POST of the Week: The Judge and Saddam and Terror Stories

Welcome back to Post of the Week. This time, I am posting two responses. The first is from Peter Newman, His thoughts provide an interesting take on the "real vs. fake" violence issue that we'll be discussing more and more as the semester creeps forward. The second, written by Andrew Ehrlich is not exactly in antagonism with the first but does call to mind the surreality of documentary violence.

----

"The Judge and Saddam" by Peter Newman

Throughout Blood Meridian, the Judge terrorizes countless numbers of people varying in gender, ethnicity, and social roles. When encountering bands of Apache Indians, he is ruthless and barbaric. Strolling into a bar, his actions are about as explosive and uncertain as a terrorist bomber. The judge has the capability of walking away from a heated situation or destroying every living creature in the bar. Sometimes he is not the one to initiate contact but rather the instigator within his gang, provoking others to do the dirty work for him. The violence demonstrated by terrorists or terrorist like governments echoes the same imagery in how they handle affairs. Furthermore, I decided to watch hanging of Saddam Hussein and after viewing it I regretted it. The video basically shows everything from being roped, to the floor dropping, and finally showing his face afterwards. Although this was not an act of terrorism but a court ordered decision, it does reflect the violence in Middle East and how they handle situations quite differently. For instance stealing can result in your hand being chopped of rather than a slap on the wrist.

Near the end of the novel, we observe the Kid taking a different approach to his feelings of what the Judge has done. Suddenly the Kid views the Judge as a terrorist, wreaking havoc unexpectedly and bringing down entire towns. Saddam Hussein basically brought down a whole country and established firm control by also using terrorist tactics of his own. A glance of what Saddam was accused of begins with the killing of 148 Shiites, the killing of political parties, the killing of religious figures, the displacement of Kurds, the invasion of Kuwait, and a poison gas attack in Halabja. I could replace Shiites with Apaches and Kuwait with Chihuahua and we have the same person.

However, the Judge was a fictitious character and his bloody imagery does not have the same emotional impact as the video of Saddam being hung. Even how the violence was delivered to me has a much stronger impact. Watching a video tells me what to think while reading words promotes the use of my imagination. The video hit me with such force that I was momentarily stunned, thinking to myself, “Did I really just witness that?” On the other hand, reading the novel provoked very little response besides for, “Well that’s gross.” There is little debate in my mind that realty overshadows fiction. In addition to, video makes it feel that your witnessing the act in real time while writing creates a cushion between the character and the reader.

----

"Terror Stories" by Andrew Ehrlich

Humans make sense of physical objects and the progression of time by constructing stories. Stories are made to have a “point” or “moral.” They are used formally to educate and informally to make an argument or derive pieces of knowledge by connecting a series of events.

The 9/11 footage looks like a movie. The images of the two jet planes hitting the world trade center look surreal. By definition terrorism is dramatic. People commit terrorism to attract attention and demonstrate power. People can kill each other in simple and efficient ways but they choose to scalp each other to send a message. For the same reason, terrorists use dramatic routes to kill people. The planes hitting the world trade center sent the message that no American is safe. The World Trade Center is a symbol of capitalism and Western philosophy. It was chosen as a symbolic target. In Blood Meridian the Judge chooses to take scalps as a symbol of his power.

Terrorism is often random and sudden. That sends the message that if an attack can occur any time in any place, no one is safe. The Judge uses this tactic when he plays with the Apache boys and then suddenly kills them. His friends and enemies are equally scared by the unprovoked and unpredictable violent.

Finally, the anonymity of the killer is a tool for generating fear. When the Kid passes a tree with dead babies hanging from the branches, the reader is afraid because the perpetrator is unknown. Similarly, terrorism can be anonymous if it will supplement the fear. The group Anonymous carries out denial of service attacks and other online terror attacks against organizations like Fox News and Scientology. The Unabomber mailed bombs through US postal service anonymously before his capture.

When I watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center I could not shake the feeling that I was in a story. Just like Blood Meridian, the feelings of loss of control and anonymous, senseless violence created a shroud of unreal-ness that was not only horrifying and disturbing but exciting and surreal.

The Right Questions--Blood Meridian and the American War Cycle

As we’ve looked at the Judge’s famous “War is God” speech in Blood Meridian and basically agreed that while his (perversion of) Nietzschean philosophy may or may not be the most ethically sound outlook, his conception of war is a fairly accurate description of the way we conceive of war—if not exactly the way it actually is. He claims, “War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.” Following the mystical subtext of the novel, he proclaims war to be God, as according to gnostic understanding of the divine, God is that which is unified.

Now this seems to be a monstrous extension of occult logic, but nevertheless, it seems right to say that war creates an egregore, meaning an aggregation of a group’s collective will which then “takes a life of its own.” Not so much that war creates real deities, but that the identities of the participants do get subsumed in the greater Will of the “war effort.” And even if this is inaccurate, we don’t treat it as such, creating monsters out of the collective ideologies of our enemies. The Nazi Party. Radical Islam. The Mongolian Hordes. Each of these enemies certainly embodies physical elements that are particular, but more so, they embody an ideology that casts our conceptions of individuals on the enemy side in a new light—that they are merely the mindless supplicants carrying out the will of their egregore. We ignore the very real possibility that not everyone who goes to war does so because he identifies with an ideology, and that even he does, that doesn’t mean that he’s any less human and shouldn’t be reduced to the sum of his beliefs.

After the September 11 attacks, we all got to witness as over-night, our nation became obsessed with the threat of terrorist attack at the hands of Muslim extremists. Often, Muslims in America suffered abuse, whether or not they actually agreed with the actions of the terrorists. We equated them with the egregore we were fighting against. The media became so jumbled in the aftermath, that people believed our aggressive entry into Iraq had something to do with 9/11, further attributing the egregore of the terrorists to everyday people in Iraq—people who probably knew as little about us as we did of them, people who were often more concerned with acquiring their daily bread than defeating the “Big Evil.”

Following the bleak logic of Judge Holden, we have an unconquerable urge to know our universe, and when we can’t know something, we destroy it. We cannot know the other, so we destroy him if we can. War is a test of wills, and like any other test of wills, we are fascinated by it. Here’s a link to CNN’s Iraq coverage, here’s Afghanistan, and here’s a great compilation of the 9/11 news footage. There’s much more than this out there. It’s interesting to think that the videos of the planes going into the twin towers shares a lot in common with the violence in Blood Meridian—it is depicted for its own sake. The news shows violent images just to show them to you, to inform you that they exist, and to give you some sort of experience of them mediated through representation. Like in art, sometimes these images intend to outrage or shock, but other times, they’re intended to be shown just for experience of seeing. Why else would we want to watch the destruction of the World Trade Center?

It’s for the knowledge of it happening, and because we can’t be there ourselves. A witness, and as I quoted in my last post, each man is tabernacled, etc, witness, etc. I’m opening up the discussion here for comments on Blood Meridian, politics, and the aesthetics of news violence. I’m not sure I have the answers here, but maybe through discussion, we might at least have the right questions.