clamoring for atrocity

Music: My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: Diamonds and Daggers Like many of us, I awoke this morning to the horrific news that London had been bombed, and this hour, it seems there are approximately 40 confirmed deaths. What is almost as equally disturbing is the way the news media are choosing to cover the "event." News has decidedly entered the zone of "real time" coverage as the immediacy of terror is willfully elongated into an exciting, Speilberg-esque state of continual emergency. Now it's time for Blair to assert the state of exception, no?

Watching television news coverage of the London bombings—the inane chatter that mindlessly repeats the same, scanty details over and over and over to fill the time and keep the sense of immediate presence alive—one cannot help but think of Baudrillard's many compelling arguments about terrorism, especially the following:

It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity.

The news media, as we all know, is almost synonymous with Western government—at least here in the United States—and so the gaped-mouthed reporting and clamoring for bloody images and photos of blown up buses are used to create a sense of deep anticipation to ready us for the phallic assertion of community. Just like Speilberg's War of the Worlds, atrocity generates the desire for the assertion of the sovereign, the mystical rites of the force of law.

So not once, but twice the G8 "leaders" met behind Tony Blair as the inevitable dirty work is done (notably, with Bush on his right): the bombings are rightly condemned as barbaric, but then, quickly packaged into a binary that characterizes whatever the resolution of the G8 talks will be, it is perfectly righteous in comparison. More disturbing yet predictable, of course, are Bush's inane remarks urging "vigilance" and home and stressing, repeatedly, the "resolve" of world leaders. "The War on Terror goes on," he said to reporters this morning asserting his righteous rigidity. They, I mean we, secretly want atrocity to remind us of how good we are.