I’ve been wondering why suicide bombers should be considered so uniquely threatening and morally reprehensible; aside from the obvious practical consideration that people expecting to die anyway are very hard to discourage. I cannot see why killing yourself and others at the same time is worse than just killing others.

In “The secret agent” Joseph Conrad describes a confrontation between Inspector Heat of the Met, responsible for the surveillance and occasional suppression of anarchists in London, and one of his subjects; a man called “The Professor”, a manufacturer of bombs who also carries a device with him at all times, to detonate in the event of capture.

Heat is a described as a large man, square chinned, with moustaches the colour of “ripe wheat”. The Professor is described as having protruding ears, as “miserable and undersized”, and crucially at the end of the book, he is likened to “…a pest In the street full of men.” The professor is stunted, unprepossessing, an alien contagion.

“And he spoke again in his big, authoritative voice, which, being moderated, had a threatening character.

`You are not wanted, I tell you,' he repeated.

The anarchist did not stir. An inward laugh of derision uncovered not only his teeth but his gums as well, shook him all over, without the slightest sound. Chief Inspector Heat was led to add, against his better judgement:

`Not yet. When I want you I will know where to find you.'

Those were perfectly proper words, within the tradition and suitable to his character of a police officer addressing one of his special flock. But the reception they got departed from tradition and propriety. It was outrageous. The stunted, weakly figure before him spoke at last.

`I've no doubt the papers would give you an obituary notice then. You know best what that would be worth to you. I should think you can imagine easily the sort of stuff that would be printed. But you may be exposed to the unpleasantness of being buried together with me, though I suppose your friends would make an effort to sort us out as much as possible.'”

                    “The Secret Agent” Joseph Conrad
                   

By blowing himself up along with the policeman, the Professor would collapse the dichotomy that Conrad expresses as a physical disparity, between the two men. That is, between the law, or lawful, and the alien and monstrous. They would have to be buried together.

In order to prosecute a war, the enemy must be dehumanised, made less than us. This can make us comfortable with what we do to the enemy, we are morally justified. It seems that all the present talk about “evil ideologies” and deportations in the same breath as safeguarding and consolidating national identity (by forcing people to sign up to the approved version on pain of being “sent back”) betrays something about what is going on. War, and national identity, require an other; or even better, an enemy within, that we can expel, repress and define ourselves (exonerate ourselves) against.


This from Jaqueline Rose (emphasis mine)
“Suicide bombing kills far fewer people than conventional warfare; the reactions it provokes must, therefore, reside somewhere other than in the number of the dead. It is, of course, feared as a weapon against which there appears to be no protection, and to which there is no viable response: targeted assassinations simply provoke further retaliation (and Israel's security wall is already proving incapable of deterring attacks). The horror it inspires cannot, however, be explained in terms of the deliberate targeting of civilians: according to McNamara, 100,000 people were burnt to death at the end of the war in the Allied attack on Tokyo, and in On the Natural History of Destruction, W.G. Sebald describes the ten thousand tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs dropped on the densely populated residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1943.

The horror would appear to be associated with the fact that the attacker also dies. Dropping cluster bombs from the air is not only less repugnant: it is somehow deemed, by Western leaders at least, to be morally superior. Why dying with your victim should be seen as a greater sin than saving yourself is unclear. Perhaps, then, the revulsion stems partly from the unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide bomber and her or his victims. Suicide bombing is an act of passionate identification - you take the enemy with you in a deadly embrace.”
                                                                                                            “Deadly Embrace”
                                                                                                            Jacqueline Rose


The “unbearable intimacy” that closes the gap between ourselves and the alien. The distinction vanishes in the pulped mess that remains. We shall be buried together.

this chart for stabbing statistics for many countries. i'm amazed that we came out ahead of south africa- but this is not for generalised homicide, specifically for "sharp objects"- would be interesting to link it to per capita gun ownership for example. why stab when you can shoot? but we came out below (for example) finland, which surprises me.

i could easily be wrong, but maybe the use of the knife is  most common in domestics- as the weapon that comes to hand. i read somewhere that women kill mostly in the kitchen, and men in the bedroom. that is if we exclude the relatively small proportion of murders without apparent motive. so this could be read as a chart of the proportion of domestic, distinctly personal, violence; as opposed to that inspired by entirely understandable, and quantifiable, economic factors. could we read this as an index of how much our nearest and dearest hate each other? it would be fun, but i doubt it. i think that people hate each other in that intimate, personal, way as much here in the UK as anywhere else.

 probably everyone has seen this before.
but i haven't. a very small free utility that will turn an image into that ASCII thing, which is all letters and stuff. it's sort of retro and cheesy somehow, but at the same way fascinating. i seem to recall that people started doing this in the 70's with typewriters, or at any rate, i recall something in a sunday supplement when i was really young with this stuff in it, and my mum telling me it was done on typewriters. for all i know, it could have been computers even then. it seems very obviously very analogue though, or a halfway house between that and digital. the idea of pixels, was that inspired by screen technology? i suppose it must have been. i was just thinking, fancifully, that it owes its existence to pointillism,  but i doubt it- though it seems that they all utilise the same bit of colour theory.

there is an attractive overlap between image/text in this, but with this programme, anyway, there's not much scope for changing font etc. it is really literal-minded, clunky even. maybe that is what i am finding attractive about it. photoshop can do something slightly similar, and you can choose the text, but somehow not the same.

