of opinion journalism; assigning an authoritative and complex perspective to what is actually a singular opinion. Claiming that “history” has passed a verdict on bin Laden, a mere eight years after the tragedy of 9/11, assumes that any subjective portioning of time can be given the finality that great passages of time affords us when analyzing past events. This day, we cannot even make the statement “a decade later” in regards to 9/11. And since we are not even past the least of the linguistically florid words which give us that feeling of epic and sweep, we must continue to use the simple metric of the word “year”, and there have only been eight, that’s right, a whopping 4/5 of one decade.
Karon claims that Al-Qaeda’s bombings to date have been “tactical successes” but were part of bin Laden’s “fundamentally flawed” strategy to…
“launch a global Islamist revolution aimed at ending U.S. influence in Muslim countries, overthrowing regimes there allied with Washington, and putting Al-Qaeda at the head of a global Islamist insurgency whose objective was to restore the rule of the Islamic Caliphate that had once ruled territory stretching from Moorish Spain through much of Asia.”
Let us forget that bin Laden did successfully launch Al-Qaeda, and probably retains the “aim” to end US influence and allied regimes in Muslim countries, as that fact is probably just another clever attempt by Karon to appeal to the opponents who would state the same information as a refutation of bin Laden’s failure. Tony Karon is after all a Senior Editor at Time.com. Let us instead tear asunder the ludicrous foundation of Karon’s entire argument which posits that Osama bin Laden’s success or failure should be judge on whether or not he is able to restore the Islamic Caliphate which once sullied Spain and “much of Asia” with its abhorrent Moorish attitudes towards women, and it’s complete disregard for the inherent supremacy of western civilization. Has bin Laden even seen Zach Snyder’s film 300 ? Sheesh (Kabob).
I don’t believe we have to worry about an Islamic Caliph. We seem to be doing just fine with a Catholic Pontiff who refuses to approve the use of contraceptives to millions of his most abjectly poor followers. Nor do I believe the existence of a Caliph should enter into our judgment on the success or failure of Al-Qaeda.
“But bin Laden himself has stated that he wants to establish an Islamic Caliphate” you may offer in support of the above argument (I myself have been known to throw a bone or two). To which, I would return that not all truth is derived from the literal utterances of people’s words. See the title of Karon’s article for further demonstration of this concept. And while an imaginary future which contains an evil religious dictator certainly sells advertising space and maintains the feeling of conflict which is the life-blood of today’s media, it may be wiser to look around us at the very real machinations of our world.
Our most provocative and yet proudly acclaimed achievement in the war against Al-Qaeda has been the invasion of Iraq, a foreign country with zero political or logistical connections to Al-Qaeda, and the militarized dethroning and sanctioned execution of its once allied dictator Saddam Hussein, a man whose only affinity to Osama bin Laden was perhaps a similar skin-tone and the sharing of a common language. And while there may be some talented intellectuals who could formulate a compelling moral argument for a country to invade a sovereign nation in order to rescue its citizenry from despotism, our nation rationalized, concocted or simply through vapid ignorance projected a justification that bypassed morals, and presumed an impending mushroom cloud. It’s hard to imagine a cogent individual who would deny that Saddam Hussein was responsible for years of bloodshed within Iraq, but as the toppling and continuing primary power base in that country today, its nearly impossible for the US to reject its responsibility for the bloodshed since Husseins’s fall.
Osama bin Laden instigated this. His plan of action was the catalyst which brought the United States Armed Forces into Iraq, and we are still there today. Although the apex of the erstwhile command hierarchy of Al-Qaeda has been degraded to the point of inefficacy, the Al-Qaeda name has been successfully spread throughout the world and adopted by so-called grass-root jihadists. And now, as a globally recognized brand of ideology, Al-Qaeda is impossible to kill with military force, and therefore, has successfully escaped us…forever. Osama bin Laden’s “failure” has been scattered in the wind like the biblical mustard seed and may even one day evolve into an actual political body.
