A WORD FROM MAVERICK CONCERNING
RECENT HORRIFIC EVENTS

You can't escape the feeling of disaster that pervades the country: at universities, culture studies folk are pasting the internet with urgent messages to remember the political history of US hypocrisy and self-interest in foreign affairs. The newspapers of Latin America, while sympathetic to our losses, remind their citizens and leaders of the crimes of imperialism and oppression that have lead us to such disastrous events. On the other hand, we have Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson claiming that the sins of America are the reason that His Almighty has rained fire down upon New York.

Finally, we have the pressure of the American government to construct a war from the frank and vicious results of terrorism. They claim that any nation, if it is to continue to exist in the modern sense, must be able to defend itself and its citizens.
The violent deaths of more than six thousand citizens cannot go without some explanation. But I fear that there will be none. National and historical pressure to respond is too great, too deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness because of American experiences in World War 2. You will see no references to Vietnam or the anti-war movement it spawned; that all means nothing here and now.

To go back into recent world history, as the good professor suggests, is but a first step in the direction of a mythically evasive hypothesis of causation. You might find yourself reading an Arabic History of the Crusades, or reading through the Koran in search of the right words to explain the present events. Conversely, you might be listening to the men of the Bush administration using words of war that can be artfully deconstructed by Noam Chomsky or any other university person with a degree in the liberal arts or humanities. We are now in a space that permits the immediate action of war, and demands the silence of the population. Death, occurring on a grand scale, unremarkable in some parts of the world and in some recent histories, suddenly becomes real to North Americans who are only used to watching safely from movie houses and living room couches. When war happens, when states sanction violence as a means to an end, to kill and to take territory are not to murder and to rob: these shifts in tone and word-choice rationalize violence as a political and social tool, as a restorative tool as well.

To the general populace, what is to be restored in the new war will be the sense of safety lost when those awful planes plunged into the WTC. Because lives will not be restored, because families will not be restored, it is the future that the campaign against terrorism seeks to recover: a future where the free economy of the world permits markets to open, permits consumers to fill the streets again. To the small but vocal group of academics who seek to actively deconstruct the social relations that fold out from the declaration of war, it is important to recognize the false peace that American Globalism established after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It was this false peace that offered by default to establish market-driven economies in the 3rd world abandoned by Moscow. It was also this false peace that lulled North Americans into a sleepy state of psuedo-isolationism. The only thing most of us know about the world outside America is limited, in many cases, to what we see on TV, or the automobiles we drive. Perhaps it is while American TV beamed itself worldwide that our enemies first saw us as truly threatening to them: our brash music videos, our noisy, electric cities, our tranquil, affluent and vapid suburbs, all signifying a spiritual unbalance that only violence could solve.

So you turn to face the violence. You imagine six thousand or more thumb-sized photos pasted to the wall in your office, six thousand or more men, women, and children walking in rows up the street where you live. In the inescapable moments of each death what becomes impossible but necessary to fathom is the utter horror and meaninglessness of it all: what was it like to choose between burning or jumping? What was it like to plunge into the fiery lake formed by the north tower falling? Denied the future, the recent dead ask us to remember what apples taste like, what it's like to go to work in the morning, what it's like to drop our children off at school. What it's like to help with homework or attend a conference. And you turn to face the war. Imagine everything you saw that one morning was a dream cast by a night of too much coffee, pot, and black tobacco. You want to get up and go on with poetry, get up and plan for a weekend in the woods, with the book you were writing about life in northern New Mexico sitting beside you on stump, at twilight before a big fire, the first winter stars becoming visible, your kids running in the meadows with other kids, finding dusky, grainy treasures there. But that was a previous century. The army is gearing up, the stock market is falling. Not a dream, but a real, quiet sadness all around. The shock of a new world that is infinitely strange and recognizable, a world that increasingly asks us to disbelieve the recent tranquil past.

In Solidarity,

Jefe Del Norte