<div dir="ltr"><div>You're not off the mark, Alan. You're also right that blindness is not a very good word. By blind, I mean blind to consequences that ultimately fold back on the agents of violence as well as their victims. This is a kind of blindness that inhabits the most precise forms of vision. But you're a poet, right? We need new words.<br><br></div>I read a family biography of the Kochs. Smart, precise, driven, violent people. Maybe we also need a new conception of sight, an ethicopoetics of sight, so as to see and embrace the world in a different light than these people do.<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 2:13 PM, Alan Sondheim <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:sondheim@panix.com" target="_blank">sondheim@panix.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
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Hi Brian, for me the key here is the phrase "the blind violence of war" - but this war, these wars, are precisely not blind on any level - not only the obvious ones of surveillance, hacking, drones, etc., but also in terems of destruction and its consequences. The regime does not care about collateral damage; the rich (Mike Davis et al) remain enclaved, and that's fundamental. An example is this:<br>
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"What the U.S. House of Representatives did today actually a very narrow majority of the House was shameful. Cruel. Callous. Venal.<br>
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The vote in favor of H.J. Resolution 69, authored by Alaskas Rep. Don Young, was 225 to 193. Those 225 members voted to overturn a federal rule years in the works, and crafted by professional wildlife managers at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to stop some of the most appalling practices ever imagined in the contemporary era of wildlife management. Denning of wolf pups, killing hibernating bears, spotting grizzly bears from aircraft and then shooting them after landing, and trapping grizzly bears and black bears with steel-jawed leghold traps and snares. The stuff of wildlife snuff films."<br>
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Again: "This eye-opening gap is also growing rapidly: Over roughly the last 15 years, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women who are among the top 5 percent of income earners in America, but by just 0.32 and 0.04 years for men and women in the bottom 5 percent of the income tables.<br>
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When we think about income inequality in the United States, we think that low-income Americans cant afford to purchase the same homes, live in the same neighborhoods, and buy the same goods and services as higher-income Americans, says Michael Stepner, a PhD candidate in MITs Department of Economics. But the fact that they can on average expect to have 10 or 15 fewer years of life really demonstrates the level of inequality weve had in the United States." (MIT news)<br>
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We like to think that war is blind, that somehow it represents a fundamentally "crippled" condition. But today that isn't the case; war is simply one of many actions carried out by regimes, militia groups, and so forth; it is literally daily bread. The US has an increasing number of militias, neo-nazi groups, etc., as well.<br>
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War is a culling by any means possible.<br>
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I find my own theoretical underpinnings, by the way, dissolving in a recognition of brute force, a force which has been a long time coming.<br>
One of our main environmental interests here is in the caretaking of manatees off the U.S. eastern coasts. They're dwindling in numbers, but they're potentially being taken off the endangered species list (and that itself may be eliminated). There are only a few thousand left. For researchers and environmentalists, it's easy to identify them - every single one of them, except for very young calves, are recognized by the brutal scars on their back, left by boat propellers. It would be easy to stop this (which also results in death of course) - prop guards are inexpensive, but the boaters and skiiers fight back on this. There's no blindness here; everyone knows what's happening, manatees are monitored, thermoclines of waters around power plants are studied, etc. But people who might make a difference don't care.<br>
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I think this all of this requires a different model of violence - not blind violence, but all-seeing violence, big-data violence which also presents foresight and hindsight, theory and analysis - a kind of violence where the only blindness might be modeled by snow-blindness, too much light, too much knowledge. But data mining also involves totalizations and analysis - it's never just raw - and the violence is one, I think, of total knowledge and analytics. From the position of a gun collector or high-income enclave, no one cares.<br>
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And it's a long way from Vietnam, say, where the over-stated Pentagon kill stats (etc. etc.) needed unraveling (again I refer to Fire in the Lake).<br>
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Finally, there's not, of course, just one or two wars (Native American lands, environments), there are many; the country seethes with them...<br>
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- Alan (hope I'm not off the mark here)<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
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