He closed his eyes one last time.

 bollocks! i have a pretty long post on Cindy Sheehan, so i did the sensible thing, and composed it in word so it wouldn't get lost if i had any mishaps. (these are usually due to  me pushing the back button or some other ill advised action)

anyway, it's all written out, but i cant seem to paste it into this window. it won't paste. i thought that maybe it was my puter spassing out, which wouldn't be the first time, but i can copy/paste links and stuff into word ok. is it something up with the motime interface?

anyway, i'm trying to decide if i should just write the whole thing out again, or log out again and give it another go in a bit.

it is about sentiment in politics. i have noticed that a lot of right-wingers like a bit of that. this
www.tomgrey.motime.com
page that had me spluttering tea over my screen in hilarity. you have to scroll down a way, and look for the entry entitled "another mother lost her son, not only Cindy". i would just paste in the whole thing, but the interface won't let me. arse! the writer switches from denouncing homosexuality, declaring that might is right as regards israeli/palestinian situation etc. in previous posts, to pasting in a fantastically mawkish (supposedly true) story....dying child, jesus, the whole bit. if true, no doubt the whole event was moving, and very sad, to all those involved- but i can't believe it. saccharine doesn't begin to describe.

whilst i was thinking of anthropomorphised beasties (don't know if this one counts, is anthropomorphic a better description?)
anyway, here's poor old earmouse. you remember him/her?

i was trying to think about the '90s, and i shocked myself in that i could remember very little. i forgot, at first, the '91 gulf war and i forgot Rwanda. remembered  the poll tax riot and the criminal justice bill one as well.

i recall being cynical whilst watching the berlin wall fall on telly, and then about the subsequent reunification. i recall being totally unmoved by nelson mandela's release, watching, and being bored.

but i do remember earmouse, the poor little monster.

another colouring book image - i've obviously made some additions to this one, like the frame. vaguely abusive banana stuffing, or so it seems to me. like in the previous one, what was the fox going to do with the goose?

the above is an image from a colouring book i bought a few years ago. from working with kids on art stuff so much had made me interested in the "colouring" activities of the younger ones - half abiding by the outlined boundaries, and half scribbling right over them. often though, there did appear to be a relationship between the direction/intensity of the scribble, and the printed shape it seemed to be directed at. it may be that i'm totally wrong in that though, and just reading coherence into something totally arbitrary.
i bought a few colouring books, and started colouring them in myself in my own manner, utilising collage and glitter glue. what i found was (a) that i couldn't colour like a two year old, and neither does Sy Twombly; and (b) that the printed pictures themselves were frequently inept, and sometimes very odd - see above. the books are strange anthologies of fantasy, and, i suspect with the £ shop variety, stuff ripped off from a variety of sources (nothing wrong with that). it probably says something about the assumed target audience, or rather, the assumptions held by the producers about the target audience.

i remember having these sort of books as a kid. i can recall  that some pictures alarmed me - and some gave me an almost unbearable feeling of pathos.  mostly, they  fell into the  realm of  kitsch  attempts at  cute.  i  found   that  sad,  and  came  to think  of  the  colouring in of parts (boots, or food) as "giving" them something. there was a cartoon tramp that i took great care to "give" a smart brown pair of boots, and a sad ostrich that i thought would be cheered up by having a bright yellow neck. the expressions stayed the same of course. i invested these icons with a power of existing; felt that i owned them, trapped there in that book, and would chech back periodically to see how they were doing, and maybe "feed" them, or give them a gift- a yellow neck, or bright red jacket for example.
 

i've been playing this game:

http://www.shockwave.com/bin/content/shockwave.jsp?id=crash
(sorry, can't work out how to get the links to work directly like they used to)

in it, you basically have to play the part of traffic lights, or a driver; at any rate, you have to slow down, or accelerate the traffic at two crossroads to avoid collisions.

the graphics are primitive, and the interface is just the old point-and-click. it's very addictive.

puts me in mind of julian opie; not particularly the driving thing, but just his sort of bland, affectless fascination.




just look at the little cars!
another view:




so, another link that will have to be pasted into the browser: http://www.forart.no/shone/shone.html

that would be an article about opie, bit out of date, from a few years ago, i think. i'm not actually too enamoured of his work, but he does reflect the surface of our world (for some). that flat screen, vectored lineaments, the minimum to be recognisable, but at the same time fascinating.  maybe the blankness is fascinating, a place  where we are not but are, because that's us, busily filling in the gaps. it takes very little information to start, to make a face, or road, building, or car.

this was started by a blog entry i'd read earlier, about london docklands. that place is still only an architect's model, or julian opie sculpture. no graffitti, no cars, really, no litter, no people. an architect's wet dream; like one of those CAD fly-throughs that are popular for buildings at the concept phase nowadays, but "real".