Many of today’s blinks courtesy of Phil Agre’s Red Rock Eaters list. Sadly, here’s what Agre has to say today:

This is the last of these encyclopedic collections of URL’s about the

attack and war that I am going to put together. It’s too much work.

Besides, I feel like the fever broke today. The war talk has suddenly

calmed down, having finally confronted the reality that there’s no

single place to drop a bomb. The whole world has now shifted into

some weird new configuration, and we’re going forward from there.

I’d rather have the old world, obviously, but this new world has some

real advantages. I am struck that American culture, amidst all of

the bad feelings that anyone would have, is more thoughtful and less

absorbed with trivia than it was last month. Maybe the rageaholics

will even lose their grip on our political system. We’ll have to see.

We’re going to have civil liberties controversies in this new world,

that’s for sure, and I’ll certainly be covering those. And please

do keep sending URL’s that represent, say, the top 5% most important

URL’s reporting information that people aren’t going to come across

by reading the major papers. I hope that everyone has been introduced

to some new information sources by these reader-contributed URL’s; I

know I have.

If anybody wants to take over the job of collating URL’s related to the

war, let me know. I’m not sure how that would work, exactly. Maybe

I would simply announce your address to the whole list and ask people

to send the stuff to you. Then you can filter and arrange them however

you want.

Grasping Ruins: Todd Gitlin’s meditation on various aspects of the attack and its aftermath: “We had better inquire deeply into this hatred because terrorists are neither gods nor animals who massacre and ruin and call their acts godly. Others, possibly already in place, may be consecrated to their furious cause, ready to murder again, even with joy in their hearts. To stop terrorism will require more than military self?defense, more than police and courts. Can there be any doubt, to thoughtful people of all persuasions and nations, that there is an urgent need for some disciplined curiosity?”

The people who resolve to do whatever necessary to destroy their Great Satan of choice devote themselves to years of planning. Their lives become the planning and they disappear into their tasks. He who signs up for such schemes convinces himself that there is a devil responsible for his and his people?s wounds; that his hatred is love?for his people or his God? and that he must regenerate himself as pure righteousness and fling himself against absolute evil. As a man, he does not matter. He melts himself down into a symbol, a symbol at war with symbols. Deploying himself against the heart of American capitalism and its chief military citadel, he will overcome earthly limits.

Violence is crucial in his scheme. Violence is at once his break from yesterday, his link to a glorious past and his door to the luminous future. Claiming ancient vindication and denying his modernity, except when it comes to techniques, he struggles to fuse the glorious past with a glorious future and burns up the present between them. To such a man, there can be no civilians. His pure totality is at war against the enemy?s impure totality. Of this, sacred men assure him. If the dead matter at all, it is as symbols themselves, symbols of the raw power, he believes, that has brought him and his people low. Their deaths will stand for his rectitude, inspirations to those who will come along behind him, inspired by his martyrdom.

Open Democracy