Against Everything

But the ceaseless grooming and optimizing of ordinary life stands in the way of finding out how else we could spend our attention and our energy. Adventurers are always coming back to tell us the thrills of daring acts that re-create more of the same. “I stood on the precipice and leaped!” “Into what?” “Into the known!”

Ref. F2DF-A

He had written in his book that the things people considered superior were often inferior. The best things might be in nobody’s possession. Trash was treasure. Work was overrated, insofar as most people worked at the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Walking without a goal was superior to running. Conversation was the true purpose of everything, even of solitude and reading and thinking.

Ref. C0F2-B

I knew a “philosopher” to be a mind that was unafraid to be against everything. Against everything, if it was corrupt, dubious, enervating, untrue to us, false to happiness. And to attempt this was to try to be our friend, my mother’s and mine.

Ref. E0DF-C

To wish to be against everything is to want the world to be bigger than all of it, disposed to dissolve rules and compromises in a gallon or a drop, while an ocean of possibility rolls around us. No matter what you are supposed to do, you can prove the supposition wrong, just by doing something else. I

Ref. DE96-D

Modern exercise makes you acknowledge the machine operating inside yourself. Nothing can make you believe we harbor nostalgia for factory work but a modern gym. The lever of the die press no longer commands us at work. But with the gym we import vestiges of the leftover equipment of industry to our leisure. We leave the office, and put the conveyor belt under our feet, and run as if chased by devils. We willingly submit our legs to the mangle, and put our stiffening arms to the press.

Ref. 33AD-E

A farmer once used a pulley, cable, and bar to lift his roof beam; you now use the same means to work your lats. Today, when we assume our brains are computers, the image of a machine man, whether Descartes’s or La Mettrie’s, has an old and venerable quality, like a yellowed poster on the infirmary wall. Blood pressure is hydraulics, strength is mechanics, nutrition is combustion, limbs are levers, joints are ball-and-sockets.

Ref. E7CD-F

And we go to this hard labor with no immediate reward but our freedom to do it. Precisely this kind of freedom may be enough. Exercise machines offer you the superior mastery of subjecting your body to experimentation. We hide our reasons for undertaking this labor, and thoughtlessly substitute a new necessity. No one asks whether we want to drag our lives across a threshold into the kingdom of exercise.

Ref. 64B6-G

In the gym you witness people engaging in a basic biological process of self-regulation. All of its related activities reside in the private realm. A question, then, is why exercise doesn’t stay private. It could have belonged at home with other processes it resembles: eating, sleeping, defecating, cleaning, grooming, and masturbating.

Ref. 77DF-H

Exerciser, what do you see in the mirrored gym wall? You make the faces associated with pain, with tears, with orgasm, with the sort of exertion that would call others to your immediate aid. But you do not hide your face. You groan as if pressing on your bowels. You repeat grim labors, as if mopping the floor. You huff and you shout and strain. You appear in tight yet shapeless Lycra costumes. These garments reveal the shape of the genitals and the mashed and bandaged breasts to others’ eyes, without acknowledging the lure of sex.

Ref. 8AEF-I

Our gym is better named a “health club,” except that it is no club for equal meetings of members. It is the atomized space in which one does formerly private things, before others’ eyes, with the lonely solitude of a body acting as if it were still in private. One tries out these contortions to undo and remake a private self; and if the watching others aren’t entitled to approve, some imagined aggregate “other” does. Modern gym exercise moves biology into the nonsocial company of strangers. You are supposed to coexist but not look closely, wipe down the metal of handlebars and the rubber of mats as if you had not left a trace. As in the elevator, you are expected to face forward.

Ref. B756-J

The only truly essential pieces of equipment in modern exercise are numbers. Whether at the gym or on the running path, rudimentary calculation is the fundamental technology. As the weights that one lifts are counted, so are distances run, time exercised, heart rates elevated.

Ref. B0DD-K

A simple negative test of whether an activity is modern exercise is to ask whether it could be done meaningfully without counting or measuring it. (In sports, numbers are used differently; there, scores are a way of recording competition in a social encounter.) Forms of exercise that do away with mechanical equipment, as running does, cannot do away with this.

Ref. 5369-L

In exercise one gets a sense of one’s body as a collection of numbers representing capabilities. The other location where an individual’s numbers attain such talismanic status is the doctor’s office. There is a certain seamlessness between all the places where exercise is done and the sites where people are tested for illnesses, undergo repairs, and die. In the doctor’s office, the blood lab, and the hospital, you are at the mercy of counting experts. A lab technician in a white coat takes a sample of blood. A nurse tightens a cuff on your arm, links you to an EKG, takes the basic measurements of your height and weight—never to your satisfaction. She rewards you with the obvious numbers for blood pressure, body-fat ratio, height and weight. The clipboard with your numbers is passed. At last the doctor takes his seat, a mechanic who wears the white robe of an angel and is as arrogant as a boss. In specialist language, exacerbating your dread and expectation, you may learn your numbers for cholesterol (two types), your white cells, your iron, immunities, urinalysis, and so forth. He hardly needs to remind you that these numbers correlate with your chances of survival.

