ED CURTIN—What could, in the eyes of the American people, justify a war against Iran, assuming the Trump administration even cares about justification? Will Iran attack Israel? No. Will Iran attack the United States? No. Of course not, not least because it can’t, even if it wished to do so, which it clearly doesn’t. Any such Iranian attack – absurd as such a suggestion is – would give the Trump administration ample justification for a war.
"curtin"
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Once Upon a Time Never Comes Again: Bob Dylan, A Masked Man in Search of Redemption?
24 minutes readED CURTIN—How, I wondered, would this Dylan documentary “story” fashioned by Martin Scorsese, whose own work is marked by themes of guilt and redemption, affect an audience that might never have taken the roads less traveled of their youthful dreams but “fell” into the conformist and oppressive American neo-liberal way of life? Would this film, in Dylan’s words, get the audience wondering “if I ever became what you wanted me to be/Did I miss the mark or overstep the line/That only you could see?” Would nostalgia for their youth be a liberating or mystifying force, now that forty plus years have transformed American society into a conservative, postmodern, shopper’s paradise where commodity capitalism has reified all aspects of life, including art objects and artists such a Dylan, imbuing them with magical powers to redeem those who buy their products, which include songs and celebrity “auras”?
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Speeding into the Void of Cyberspace as Designed
18 minutes readED CURTIN—In a brilliant book written in 1999 before the hyper-speed era was fully underway – Speaking Into The Air: A History of the Idea of Communication – John Durham Peters, while not especially focusing on the issue of speed and technology as does Virilio, indirectly explores the fundamental issue that underlies technology and its control by the elites. The problem with technology is that it is the use of a technique applied to physical things to control those who don’t control the machines. Today that is the Internet and digital technology, controlled by those Virilio calls “the global kinetic elites.”
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Answering the Mysterious Call of An Artist’s Spiritual Vocation
23 minutes readED CURTAIN—Chencho is a catechist who secretly moves under darkness of night from one small Christian base community to another, encouraging the campesinos to keep the faith because God is with them, la gente, los pobres, the people, the poor. He says to Carolyn,Listen to me, hermana. We are brothers and sisters in Christ, and Christ is moving through the world now, through us. He is acting through us in the struggle against injustice, poverty, and oppression. To be with God now is to choose the fate of the poor, to be with them, to see through their eyes and feel through their hearts, and if this means torture and death, we accept. We are already in the grave.
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Looking Through the Screen at the World’s Suffering
15 minutes readED CURTIN—Awareness? I sit here looking through the screen that encloses the little porch where my table rests. MLK’s words reverberate in my mind as I watch a grey fox slink across the grass in search of prey. What is it about the love of money and the fear of death that so cripples people’s care and compassion? I know I don’t want to see that fox seize a screaming rabbit and worry (to kill by biting and shaking the throat; strangle) it to death. Unlike Forché, I have not physically seen the dead and mutilated bodies of Salvadorian victims of death squads, nor been threatened by them, as she was. Nevertheless, thanks to her and others like Manlio Argueta, I have seen them in my imagination and heard the screams, and they have haunted me. Ghosts.