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 Ice
Cube 
 "It's
a tried and true way of dealing with people or nations that the
ruling elite finds troublesome or inconvenient -- whoever gets in
our way. They're simply lumped into the enemy pile. "
 "You
need gas money and a car that works. Of course, my preference is to
do it in the middle of the night! Leave them little presents, you
know what I'm saying? Like the Easter bunny."
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A World Without Bodies by Nathan Means In the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, Allen's character -- a health food storeowner from 1970's Greenwich Village -- awakes to a fascist future where steak is considered healthy. Though Allen's movie doesn't stray far from the well-beaten path of science fiction dystopias, this shlocky science fiction vocabulary remains one of the best ways to feel the pulse of events in America. Take Hardees, which now markets bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, and cheese melted together in a bowl as a "low carb" diet option. The possibility that anyone (even someone who had never considered dieting) would buy this warmed-over jumble of meat as a "meal" is indicative of how easy it has become to stuff shit down our throats. The real problem here is not that there is another diet fad that may not work but that imagining our bodies as some sort of endlessly elastic, expendable commodity seems to be softening us up for our equally delusional foreign policy. It's easy to see that we attacked bread and Bin Laden with the same misguided mania and that before we had finished bombing the Iraqi power grid, cereal boxes across our country were being trashed like the Taliban in a portrait gallery. However, while Bush's second term has been predicted to bring flat taxes, a military draft, and maybe the outlawing of abortion, one other far-reaching trajectory seems to have been neglected: A world without bodies. From a security standpoint, the current inspecting and detaining of bodies at the borders is merely a patchwork approach - eliminating them altogether is the only reliable solution. Bodies are the most favored weapons delivery device of suicide bombers. And witness the 9/11 attacks in which passengers were actually blackmailed with their own flesh!
So the incremental first steps -- Afghanistan and Iraq -- are actually part of the most far-reaching security operation in the history of the world, one guided by an anti-corporealism that synthesizes Colin Powell's concept of a war without casualties and Donald Rumsfeld's idea of downsizing the attacking force. In a sense the plan is simple: Bomb Afghanistan back to the stone age (about 150 years) from such great distance that it was virtually an immaterial war (on our side) and then go in with local bodies. Next, similarly destroy Iraq's infrastructure and go in with some tanks and Humvees to mop up. Public support is a lot easier to manage with the lower casualty rate expected of corpseless combat. What's more, the opening battles are managed intended to be fought not in the physical world of scars and memory, but in two dimensions via flickering target imaging software and television news. Even if there turns out to be some unexpected violence reported in this war, 2-D wounds heal within one or two news cycles while funerals for actual dead American soldiers are kept off the screen and Iraqi war dead simply not counted. It is a profound vision -- Republicans deserve to be called a lot of things these days, but not conservative -- but it turns out that the bodies still left in the world have created a tremendous amount of drag. The war in Iraq is becoming increasingly material, physical, and thus unmanageable. Violence bleeds out onto the pages of newspapers as char-grilled contractors appear in Fallujah, tortured bodies pile up at Abu Ghraib, and the internet flashes an international range of beheadings. With weird stains appearing on the ceiling of the Oval Office, Bush now has the same problem as Scott Peterson: No matter how well planned your heist or how deep the harbor, bodies have a disturbing habit of washing up on the shore. 14 January 05  Nathan
Means performs with cacophonous aplomb for Washington D.C.'s post-rock
badasses, Trans Am, whose newest release, Liberation, is insulting a red-state
citizen somewhere near you. This is his first column for Morphizm. To
be abused by the Am, click
here now.
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