Gone, but not forgotten.

“In a state of constant distraction, the consciousness
of the collective acts like a shock bsorber, registering
sense impressions without really experiencing them:
Shocks are”intercepted, parried by conscoiusness, ‘ in
order to prevent a traumatic effect. [Montage] provides
the audience with a new capacity to study this modern
existence reflectively, from ‘the position of a expert.’”
(Buck-Morss 1995:268)

“… collage writing may reveal the artificial character of social
identities and the cultural constructs we take to be most real
(Pfohl 1992:97-101). As Jackie Orr suggests, ‘performing sociology’
[as collage …] is ‘also and most immediately about critical, creative
responses to struggles over what gets to count as, and who gets to
make, public knowledge and collective memory’ (2006:27).”
(Pfohl 2006)

“BUSH WARFARE 2006 is militant cut’n paste soundklash,
the bastard child of the war against piracy and the war
against terror. In 80 minutes the mix samples more
than 320 sources, most of them protests against the
new age of war and its most prominent leader.”
(liberation chabalala versus the war on terror)

liberation chabala’s 79 minute and 32 second BUSH WARFARE 2006 mix has kept me company for days. The audio-collage of Presidential misfires and hip-hop heavy artillery fulfills the “healing potential” of montage/collage, namely to construct “synthetic realities” in which “fragmented images” - or, in this case, fragmented language & sound - is brought together “according to a new law” (Buck-Morss 1995:268). The track’s 79 minutes and 32 seconds establish the laws of skepticism, protest, and radical consciousness and synthesize from them a reality for our President’s unreal justifications of and promises for this war.

“You’re free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it’ll take time to restore chaos and order …”

Download!
EP

We can measure the time by $ or tragedy or tragedy : this is another kind of counter

We have been at war against the people of Iraq since I was in the fourth grade.

We have been at war against the people of Iraq since my youngest brother - now eighteen, the same age as the youngest soldiers serving today - was two.

My baby brother. Those baby soldiers.

We have been at war against the people of Iraq for sixteen years.

When I was a senior in high school, a half-year before I graduated, a few months before I turned eighteen, President Clinton ordered Operation Desert Fox.

(But there was “no evidence of civilian casualties.” Or, if there was, “only Saddam and his brutally destructive regime [were] to blame” (Mother Jones; Navy League).)

We have been at war against the people of Iraq since I was in the fourth grade, but when I was a senior in college, on the day that I turned twenty-two, two weeks before I graduated from that university, the mission was accomplished.

In a month and a half from today, on my twenty-sixth birthday, the mission will have been accomplished for four years. And we will still be at war against the people of Iraq.

This is another kind of counter : the timeline superimposed over youth. But the tragedy is not mine. I am not of a war cohort.

While we have been at war against the people of Iraq,
(grief, grief, grief)
since my youngest brother was a baby,
(grief, grief, grief)
the infant mortality rate in that country has doubled or tripled (BBC; NEJM)
(grief, grief, grief.)

& while we have been at war against the people of Iraq,
(grief, grief, grief)
since I was in the fourth grade,
(grief, grief, grief)
since I was a senior in high school,
(grief, grief, grief)
since I was a senior in college,
(grief, grief, grief)
… while we are at war against the people of Iraq now, as I complete my third year of graduate study … ,
(grief, grief, grief)
Iraqi schools - &, in turn, students - have been targets (Seattlepi.com; UNICEF; BBC; VFA)
(grief, grief, grief).