"Bomb Scare "

From :

Bomb Scare
by the Editors

Post date 03.14.03 | Issue date 03.24.03

It is only because the United States stands on the brink of one war that so few people notice how close we are to another. In recent months, North Korea has begun an escalating series of provocations: violating a 1994 agreement with the United States in which it promised to freeze its nuclear program; admitting to a secret uranium-enrichment program that could deliver weapons-grade material; expelling International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors from Yongbyon, a facility that can reprocess plutonium and produce nuclear weapons; and launching two missiles into the Sea of Japan. American intelligence now estimates that the North may have one or two nuclear weapons, which it could use or sell on the black market.

In response, the Bush administration, which until recently had either ignored North Korea or insisted on multilateral negotiations with Pyongyang, has adopted a harder line. This month, President George W. Bush demanded Pyongyang abandon its nuclear program and explicitly said military force might be used against the North, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently warned North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il that the United States could fight two wars at once. Backing up its words, the Pentagon has sent 24 long-range bombers to Guam that could be used to strike North Korea. And the White House reportedly is drawing up plans for an airstrike on Yongbyon, a move North Korea says would prompt all-out war.

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Poetry and War

I'd like to point everyone to an excellent article on poetry and war over at Slate.

[HONOURS] Conclusion (finally!)

E. Conclusion
In the final analysis, Thirty Acres, Barometer Rising, and Surfacing all demonstrate the failure of Canada’s internal periphery–the semiperipheral and peripheral human islands of eastern Canada–to break away decisively from central Canada and a broader North American modernity, both of which are often exploitative but always attractive to some degree. In these three novels, the inability of relatively marginal societies to stand up to a more urbanized and cosmopolitan central area, a more materially productive and politically influential core, is painfully demonstrated. In Barometer Rising, a Nova Scotia marked by intense internal regionalism and an ambivalent attachment to the idea of being a self-consciously Canadian territory is eventually assimilated into a consolidated whole; in Thirty Acres, a French Canadian peasant society, organized on principles explicitly antithetical to those of the central Canadian core and led by individuals who planned to challenge the whole idea of modernity, ends by being assimilated to the margins of the North American economy; even in Surfacing, a messianic prophet who realizes the immorality and degradation inherent in the city returns, knowing that only in the city can she convey her epiphany. Canada’s semiperipheral and peripheral societies and regions are just as unable to resist the lure of a dynamic central Canadian core as Canada, in the formulation of Canadian nationalists, is unable to resist the promise of a dynamic and prosperous United States. If Canada is–as some critics would have it–practically a dependency of the United States, then it is a colony that fractally incorporates a large number of internal dependencies in a political and economic hierarchy strongly reflected in the cultural field.

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[HONOURS] Brief Thoughts on Completion

It's done. I've combined the different files (not the bibliography, which needs furhhter sorting out) and it comes to 54 pages in WordPerfect.

Two years. God, what's happened during that period! And you know, it was all worth it, including this one essay.

Shikasta

Today, on lunch break, I bought a copy of Doris Lessing's Shikasta. It was paperback, but a nicely-bound paperback, so 20 dollars Canadian plus tax.

Shikasta is an interesting book, if flawed by a narrative style that is opaque and confusing--even if Lessing intended that, it still hinders communication and understanding. It is a science-fiction novel based on the assumption that the miracles which our ancestors defined as divine were actually manifestations of alien presence. Lessing has a multi-civilizational environment, including a Manichaean split between the malevolent empire of Puttiora and the relatively benevolent Canopeans. This split has ensured, as one reviewer puts it,

that the development of humankind has gone very wrong and that the horrors of the current human condition are due to a massive longstanding disruption in the normal spiritual state of things. Through astral conditions, the Earth disconnected from the culture that initially developed and sustained it, then human life has atrophied, shortened terribly and become dangerously unbalanced

The narrative takes the form of reports issued by a Canopean observer about the different forms of ingrained, institutionalized collective insanity that many of us take for granted or cannot even perceive because of our cultural curtain of lies in civilization, at least as Lessing's narrators describe the situation.

It is an apocalyptic text: The past millennia of human development, in Lessing's narrative, is a horrible mistake, forced upon a prelapsarian world by cruel beings from beyond. Liberation is impossible through collaboration in any of the political scripts that we know about; it's only through a convenient apocalyptic Third World War that puts the world to the sword that we can begin to repair ourselves and build saner cultures.

I reject this philosophy. Civilization might be, as Lessing's protagonists would have it, unnatural and foreign to our natures, but then everything is foreign to us: If we were to be natural, we'd be a race of hunter-gatherers scattered across the Old World (likely not the New, given our lack of maritime technology). It's in our particular nature, though, as flexible language-and-tool-using creatures, to strive for relatively unnatural things (in the sense of not being derived from nature), to suffer and inflict suffering en route it is true, but still, to be something different.

Even so, in a war-ridden time like today's, a corner of my mind can't help but wonder what if Lessing and Shikasta might be right.

[REQUEST FOR HELP] Fan Fiction

Hi!

Do you write fan fiction?

If so, I'd like to interview you for an upcoming term paper.

You can contact me via my profile page.

Thanks!
Randy