since we last spoke
The first few paras from my first essay/review thingy for Needles For Teeth:
In a fit of classicism a couple of weeks ago, I picked up Enlightenment thinker and pamphleteer Tom Paine’s Common Sense. Seeing how it’s by a pamphleteer, and the work is pamphlet-sized, I thought it’d be something I could knock out in afternoon. Sad to report, however, my interest tailed off once Paine dropped the eat-the-rich stuff and rights-of-man rhetoric for some olde timey naval math. I made it all the way to page 34.
Of course, a navy, and how you got one, mattered to the political and economic culture of the late 1700s - the sun never set on Britannia because of her fine fleet of ships and shrewd sea captains (and later enabled by a legion of bookkeepers and clerks) - and so that’s what Paine wrote about. Manifestos don’t always make for good reading, but they don’t have to: as a statement of principles, they belong to history more than a reader’s imagination, or maybe more accurately, they belong to a particular kind of reader - a reader-who-was - and that person’s experience of history.
That said, What Does Al Qaeda Want?, a collection of Osama bin Laden’s statements, interviews, and dispatches spanning 1999 to 2004 (including a message from Abu-Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, presumed to be a sort of Al-Qaeda franchisee who’s been operating out of Iraq since the Anglo-American invasion) gathered up by University of Houston doctoral student Robert O. Marlin and whittled down for relevance (i.e., light on the Great Satan ranting) should be engaging and provocative. OBL, after all, is singularly responsible for giving the world that catchall, mind-killing term, “post-9/11": like it or not, he belongs to us and our experience of history, a fact due in large part to the role the West’s played in a region with a profound sense of the past:
What happened to America was something natural, an expected event for a state which has practiced terrorism and the politics of domination and the rule of force against nations ane peoples, and has imposed one model, one thought, one style of life - as if all individuals in the world are servants in its government departments and employees in its companies and commercial institutions.
Well, yes and no.
How will it end? Will it ever? The answers to these questions and every one you've ever had about anything may be found in the new Needles, which you can pick up in all the low-down and dirty nightspots/watering holes/opium dens in the Denver metro area.
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