The Deconstruction of The World Trade Center

November 26, 2001 7:36 AM

The Deconstruction of The World Trade Center An analysis of the Right versus the Left in ways that 911 and other events are interpreted and understood. Take your choice.
posted by Postroad (14 comments total)

(beige to purple to red to blue to orange)
Is it a philosophy, or a crayon box?
posted by darukaru at 7:41 AM on November 26, 2001

Yeah, what's up with that? I looked for the color code, but it seems to be missing...

They're born on third base and spend their entire lives thinking they hit a triple

Gotta remember that one...
posted by groundhog at 8:01 AM on November 26, 2001

Postroad: Thoroughly digging this link. Thank you, thank you.
posted by allaboutgeorge at 8:16 AM on November 26, 2001

So. It paints both "sides" of the argument as extreme caricatures before claiming the middle gound for florid new age verbiage that takes two too-long pages to say "the world is complicated". Worse, it adds insult to injury by wrapping the whole thing in a "Socratic debate" (does anyone enjoy having things "explained" to them in that style?). Am I missing something here? Am I supposed to enjoy this link in the same way as I laught at mutilated animals and circus freaks?

Joan looked at everybody present. "Perhaps we should pause here and discuss an integral approach to terrorism that would include not just the spiral up to turquoise but also the transpersonal realms?"

Is the idea that by the end you'd be glad to have an aircraft land on you?

[the colour code is about a quarter of the way down page III - he can't even use a "3" for chissakes...]
posted by andrew cooke at 8:19 AM on November 26, 2001

Thanks for the link to this philosophy parody page. The author tried to be funny, but the essay isn't on the same hilarity level as the fake news story a few years back about Microsoft buying the Vatican.
posted by Holden at 11:54 AM on November 26, 2001

Try running chunks of it through Doctor Nerve's Markov Page, and see if it makes any more sense.
posted by gimonca at 11:57 AM on November 26, 2001

I thoroughly enjoyed this. Long, and a bit of a tough slog, (especially as I was picking up some of the jargon [red, blue, green, etc.] as I went along,) but ultimately rewarding. He addresses both some of my criticisms of modern social theory, as well as elements of my internal struggle vis-a-vis 9/11/01: I found myself unable to entirely embrace either the 'rightwing' or 'leftwing' responses to the attacks, and felt that most grey-area compromises were fragmented. Wilder's more holistic view is really, really interesting, if a little intimidating at first. The analysis based on levels of cultural evolution is also much more successful than simple, conventional political analysis is.

It's also fascinating to see real spirituality integrated into the often godless realm of social critique.

Thanks again, Postroad. It's nice to know that MeFi is a home for less broad-based links, alongside general interest stuff, and that such links are posted based on their internal merit (not the desire to appear elitist/smart).
posted by Marquis at 1:08 PM on November 26, 2001

Hey, it's at the end of a novel, so it's not surprising that there's some unexplained stuff.

I found it pretty cool. It's good, I think, that someone is thinking along the "what if we really had some understanding of this really complicated shit that we currently make such a hash of?" lines. Doing it in the form of fiction sounds about right: he's not claiming to actually know stuff, he's speculating about what a world might be like in which some people did know certain stuff.

So there! *8)
posted by davidchess at 1:09 PM on November 26, 2001

Some analyses are difficult reads because they cover a lot of ground or require work in genuinely dense technical information. Some are "difficult" because their authors know that many people will think that jargony blather sounds very deep. Guess which category this execrable bit of nonsense belongs to.
posted by argybarg at 6:26 PM on November 26, 2001

It's not often that you see someone seriously deconstruct modern liberal-progressive thinking. ({{{flashback}}} to when I was at the NY Marxist School for a course on Hegelian dialectic, and in the study group discussion casually riffed on how Marxism was best understood in the context of other 19th-century Utopian movements .... and suddenly realized nobody was picking this up, and you could have heard a pin drop. Uh ... yeah, stepped on some toes. {{{end flashback}}}})

This is much too long for the point it's making, and the pomo-speak is as dense as steel wool. One passage I liked was pretty straightforward, though: Of course American power is in some ways a bad guy in this particular regard; globalization--meaning in this case an orange-meme capitalistic expansionism--is partly to blame for the causes of terrorism. I'll tell you more of what I think about that mess in a moment! But what I would like to see is how any other country--France, Japan, Iran, Germany, Indonesia, Rwanda, Peru, Iraq--would handle the same amount of power on a world scale. Would they do better, or worse, or much worse? Get the picture? As far as I can tell, no country can or could handle that amount of power well--with the possible exception of Holland, perhaps the only sane country on the face of the planet, but they're too busy having a life to get that obsessed with power. But it's highly likely that everybody else would be worse than America, some by staggering orders of magnitude--the same countries that scream the loudest about what criminals Americans are. What pathetic hypocrisy, these vulgar critics. Still, bad is bad, and America is bad enough in this regard.

And it had some interesting things to say about Islam, particularly in relation to its sibling Abrahamic religious, Judaism and Christianity. I hate to think it, because I'm sure I'll get lost in the thickets, but I want to understand this color business a little better.

That said, there isn't much new in the way of solutions here, nor are they very concrete. Economic development? Check. Social development? Check. Kill the terrorists? Check. Although really part of the problem is that the stuff we are already doing is allegedly causative.
posted by dhartung at 6:35 PM on November 26, 2001

...with the possible exception of Holland, perhaps the only sane country on the face of the planet, but they're too busy having a life to get that obsessed with power.

Or maybe they finally got over that whole East India Company thing.

posted by gimonca at 6:51 PM on November 26, 2001

Why Do Humans Suffer?: The Liberal and Conservative Answers

I got that far. Which wasn't terribly far. Which disqualifies me from making any worthwhile comments.

But since I'm an arrogant bastard, I'll comment anyway : The world as a series of dichotomies - good/evil, right/left, black/white? Yawn. Carry on.

(I'm hoping it got smarter after I gave up.)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:39 AM on November 27, 2001

The world as a series of dichotomies - good/evil, right/left, black/white?

I don't remember that bit...
posted by Marquis at 7:54 AM on November 27, 2001

stavros:

No, it got dumber. Just not at all in the way you describe.
posted by argybarg at 9:19 AM on November 27, 2001