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.

How can one man have so much power?

OK, I'll be the first to offer a content post. The first day of class, despite a SNAFU with the syllabus copying, we were able to look at a clip of violent media, Kanye's "Monster" video:

I remember the first time I heard "Monster," driving along 280 in late September, listening to Hot 97, taking pleasure in my proximity to NYC. The infectious yet low-fi hook gave the track an aura of legitimacy and disaffectedness (a trait growing in popularity), and Nicki Minaj's verse was some sort of schizophrenic female version of a more-violent Busta Rhymes. I liked it.

Then while I visited my family in Louisiana for Christmas, I sought out the leaked video. It starts out with a shot of a hanging model. As in from the neck hanging. And then Kanye, it his rationalface, poses a few corpses of more dead ladies, giving Cee-Lo Green's Ladykiller moniker an outright challenge for the title. Jay-Z shows up next like Aleister Crowley on Wall Street, but black, and rhymes "conscience" with "monster." It seems that Mr. Carter has done a few things to be ashamed of, such as vampirism and potentially necromancy. Finally, Nick Minaj re-enacts at least two or so Freudian case studies, dressed as both a little girl with pink hair and a dominatrix, and then tortures herself, while keeping the loud persona with the dominatrix and the sweet persona with the little girl. If nothing else, we might revisit this video when we get to the Buffy section of the course (which will be under the heading "transgression"). Somewhere between all of that, Kanye reappears with a severed lady-head and an "aw shucks" attitude. Everybody knows he's a motherfucking monster, indeed.

So Kanye and Jay-Z and Nicki seem to imply that they're fairly monstrous due to their success and influence and power (vis Kanye's album). It's a fun fantasy, sure. The megalomaniacal businessman cum artist who... does what exactly? Stores dead models? Eats entrails? All while making dope beats?

This video seems to also throw the "rap-is-misogynistic" criticism back to pundits. Not only do the rappers call women bitches, but they also murder them and use their corpses to decorate their overpriced apartments in Tribeca. So should we take Kanye and posse's video as a satire via exaggeration? Wouldn't that just cloud the fact that rap, no matter how much we like it, still has a great deal of woman-hating to go around.

However we "read" the video, one thing is evident: it's much more fun to believe that the bad guys are lovable rapper millionaires like Jay-Z and Kanye and Nicki Minaj than the people with the real power of violence. They're creating an imaginary world to make their lyrics matter because no matter how clever and shocking their words seem to be, the braggadoccio of "I'm rich and a libertine to boot" became a cliché of hip-hop about twenty years ago and, in an America of social media and financial depression, is becoming less and less relevant.