shock and awe

"When I got to my grandma’s house after school, I turned the TV on to watch Pokémon. But instead I saw two buildings in flames. I was angry that some “grownup TV show” was taking over Pokémon"

"Since I grew up watching action movies, I thought the scene was from a movie, not the news."

~ ~~

The fist 'shock and awe', courtesy of CNN, was much earlier. The society of the spectacle-produced by material and political realities, one has to add, lest we think images are self-subsisting.

You remember meeting Hossein, down in the dungeons of Essex. He never really talked about his experience of fighting against the Iraqis way back when. Instead, he would always-and this is typical of the Iranians-make the tea, ask you about your family, talk about poetry (mainly Iqbal) and then say: what's on your mind, K?

Some things you shouldn't speak of, and some things you shouldn't see. You didn't need to be a philosopher or an academic to understand that; it's just the way people used to be brought up (Illich's idea of the 'restrained gaze'). 

But that's probably all over with the relentless onslaught of manufactured images on our sensory experience. 

Only little children now are still amazed by the sight of a rainbow, the first snow, clouds drifting by...

9/11:

You were sitting in an Iranian restaurant with that punk kid, when it happened. An Arab nearly fell off his chair when he learned what happened. "The world changed with.." You didn't believe that for a moment. Prophets and Saints come and go, and still the world is the world. 

D, interviewing an old woman from a village..

"And who will you vote for now?"

General Z, she says.

"But he died 5 years ago!"

Really? Then I won't be voting for him.

...

.....

__  __ ___ ___


Peter Brown writes of how the slow-moving world, the interior world, carried on, almost oblivious of what happened at the frontiers, or on the coasts. You often think this when you go to T's village, just how old the ways are, almost incarnated in the body's gestures. Exploitation, of course..you conveniently ignore to mention: one of those 'gestures' is the body stooped in deference, close to the earth, hands out-reached to touch the spiritual leader's knees or feet. This language, this lowering or bending of yourself, itself something older than Islam, so very, very ancient.

~~

J. Luc Marion: