The Cause for Disgust.

The previous post makes the point that the celebration American's engage in over Bin Laden's death is not the result of their personal lust for vengeance. True, some went through great emotional tragedy, but without the war effort, an appendage of the American nation-state,  their lives would have carried on as the tragedy falls into their past. Of course they remember, but it does not consume their being as it did on the morning of 9/11. For people to support a sustained war effort with ambiguous ends, the U.S. controllers had to provide rationality for their outrage in the face of this attack, and the revenge they vowed to their enemies in response to their losses, which are at once material and symbolic destruction, death and annihilation of property but also a threat towards the institution. If the nation-state were an embodied being, then Bin Laden had just cut off a thumb or a toe.

So the people are duped into a system of belief, that the war effort is really the enactment of their desire for vengeance, against the enemy of justice, the oppressor. But this too is representation. Most people only see the war in varied forms of media coverage, which reflects not the total reality of the war scenario but a popular point of view. The controllers of the nation-state reserve the power to destroy life without consequence, since their collective being retires from the justice system which assigns consequences to individual actions. The whole of the nation-state cannot be put to trial because no greater power can oppose it, and no single individual is wholly accountable for its expressions of power. The expression of this power is in the movements of war, and though select demographics of the American public sacrifice themselves for the war, they do it not for themselves but for an image, their "country". The rhetoric of the nation-state deceives them, makes them believe they are acting for themselves when they really act as a function of the superstructure in its expression of power. The movement of war, in the end, is still made by the nation-state, at the will of its controllers. The same deception occurs in mass society; the images people are given of the tragedy, the war effort, and now of the satisfaction of the vengeance of the nation-state, become their experience, their lives. The will of the nation-state is transmitted to the masses in these images, acting as a veil that conceals their reality. They see the images of war behind glowing screens and think "my God, we are at war!", but they forget that for them this is clearly false. The same occurs at the end of the war when they celebrate victory. But the meaning of this motion is not theirs, nor are they free to choose it by any means. They are absorbed in the expression of the nation-states power, flowing along with its operations in making the movements of war. In celebrating the blood debt paid to the nation-state, they celebrate the manifestation of tyranny which emerges and dominates through its actions. Not only does it win the war overseas, but domestically as well, in dominating the perceptions of those it rules over. To celebrate state executions is a celebration of tyranny, and the celebration of tyranny is the denial of one's life. More specifically it is the denial of the interest one has, or the responsibility for what happens in their life. Strangely enough, to celebrate death in this sense cannot be a celebration of death, since it is ultimately a celebration that escapes from the reality of one's life (which entails death). In the celebration of tyranny which our deceivers dupe us into, our lives become lost though we are not dead. This artificial and stagnant mode of existence is repulsive, and there is no occasion for celebration to be found. It is absurd to think that people celebrate in this sort of existence, and it is this absurdity which causes disgust. In conclusion, let life and death be your cause for celebration, for if either is resigned nothing is left.

The Celebration of Death.

Should we instead approach death in self-resignation? Isn't death one of the two fundamental facts of life (the other is taxes, as the saying goes)? On the other hand, hy would any life-affirming celebration forget about the contrast between life and death? In celebrating life, death is always realized in some sense. It is in the background of the celebration, the base upon which the individual's celebration, their monument to their love of life, is erected. Death cannot be resigned, for there would be no cause for celebration. Why not, then, also celebrate death? Not in the sense that one wishes for death; when one celebrates life, or any aspect of it, one does not wish for it. How could they, when they are immediately granted with their desires. Their celebration is generated by some symbolic meaning found in life, meaning that generates a sens of joy or reverence. Death has meaning also, and being bound to life necessarily, it instantiates an occasion for celebration. But death is rarely experienced by us in our lives, while we experience life everyday. Rather than resign ourselves from the meaning of death, we should embrace its meaning and find in it some kind of celebration, though perhaps not necessarily the rejoicing of the masses. Now American uneral ceremonies too are a kind of celebration, although more rigidly regulated and constraining to the individual participants.Similarly, the image from the movies of the gangstas passing around liquor after the death of one of their homies strikes us as a kind of celebration. In many ways, we already celebrate death. What then, is particularly revolting about celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden?

Death of Bin Laden

The U.S. celebrates a successful operation in the death of Bin Laden. Obama gave a speech recalling the exchanges between U.S. and the Middle East post-9/11. He reminded Americans why they cared at all about military presence in Afghanistan (if they had forgotten). The controllers of the American nation-state have delivered their promise, and the individual's emotional conflict, along with the national tragedy, reaches what resembles a resolution. The relief and satisfaction apparently gives many Americans (but also those across the globe) reason to rejoice.

However, many have voiced concern over the mass celebration. First, they are concerned with the celebration of death in general; for them it is miserable, something to flee from. They express this impulse in terms of their morality, which gives the argument some complexity. After all, what generated America's lust for vengeance was not the so-called War on Terror, but rather a domestic tragedy. The story is as follows: destruction of highly valuable property (valuable in the traditional economic sense, also valuable as cultural symbolism) provoked the controllers of the American nation-state (the owners of the property), and they demand justice. Justice, like the term nation-state, is ambiguous and requires explanation though here is not the place for it. Let it suffice to say that justice is, for the controllers of the U.S., a means of rationalizing their vengeance. They represent their constituents of course, so public media must transmit this rationality of vengeance, the story of injustice which demands blood, to the masses. So people come the be enchanted by the images presented by the media, the prescriptive rhetoric of the nation-state. Their battle is depicted before us as if it is ours. What did the wars in the Middle East really mean for the people of the U.S., or to the controllers of the nation-state for that matter? In this interpretation, any reliably certain answer for this question is lost.