on structure

As I grow older, I realize more and more the importance of structure, and how irrelevant it appears to the casual observer. In large part, I think structure is taken for granted. We awake, the paper is there, on our doorstep. We expect the mails. We expect trains to run on time (even if this is a vain hope in Boston). But to simply look at the memnotechnical structure of our days and to believe this an adequate expression of societal order is a mistake. Trains aren't just plunked there, purchased at the local train store by hobbyists. They require rail lines, traffic signals, planing of traffic patterns, material cost outlays for personel and maintenance. They must conform to a gauge, and divers specifications established by various committees facing varying degrees of public oversight. A train, at a station, in some proximity to your house at a (reasonably) proscribed time is, in fact, quite a marvel.

Or take airflight. I was reading, on a whim (thanks to the tender ministrations of the Central Square Salvation Army which had all paperbacks for just 79 cents) the fine, if grotesquely prurient, adventure yarn Alive (also a major motion picture. I'm sure everyone's heard about Alive, since everyone loves canibalism, and everyone loves the particular voyeurism of survival stories (just ask Jon Krakauer who perfectly rode the line between observation and schadenfreude into a brilliant book). Alive is particularly bad in this aspect, as Piers Paul Read painstakingly gives the reader a culinary tour of the thousand ways to canibalize a man (slice up the tendons with a razor blade, let 'em cure in the Andean sun, eat raw like so much beef jerky; braise lightly with a camp stove, eat rare like a good steak; smash skull and evacuate brains with the ostensible goal of harvesting glucose, lightly season with pepper; consume semi-rotten entrails, taking care to avoid stray digestive juices; consume lungs for no particular reason beyond brute extigency; avoid genitals at first, but later eat scrotum; eat liver, early and often, for the minerals and vitamins) and the thousand and one ways to justify such behavior (brute extingency, variously etiolated scholastic arguments about the canibalistic nature of the Eucharist (later officially disavowed), half-mad statements about one-ness and elements of homosocial sacrifice, poorly digested stews of catholic theology filtered through the athletic brain of a playboy rugy team, authentic hunger) all the while insisting on his particular species of journalistic integrity (his own catholicism, his will-to-truth over the material, his bravery in fully recognizing the extingency of survival, the clearing of the air around a (horrid) event, prurient interest and thinly veiled delight in such offbeat gustatory pleasures). The book is an unpleasant masterpiece, a anti-Julia Child, a gastronomical voyage into (fortunately) rarely-charted waters. But, more importantly, the book is also a exegesis on the (banal) failures of poor, barely motivated, third world countries to have effective air command and control situtations, for their pilots to be poorly trained and to lack effective technology, and for stupid navigational mistakes (coupled with idiotic search and rescue strategies). Alive might be a menu masquerading as reportage, but it also unveils the importance of structure.

We should be glad, after all, that we live in America, where nobody eats eachother, not least because of the toxic levels of cholesterol in your average Joe.

On 9/11

I'm not sure, in retrospect, if I was ready for the outpouring of 9/11 coverage over the past couple of weeks. I think I would have largely avoided the TV coverage if not for the girlfriend: it would have been easy enough to not watch that footage again, just watch South Park re-runs and the odd Sox game. I remember that day, five years ago, so vividly. For me, it was the second plane, the second tower, that really hit. The first tower had been hit when I was in class, and although people were milling around Baxter--I remember that the NYTimes' website was down--it was all still very confused: mistake? horrible mistake? accident? And then, with definitive physical certainty, the second plane streaking across the frame, just clearing those few other buildings on the skyline, and then that impact, which you could feel, in the pit of your stomach, standing hundreds of miles away in sun-kissed Williamstown. That's when we all knew: that awful instant, freshly replayed, with the plane, and the flame, and the smoke, and the realization that we weren't invincible, after all.

I think, though, that reading 9/11 as "the West's (inevitable) come-uppance" is a huge mistake. After all, that's the Bin Laden-ite party line: 9/11 is the necessary riposte to a pro-Israel foreign policy. I've said for a while that the truth is darker: 9/11 is the totalized, media-age, expression of the barbarian impulse. 9/11 is simply the last salvo in the battle between civilization and barbarism, order and chaos, the Roman and the Pict. With an impressive flourish, the subaltern uses the conqueror's own technology against him, strikes against him with technology of his own design. How else can we read 9/11 but as the ultimate expression of vague rage and impotence: buildings which barbarians could never construct are destroyed with planes barbarians could never design.

That's what I took away, from my 15 minutes in high school at the base of those skyscrapers, impossibly tall, impossibly graceful, the (seemingly) casual expression of commercial and financial dominance, the markers, at the prow of Manhattan of the greatest city in the greatest civilization on Earth. What grace, what elegance, what sheer engineering audacity--110 stories! I felt pride. Pride is what I feel whenever I fly, (well, now, pride maybe mixed with a little trepidation) at the mix of physics and engineering, the (now) casual achievement of launching hundreds of tons of passengers and luggage and carryons and personal items into the sky--the fucking sky--and within hours, halfway across the globe.

I never considered that anyone thought anything else.

I never thought that barbarians felt rage. Hatred. Disgust. How dare planes fly? How dare air travel be inexpensive and over-arching? How dare skyscrapers house thousands productively working, a thousand feet above a bustling city? How dare they can, when we cannot?

I'm sure the Visigoths felt the same way when their filthy toes touched the smooth marbles of the Forum. There's something unseemly, the distance between civilization and barbarism, and there's only one barbarian response: to smash and destroy.

***

2,996 people died five years ago, today. (I'm pretty sure that figure never included the barbarians--and it never should.) We cannot forget that we're fighting for civilization, and against barbarism, and that order, buildings, beauty, airplanes, and all the things we hold dear (civil society, rule of law, all you can eat buffets). We cannot forget that there is no negotiation, no quarter, in this fight. Our barbarian opponents will not rest until they can dip fungal toes in the reflecting pool, will not stop until they can deface Lincoln to fufill their esoteric Islamic prohibitions against graven images, will not cease until they can reduce the rest of the world to the flea-ridden, dusty, entropic mess that is the dearest dream of nomadic tent-dwellers.

Let's Roll, America...Let's Roll!