Ref. 91C9-M

How do we acquire the courage to exist as a set of numbers? Turning to the gym or the track, you gain the anxious freedom to count yourself. What a relief it can be. Here are numbers you can change. You make the exercises into trials you perform upon matter within reach, the exterior armor of your fat and muscle. You are assured these numbers, too, and not only the black marks in the doctor’s files, will correspond to how long you have to live. With willpower and sufficient discipline, that is, the straitening of yourself to a rule, you will be changed.

Ref. 752F-N

Today we really can preserve ourselves for a much longer time. The means of preservation are reliable and cheap. The haste to live one’s mortal life diminishes. The temptation toward perpetual preservation grows. We preserve the living corpse in an optimal state, not so we may do something with it, but for its own good feelings of eternal fitness, confidence, and safety. We hoard our capital to earn interest, and subsist each day on crusts of bread. But no one will inherit our good health after we’ve gone. The hours of life maintenance vanish with the person.

Ref. 615F-O

The person who does not exercise, in our current conception, is a slow suicide. He fails to take responsibility for his life. He doesn’t labor strenuously to forestall his death. Therefore we begin to think he causes it. It may be a comfort to remember when one of your parents’ acquaintances dies that he did not eat well or failed to take up running. The nonexerciser is lumped with other unfortunates whom we socially discount. Their lives are worth a percentage of our own, through their own neglect. Their value is compromised by the failure to ensure the fullest term of possible physical existence. The nonexerciser joins all the unfit: the slow, the elderly, the hopeless, and the poor. “Don’t you want to ‘live’?” we say. No answer of theirs could satisfy us.

Ref. 1DE1-P

Conceive of a society in which it was believed that the senses could be used up. Eyesight worsened the more vivid sights you saw. Hearing worsened the more intense sounds you heard. It would be inevitable that such a conception would bleed into people’s whole pattern of life, changing the way they spent their days. Would they use up their powers on the most saturated colors, listening to the most intoxicating sounds? Or might that society’s members refuse to move, eyes shut, ears covered, nursing the remaining reserves of sensation?

Ref. 961D-Q

Movement is a necessity. There is everything to be said just for moving, getting the lead out, shaking what your mama gave you, turning restlessness to motion and vitality; but exercise is not plain motion. It is more like oscillation. The most common phenomenon may be the individual who judges, in his own mind if not out loud, the total healthiness of his state at each moment, alternating satisfaction and disappointment, based on what he ate, what he drank, how much he exercised, when, with what feelings as he was doing it, and with what relation to the new recommendation or warning he just heard on the news hour’s health report.

Ref. 254F-R

Women strip their bodies of layers of fat to reveal a shape without its normal excess of flesh. Despite the new emphasis on female athleticism, the task of the woman exerciser remains one of emaciation. Men thin themselves, too, but more importantly bloat particular muscles, swelling the major clusters in the biceps, chest, and thighs. They awaken an incipient musculature that no work or worldly activity could bring out like this. Theirs is a task of expansion and discovery.

Ref. 4364-S

Every exerciser knows that the tendency of the body to become soft when it is comfortable or at rest, instead of staying perpetually hard, is a failure of discipline. This is the taste of our new Tree of Knowledge. In our era of abundance, we find that nutrition makes one fat rather than well fed, pleasures make one flabby rather than content, and only anorexics have the willpower to stop eating and die.

Ref. 6392-T

While the cigarette suppresses appetite (rebelliously), the StairMaster attacks calories (obediently). Each can become intensely, erotically pleasurable,

Ref. 322C-U

With health in place, the aggression is more likely to be carried on psychically. It pools, then starts an undercurrent of hatred for this corrupt human form that continually undoes the labor you invest in it. One hundred twenty pounds of one’s own flesh starts to seem like the Sisyphean boulder. Yet the bitterness of watching your body undo your work is restrained by a curious compensation that Sisyphus did not know. If the hated body is the scene of a battle, a certain pleasure still emerges from the unending struggle, and in a hedonistic order divided against its own soft luxuries, at least this pleasure, if no other, can be made to go on forever.

Ref. 8305-V

An enigma of exercise is the proselytizing urge that comes with it. Exercisers are always eager for everyone else to share their experience. Why must others exercise, if one person does? No

Ref. 37B6-W

Fashion historians point out that women freed themselves from corsets worn externally, only to make an internal corset, as they toned the muscles of the abdomen and chest, and dieted and exercised to burn away permanently the well-fed body that whalebone stays temporarily restrained. Though the exerciser acts on his self, this self becomes ever more identified with the visible surface. Though he works on his body, replication makes it ever more, so to speak, anybody.

Ref. 9B63-X

Only in a gym culture do physical traits that were formerly considered repellent become marks of sexual superiority. (We are hot now for the annihilation by exercise and dieting of once voluptuous feminine flesh, watching it be starved away in natural form and selectively replaced with breast implants, collagen injections, buttock lifts. We’ve learned to be aroused by the ripped, vein-popping muscles that make Incredible Hulks of men who actually push papers.) Because health and sex are the places we demand our truth today, newly minted ideals must be promulgated as discoveries of medical science or revelations of permanent, “evolutionary” human desires. The technical capabilities of gym exercise drive the social ideals and demands.

