War in Context

Why War in Context? In October, 2001, I sent a few articles to some friends and colleagues who shared my concern about President Bushs decision to engage in a war on terrorism. These were articles on some of the political and cultural issues whose consideration might have led to an appropriate response to 9/11. I bundled them into a rather long ema... il, subject line: The War in Context. There seemed to be a hunger for the type of material I was able to trawl from the Web so I continued sending out emails. After gathering and distributing articles for a few months, I switched to a blog. For several years, this was a news aggregation site, but nowadays also contains my own analysis at least when I feel like I have something to say. After 9/11, the Middle East seen through American eyes inflamed by fear and anger took on an amorphous, undifferentiated otherness. The threat was called terrorism but really it was the unknown. And because we couldnt isolate it, suddenly it seemed to be everywhere. The tenor of the political moment was captured in a single sentence as President Bush said, We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them. With those words, as though wielding a scalpel, the president deftly lobotomized the nation. At a time when discrimination was in desperate need of refinement, instead, it was thrown away! War in Context, from its inception, has been an effort to apply critical intelligence in an arena where political judgment has repeatedly been twisted by blind emotions. It presupposes that a world out of balance will inevitably be a world in conflict. The tagline, with attention to the unseen, comes from my observation that in America we inhabit a culture marked by its inattention to the unseen. This is not a religious statement. The unseen to which I refer is the amalgam of non-material entities whose co-existence and interaction produces culture. What makes culture work is shared meaning. This has an ephemeral life in a space of resonance that ties ...Read More