UNITED STATES DOMESTIC TERRORISM

AND THE SCREAM, BY EDVARD MUNCH (1893)

Christopher Dorner, Jared Lee Loughner, James Holmes, Evan Ebel, John Allen Muhammad and Adam Lanza are only a few of the individuals whose corpses-or images in your social ken-have undergone a cosmetic plastic surgery of sorts, and then got their make up done by the Avon lady to appear to you as “lone wolfs” and “rogues”.

Because the circumstance that these individuals were not organized-essentially-through the collaboration and financing of others, is the only thing that prevents them from being in fact understood as terrorists.

Although “criminal” in their intent, they don’t really commit crimes that make sense as such from the standpoint of a motive-or in the sense that this motive is actually addressed by society at all.

And it is this about their acts that brings them closer to the category of “terrorist”, as somebody who makes some form of statement through the slaughter of others.

How can this not be understood as “political” in this basic way?

Well, it is not understood as such because it is never allowed to be addressed from this point of consideration; it is not allowed to be addressed from this point of consideration because that would imply an understanding of the social medium these individuals are, in part, products of.

And this implies an understanding of social structure-and this most necessarily dictates an assigning of different roles of dominance and subjugation in regards to the components of society itself.

And we all know this something that you never do in the United States!

The United States is a democracy founded on a popular understanding of equality among individuals in the pursuit of their own law-abiding wants and needs as the proverbial “pursuit of happiness”.

The United States is also socially cohesive in the individual’s vital mode of satisfying-or attempting to satisfy-his or her needs almost exclusively understood in economic terms; there was, because of this, an absence in the Unites States of true class struggle in a traditional European or Marxist sense.

And consumer society-it is true-has taken care of other systemic dangers by turning citizen’s-now more than ever-into just consumers; and black Americans are certainly free to make their purchases anywhere they want, which would make it hard to argue from the consumer standpoint that people are not equal, aside from the category of consumer they belong to-and there is a big difference in that, isn’t there?

Black Americans also get to vote, serve in the military and even be president; and there is, effectively, no such thing as institutional racism in this country.

But are black Americans, as a social and demographic group, really equal?

The worst thing today in this regards, however, is that you are not even allowed to seriously address this, mostly because the white world of power refuses to be disturbed by it.

So it is no longer talked about.

But I would desire for everybody’s benefit that US society could be seen by everyone through the black man or woman’s eyes.

And it would be like seeing your own country from a foreign cultural stand point.

And you would see-and feel-your own subjugation in spirit-in your very vision of society, and you would know the violence in yourself as a reflection of the violence you must bow to-out of survival and the will to not be annihilated.

But luckily for white society-and the general WASP structure of power-black Americans traditionally channel the existential violence they live in into modes of tamed subservience in their spirit and, eventually, socially.

And you can be a professional athlete and even a business man or doctor and lawyer; but you will always see life, to a great extent, as a struggle for dignity with regards to white society, either personally or with regards to the cultural experience you belong to and its people.

Or you may bag it all together, and seek just to stay out of prison and get by as easily as you can-exactly what you are offered by consumer society.

And you will not be fatalistically drawn into a life a violence-necessarily-although it is psychologically understandable that you would tend to take out your frustrations on others-other black people, or minorities, in one sense of another.

But never is white society truly confronted by the black man.

He knows better.

And for a lot black people there is a profound sense of not owing anything to white society; and there are also many individuals who do overcome this-precisely because they have to.

And there was an explosion of elated euphoria in one prison experience that was described to me when black inmates saw on TV the collapse of the World Trade Center towers and a dense cloud of destruction over Manhattan, on September 11^th, 2001.

The reaction on the part of prisoners of different ethnicity was entirely different.

And the “domestic terrorism” I speak of stems ultimately from a sense of powerlessness in the psyche of individuals with regards to American society.

But the understanding of the psyche of the individual cannot be found, really, in the individual, but rather in the social medium that person reacts to and is determined by as a cognizant, biological organism.

And the story of the American psyche is the story of power itself in the individual and in social structure the individual has to interact with.

The issue of firearms is important, but cannot be truly understood without understanding how individuals interact with social structure, either.

But you can start by understanding guns as a much coveted consumer product in an American context-but you need to understand why, why guns appeal to American consumers in a way that is not similar to the needs of consumers anywhere else in the world-no even in South Africa in the same way.

For the vital need for self-imposition over others as the attainment of personal, psychological comfort in the individual has never existed in any other society on Earth as a form itself of social structure.

This has never been observed before outside of US social experience to the same degree.

And you still don’t have to look at it, if you simply care not to.

And you are right: it is not at its heart a uniquely American phenomenon in that human psychology itself-from infant to retirement home-let’s say-is a struggle for comfort as a response to need.

And power is the satisfaction of human need, even if it is in detriment of the well-being –or even life-of others.

And the United States is a society of vital containment of the individual-in its morality, intolerance of criticism, the imposition of money as supreme value and in its law and cultural enforcement.

And this probably can be seen as a positive thing historically and in terms of world stability after WWII; or at least I know somebody who based very serious decisions on exactly this vision.

Because there are more destructive ways the will to imposition as power in man can jump up and bite you in the ass, so to speak.

But that is never going to happen again, not like it did.

And murder is easily understood as form of power that pales in comparison only to the supreme power-ride that is suicide itself: