] This uncontrollable unraveling of reversibility is the
] true victory of terrorism. It is a victory visible in the
] underground and extensive ramifications of the event -
] not only in direct, economic, political, market and
] financial recessions for the whole system, and in the
] moral and psychological regression that follows; but also
] in the regression of the value system, of all the
] ideology of freedom and free movement etc... that the
] Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its
] eyes its power over the rest of the world.
]
] Already, the idea of freedom, a new and recent (sic)
] idea, is being erased from everyday lives and
] consciousness, and liberal globalization is being
] realized as its exact reverse: a 'Law and Order'
] globalization, a total control, a policing terror.
] Deregulation ends in maximal constraints and
] restrictions, equal to those in a fundamentalist society.

Baudrillard is perhaps living proof that the opposite of art is politics. I don't find myself standing with him in his world, but I find an honesty in his observations that perhaps those who stand with me are afraid to exhibit. There is an artistic purity to this essay. Like that feeling you get staring at a Rothko, or reading Hakim Bey. He makes a stark observation upon the radicalization that terrorism births, and the inevitable hypocrisy of attempting to secure the world while claiming to stand for freedom.

He also offers a unique cultural answer that I haven't seen yet, but which he feels is impossible in this case. Consumption. Assimilation. As one who strove for years to surf the edge of culture, and one who feels exasperatingly suffocated in recent years as I've found myself sliding back from it, I know the process well, as do many others on this system. Culture consumes; from Sex Pistols to Blink 182... from Nine Inch Nails to Janet Jackson... from the Computer Underground to Hackers: The Movie... There used to be a revolution on Haight street. Now there is a Gap and a Ben and Jerry's. Culture consumes everything... Nothing can escape it... The reason liberal culture is so successful is because it is like the borg. Died haired spiky metal leather jacket fuck you is boiled down and put in church with the rest of the sheep. Only the symbols remain... The style shucked from it's meaning. Again and again and again...

Baudrillard is wrong. We'll do it to fundamentalist Islam too... Those left wing kids that keep flying over there to act as human shields are actually our little cultural ambassadors, much to their chagrin. They are the first wave.

The Spirit of Terrorism -- Jean Baudrillard