[Newspoetry] Rare Legislative Victory for Terrorists

[emerick at chorus.net]

DateLine: America, on the 3rd Memorial Day(*) for 9-11.

(*)  We need a National Commission to choose a fitting and proper name for this day of infamy. But, who here today remembers that famous day and year, by name, as Paul Revere rode upon?  Or, do we really Remember the Alamo or Remember the Maine, if we couldn't tell you the precise day of the week (or even the year, in most cases) when they happened?

(*)  Oh, I remember Pearl Harbor Day, as a day to live in infamy -- that 7th of December 1941, seven years before I was born, to even have a memory of things past, things past life, things in past lives.

(*)  But, why remember anything, when everything like that is written down, there in the archives?  One only needs a referent; one only needs to learn how referents happen, as names for the lexicon, as indices in the digest of life.

(*)  And, every kind of day of recollection can not happen in a year.  My calendar days are already over-loaded with referents to impossible worlds -- those of the past that can not come again.  Philosophers love to speak of possible worlds -- but they often just mean the future, as if it were an alternative to the present.  I speak of impossible worlds, because I know that nothing noteworthy happens twice.  (If it does happen once, says the logician, it is noteworthy.  And, self-referentially, the logician says that the first time that something happens twice would truly be a noteworthy event.  But, if more than once, then everything happens not merely twice, but again and again, in times without a limiting number, as if we lived in some oscillating universe -- a possibility quite dim in Gamow's view.)

(*)  I rather speak of impossible worlds; they can not happen again.  Anything that looks like a repetition, even a repetition iself, is no repetition if you give to it a long enough stretch of the rope.  Repetition requires a certain kind of indifference, a willingness to find a way to make life more interesting by making it less interestingly unique.  In a word, we create interest in some aspects by making some other aspects boring.

(*)  Take the hyper-inflated significance of terrorism in the American life world today, for instance.  There is to death, a statistical character -- the chatter of morbidity.  But, once in awhile, according to the imperial intelligence analysts, some part of the sign of death -- its signal -- strengthens against the white noise background, the poor white trash of the Western World.

(*)  When the signal, relatively, rises (or to be fair, attenuates) appreciably, then it is possible to say that we pass some threshhold  A threshhold itself is always an arbitrary delimitation, a mere mark on a space always already covered by some other marks.  Now, this is a condition that GS Brown, Laws of Form, does not address: the always already marked-up quality of the space.  But, to be fair, Brown does says, just imagine if a void were possible, even though we know it is not.  (No void is possible because the world began from a void and nothing ever happens twice.)  <<On reflection, Brown may have been only talking about a Genesis, in a reversible-state universe -- which is not even a possible parallel (if I may clumsily impose that adjective here) to our world.>>

(*)  Restating the obvious: our world is not reversible.  
Make of that what you will.  The people who make of that something are called Historians -- they trace the paths.  Sociologists (prototypic of all social scientists) find it boring to recount all the innumerable details of such a kind of infinity as even one moment of history might occupy -- as if anyone could read or write a text equal to the never-ending task of describing even one moment.

(*) The Sociologist states laws about History -- for example, the "Law of Supply and Demand".  It really was never a law, but that term is a popular appellation and it is often wise to honor the myths, rites, and customs (and maybe the habits in which the disguises of repetition falsely hear their own false echoes).

(*)  But, I am no wise guy. (Did I have to tell you that?  Did I spoil my conclusion for you?  You could have ended me, anytime, anyway.)  What we SocSci folk call "Laws" -- fondly aping the machines of Nature -- are truly methods for approaching questions.  There is such a process as Demand and there is such a process as Supply -- these processes are as things to us.  And, we believe that the Good itself is trapped in the webs of Supply and Demand --such that these opposing curves sometimes have a region of overlap, of tangency, or of intersection.  The Law commands us to speak in its terms, but it is does not tell what we actually find in the given situtation of some Good.

(*)  Take the over-vaunted terrorist of hyper-inflated terrorism, for instance.  The terrorist has a Demand for those necessities of death that will enable him (or her) (or them, if we wish to be more faceles about the matter) to accomplish his (her) (their) (or our?) objective in the most satisfactory manner -- to wit, to kill or destroy the greatest possible number for the least possible cost.  In short, terrorist Demand has a production problem for which it seeks out its natural levels of Supply.

(*)  Oh, happy is the day when Supply and Demand come closer together, unite and become one in some great transactional interface of the impersonal marketplace, which has no other values at all -- except the interchangeable equivalence of trading activity with personal identity.

(*)  It is altogether fitting and proper, in a Bush-led world, that we marked the 3rd anniversary memorial, in a free-market way, by making automatic-rapid fire weapons more widely available again, in the free economy.  Terrorists of all stars and stripes can well appreciate the meaning of their economic freedom, of their uninhibited right to keep and bear all arms, for they most nobly embody the anti-communal spirit of such free right.

(*)  The only sad thing is that we have no name for that infamous Day of Anarchy, T-Day, which happens but once, everytime we turn around, Today.