SC119-10

http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/a-state-of-exception-a-state-of-grace-a-state-of-denial/

A State of Exception . A State of Grace . A State of Denial

How are we to make sense of this ongoing war of words? How do we understand the cocky swagger, the egoism of this continuing and unabated national self-importance of American Exceptionalism? The bobbing-head-doll leading this parade — our charade of international self aggrandizement — continues to demonstrate why such an attitude is so very dangerous — for our own health and the health of the planet. To take oneself so seriously as to thoughtlessly LORD it over the rest of the globe is dangerous in any hands and in any framework. True, we may be exceptional at misreading how the rest of the world perceives us. And we are exceptionally ignorant of the terror we unleashed on the original inhabitants of the Americas, as well as the torture we inflicted on those tribal peoples from Africa we abused in order to create human-livestock to perform our unskilled labors. We are exceptional in our ignorance of the world we inhabit, from the subtleties of cultural and linguistic variation to the gross identification of geographies.

We believe, in keeping with the Abrahamic tradition grounding this nation, that we are a chosen people; chosen to lead the rest of humanity into some promised land. Of course, for decades that self-delusion was kept in check somewhat by our alter ego, the Soviet regime, which also thought itself exceptional in some critical respects. After all, they too wanted to convert the world to their specific view of human relations, marginally less hierarchical than our own, and perhaps more assertively aggressive, but no more authoritarian in its intention.

We need to give up this delusion of exceptionalism, just as surely as we need to give up the illusion that we are a democracy. We are neither exceptional or democratic in any meaningful sense of those terms. And while our leaders continue to feed us on the fairytale about living in some state of grace — that no matter what we do it must be right, righteous and good because of who we are — the facts before us tell a different tale altogether. But we cannot give up this fairytale, just as we cannot give up the myth of democracy or human progress, which we have been chosen to lead. At least, those running the show and reading the polls will work overtime to insure that we never give up such illusions. They have too much to lose. At the very least, they need us to watch television and buy whatever it is they are selling now.

They have honed and refined the tools to keep us in check and enslaved to their fairytale. Not only with the strong diversionary tactics provided by the propaganda of consumer economics, but, now with the enriched tools of the security state covertly built on the foundation of new ‘terrorist’ propaganda, one perhaps created in large measure by their own prior machinations, in order to justify the build up under the guise of safeguarding our exceptional lifestyle.

Yet, who is the target here, and who, the protected? It is becoming increasingly clear that we are as much a target as are the ‘others.’ The revelations of Manning, Assange, and Snowden are just a few who give body and voice to that intuition. We, The People, can not even step back far enough or long enough to see, let alone admit, that this lifestyle they are seeking to maintain is itself unsustainable — fleeting, destructive, and ultimately unfulfilling because the fulfillment of one desire leads to more, ad infinitum, until all efforts and all resources are focused on and dedicated to achieving one goal, maintaining the system itself.

And they will do ‘whatever it takes’ to achieve that goal, whether it requires decimating all who refuse to accept their terms, depleting all available resources, or even reducing human existence to a virtual life lived in underground cities on another planet. And when a small cadre of compatriots tries to question them (like with the OWS movement), it must be snuffed out before it gains traction. If a regime needs to be changed to gain better access to vital resources, so be it. Finally, they will keep exploiting the sciences and technologies of control and manipulation in order to maintain the upper-hand on all social, political, and natural forces. At least they will try. It is a perverse manifestation of the ‘will to power’ unique to a State (a people) that believes it is unfettered, no longer bound by the intersticies and the intertwinings to which all natures must adhere, human and nonhuman alike. It is a community living in denial of itself (its connectedness) by believing it lives in a state of grace, and therefore elevates itself above those who live daily in fear and trembling. It is the mistaken self conception of a would-be Superman.