An ignorant and sweeping claim unsupported by factual evidence? Israel’s military, the Israelll Defense Force, began as the paramilitary group Haganah, which followed after the Jewish defense organization Hashomer, which was itself evolved from the clandestine Bar-Giora, whose desire it was in the earliest part of the twentieth century to form a Jewish military force in the British mandate of Palestine. Formed by immigrants escaping the anti-semitism of eastern europe, these groups opposed British rule and actively sought violent means to protect themselves. The group Irgun, which also was absorbed into the Israel Defense Force, was responsible for sabotaging strategic British resources in later years as well as bombing the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 91 people. The British regarded these activities, unsurprisingly, as terrorism. But that didn’t stop the creation of a Jewish state and the incorporation of violent paramilitary groups into a state-sanctioned military apparatus that is today respected as a legitimate fighting force by the majority of US and other media. Nor is this a singular case. The Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Irish Republican Army both began as terrorist groups fighting what they saw to be an oppressive and occupational foreign country, and both are now legitimately held political bodies without sanctioned military wings. Even Hamas, still held as a terrorist group by the United States and Britain, and still wielding a paramilitary wing, has a political body which was elected to office.
Is it not only possible but probable that Al-Qaeda will follow along a similar evolution? It certainly seems to be the human way to establish power by first violently taking it away from those that we feel are using it against us unfairly. I wonder what Karon’s verdict on bin Laden will be then. Or perhaps by that far away and hypothesized date, history itself will be able to clearly show a judgment on Karon’s opinion journalism. Lucky for me, his history is comprised of fantastically convenient eight year increments, I’ll be able to claim the victory of my argument against him before I retire.
I understand the need and desire to bolster our spirits on this auspicious day. I continue to cry when I watch documentaries and even narrative films on 9/11, I feel that need to be safe and to believe I live in a world where terrorism does not exist. However, this is a luxury that we cannot afford to the journalists of our culture. Journalists, like artists, have an ethical obligation that transcends professional mores, and are mandated by the social contract to reveal and publicize the things that we common folk are unaware of or unable to. If journalists wish to share their heart-felt feelings and informed opinions with us they should be mandated to maintain them within their personal websites, and not be paid by internationally recognized news outlets like Time.com to publish those opinions with the implicit stamp of authority and authenticity that comes along with such an arrangement.
Tony Karon is free to consider Osama bin Laden a failure because there exists no Islamic Caliphate in the world. But it is a betrayal of the highest order for Time.com to title Karon’s opinion as a matter of historical fact. I believe there are roughly three thousand murdered Americans who might consider bin Laden rather successful at his pernicious and nefarious agenda, but this is only my opinion. If an actual media outlet asked me to publish this opinion, call it journalism, and offered to pay me for it, I would decline. Not from any sense of moral righteousness, but from the clear knowledge that my opinion does not make a single one of us any safer from the men with guns in this world…and that knowledge does carry the authority and gravity of history.
District 9 (08/14/09)
When comparing one’s positive experience of viewing South African director Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 to the problematic encounters one has with so many prominent American film makers, one is tempted to use the model of a homophobic heterosexual male lamenting an extended period of drunken bisexual experimentation. Considering the voluptuous story that District 9 hangs in front of one’s face, and the nearly flawless and seamlessly integrated visual effects the film attempts to seduce one with, one might imagine the aforementioned heterosexual male asking himself why he ever allowed Quentin Tarantino to go down on him that year.
Gamer (09/04/09)
Although the film makers of Gamer tried to create images that would afford visually sub-textual commentary on a hypothetical vulgarity which is overcoming society, or an obscene montage of simulacra threatening an equally hypothesized humanity, ultimately the attempt is dwarfed by the grotesquely stunted intellect of the film itself; that is, nothing contained within the film is as disturbing or frightening as the thought of the film makers encouraging one another that they were constructing something cinematically cogent. In fact, I stepped out of the auditorium during the film to write this, and in the time that it took to write these two sentences, the warm realization that I would subsequently leave the cinema washed over me like the relaxed pleasure of urinating in the shower.
All About Steve (09/04/09)
When I was eleven years old, I fell off the roof of a two-story house and landed directly on my right arm, fracturing both my fibula and tibia in a near compound manner, and sending me on a torturous road-trip with my father that passed through one hospital that denied me treatment because of my father’s empty bank account, a gas station as my father literally pushed our empty-tanked Comet GT out of the middle of Woodman avenue during rush-hour, and to a second hospital that set my arm as I whimpered through a semi-conscious black-out of prolonged agony. That afternoon was exponentially less painful than sitting through Sandra Bullock’s latest film, All About Steve.
