Began reading Against the Wall tonight in the tub. It's an anthology that explores the politics of physical/virtual walls through the subject of Israel’s "peace barrier"--a wall that annexes Palestinian territory beyond the 1948 borders. Though Sorkin (ed.) calls this collection a "polemic" in his introduction, I find his assessment of the situation to be less dogmatic than other things I've read on the topic. It's not really pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, but more a discussion of what it means to live in a world of nations that naturalize their own superiority, claims to territory, and aspirations by some notion of what it means to be a citizen of said nation. From the introduction: "Neither the utopia of a single state [as alluded to by E. Said] nor the dystopia of a bio-politicized planet offers much hope here: citizens of the world still enjoy very few rights. Only nations secure them." In this equation, nations secure rights, but nations themselves are tangles of imaginary borders and lines of demarcation [thinking of the John Sayles film Lonestar as I write this] that give the facade of permanence and necessity. Nevertheless, this has somehow become our reality. Sorkin's anthology further suggests the ways in which walls and barriers separate socially stratified members of societies from the wealthy and powerful. Also interesting in light of the attention Jimmy Carter's new book is getting is Sorkin's parallel of the annexed territories to Apartheid in South Africa. Should prove to be an interesting read... And I enjoy reading something that has only one star on Amazon -- must be truly radical! Its only review is a scathing one from someone who seems not to have read to book or if so is very reactionary.
On the back burner is Eco's Mysterious Flame which I can't seem to get into for its seeming frivolity. I liked the idea: an antiquarian book dealer who looses his memory of things that he's emotionally attached to or motivated by but retains his book-learned memory attempting to piece together his life's memories through said books... More and more I have little patience for male protagonists in fiction.
In attempting to read Eco's novel I've been thinking a lot about the human brain and memory, egocentrically about how my own life is understood through my memories. I've always thought of myself as someone who has a horrible long term memory constantly attempting to rediscover my past through audio-visual materials (family photos, videos, etc)... But imagining attempting to recreate this personal narrative through the pictures and records I currently have of my life would be a nightmare. And it keeps reoccurring to me the story one of my professors told in class a few weeks ago about how all of his family photos have his father's finger in them, imagining him leafing through these pictures only to regain a memory of his father being a horrible photographer, or having fat fingers, or some other explanation he can reconstruct.
In other news, the best pick-up line right now, I think, is "So grab ya friends and let's take ya back to my house, we can watch Sex in the City or Desperate Housewives..." (Name that song!)
And, in local celebrity news--there was a great interview with Chris Soghoian, IUB doctoral student known recently in the news for his misadventures with the FBI and TSA, on WFHB's Interchange last night. Most interesting is his discussion of Tor research at the end of the interview... Check it out--
download the interview at http://news.wfhb.org--
12/5/06 - Does the government's "no-fly" list make air travel any safer? Do other supposed "security measures" really protect us from terrorists? Host Chad Carrothers spends an hour with Chris Soghoian, the Bloomington grad student who drew national attention when he set up a website that allowed visitors to print fake Northwest Airlines boarding passes in an effort to expose flaws in national security policy. The federal Transportation Security Administration forced him to take down the page and the FBI raided his Bloomington home and "borrowed" his computers and passport. Find out why Chris did what he did, his views on the role that researchers, academics, and common citizens take in studying, criticizing and pointing out the flaws in our security systems, and why he thinks the federal government hasn't learned the intended lesson in this WFHB local radio exclusive.
6 comments:
I thought the WFHB interview was a disappointing though, becuase even if the way the U.S. views security is fundamentally flawed, and we aren't made more safe, Chris still invests himself, both in terms of the time and energy of his research, and in terms of belief in the narrative of security. Fundamentally, this narrative of security suggests that there is an amorphous human threat set on harming and amorphous sense of "us", and that we can do something to protect "ourselves" from it. The thing that is troubling about this narrative of security is that it never fully aknowledges that the threats we perceive are from other humans, nor does it seek to understand those who we perceive as threatening in a way that is more complex (or even compassionate) than stereotypes or prejudices. Stepping outside of that narrative, I find that the prospect of violence is still troubling, but that the motivations for violence can be quite rational and mirror motivations or violence that follows from my life, or its cultural context. So, trying to protect myself from harm seems pretty futile, either personally, in belief in the idea of security, or through the proxy of goverment in waging wars or making policy decisions about airline regulations. It seems far more likely that some kind of harm, either physical or psychological, will follow from these actions than some kind of harm will befall me as a result of a terrorist attack. I hope that we can live our lives in a way that seeks to understand others, and seeks to change the relationship between people, or nation-states, or cultures that make violence and retaliation seem almost rational.
Tor is pretty awesome, however. It's software that is fairly easy to use that allows you to anonymize your web (and other Internet) traffic.
Yeah, I feel you Geoff, but I still feel like as long as we have government bodies like the TSA purporting to keep us secure it is important to have citizen interaction with these bodies and I feel like Chris was pretty bold in forcing a dialog to happen, which is always good. It is, nevertheless, too bad that the only voices in the dialog are invested in "the narrative of security" as you say.
hey cool "blog" corinna! the word blog only sounds good when you say it.
haha you're on the internet!!!!
i'll read this at work!
hi cory, i feel like im spying on you!
holy shit, this i spretty weird in the sense that i should be talking to you about this instead that typing words on a computer, but i am, so it goes,
i was actually the lady that called during the wfhb program becacause i thought it was extremely short sighted to just discuss airport security without trying to at least mention the reasons why someone would be willing to die and kill to harm the united states or any other country.. but i dont think they really got it, they seemed more just annnoyed, like it was the rambling of another bloomington lefty.. yeah..
thats all ive got.. but i miss you
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