Ref. D8EC-Y

An era of exercise has brought more obsession and self-hatred rather than less.

Ref. 695A-Z

Facing mortality, the gym-goer believes himself an agent of health—whereas he makes himself a more perfect patient.

Ref. 704C-A

Facing the sexual struggle, the gym-goer labors to attain a positive advantage, which spurs an ever-receding horizon of further competition.

Ref. 5205-B

You are condemned.” This is the chant the machines make with their grinding rhythm, inside the roar of the gym floor. Once upon a time, the authority of health, and the display of our bodies and biological processes, seemed benign, even liberating. We were going to overcome illness, we were going to exorcise the prudish Victorians. But our arrows were turned from their targets, and some of them punctured our privacy.

Ref. 3285-C

The thinness we strive for becomes spiritual. This is not the future we wanted. That prickling beneath the exerciser’s skin, as he steps off the treadmill, is only his new self, his reduced existence, scratching the truth of who he is now, from the inside out.

Ref. 1C13-D

The optimist says we were born for life, and in solitary hours fears he doesn’t live.

Ref. 17DF-E

Memory floats you back to days that will never be repeated, letting you know you didn’t appreciate them when they occurred.

Ref. A166-F

You move behind the time, like a clock continually losing seconds, and despair. —

Ref. 6217-G

The problem is experience; specifically, a concept of experience that gives us the feeling we are really living, but makes us unsatisfied with whatever life we obtain.

Ref. DF82-H

Happiness is a vague bliss. Sunny and sociable, it considers the well-being of family and friends, while ordinary pleasure is immediate and private. If you say, “I live for happiness,” no one will challenge you, since everyone is assured of the crumbs from your meal. The flaw of this philosophy, however, is that neither happiness nor pleasure can be put into reality directly. The pursuit of happiness has to enter occurrence, and raw occurrence can’t be saved or savored. Pleasure, like pain, will be unmemorable if it exists only as immediate sensation. Neither an orgasm nor the pains of childbirth can be recalled as feeling when you’re not undergoing them. So we learn to ask ourselves what it was like when the encounter or shock of sensation took place. You monitor the inward influence of occurrences as you undergo them, ruminating an interior object, something that can be brought up, later, to release a musty whiff of pleasure; or chewed again, to test if it’s “the real thing,” life; or digested some more to see if it will yield some elusive nutriment of happiness.

Ref. 660F-I

Any question of “the meaning of life” is usually raised as a joke. But some urge compels us to answer. “What am I living for?” The mistake commonly in our answers is that they project only a what and don’t spell out a how. A monk said, “I live for God”; a modern says, “for happiness.” But the meaning of life always comes down to a method of life. Sometimes the method follows from the goal, as religious obedience followed a God who paid attention. Often we don’t know how we are living.

Ref. 16DD-J

We become lifelong collectors, and count on fixed mementos to provide the substance of whatever other aims we may declare, when asked, are our real goals or reasons to live.

Ref. C035-K

Give experience your energy and like any living process it divides and grows. The deliberate wish to “live” takes over from the day-to-day accident formerly called life. Experience, pursued, creates certain paradoxes.

Ref. B2BE-L

You are like the traveler, back from any trip, who has to ask, “Why didn’t I take more pictures?”

Ref. 2E86-M

The need to retell experiences becomes your last means to try to redeem experience from aimless, pure accumulation—and either you cannot find a listener or you realize that you are mute, unfit to communicate the colors of this distant realm of experience in any way adequate to the wonders you found there. Thus everyone longs to tell his story today, but not as literature.

Ref. 46D7-N

The downside of sought-after experiences is usually that they end. If they don’t end, it brings worse trouble. Some people never stop following the same early experiences without limit. The sex seeker evolves from an innocent voyager in uncharted seas to a bored and cynical conquistador. The drunk finds that the fun is no longer shared as his circle of drinking buddies dwindles. The traveler goes from learning to mere categorizing: he has seen so much of the world that every town is reminiscent of another.

Ref. 88BC-O

Youthful experiences are complicated by the pressure of new people, adding to the crowd that advances at your back. Contemporary perma-adolescence—the repetition of the experiences of youth ad infinitum—far from expressing solidarity with the young, becomes an act of hostility toward them. The concept of experience makes you fear you didn’t grab enough in the short time you were in the candy store. So you refuse to leave, and thereby prove that life won’t be ceded to those who come after you.

Ref. FA26-P

I never took the drugs I planned to take: I thought I’d lose my mind.” But I am bored by Casanovas, inveterate travelers, nature lovers, and the drug-obsessed, as they speak from the narrowness of their exhaustive experience of one thing. Nor can I make anyone feel what I did do. Trying to get a taste of everything, besides, gave me a depth of understanding of no one thing—I missed the experience of insight for a diffuse ambition.

Ref. 4B7D-Q

Serious reading often starts from a deep frustration with living. Keeping a journal is a sure sign of the attempt to preserve experience by desperate measures. These poor dissatisfied people take photographs, make albums, keep souvenirs and scrapbooks. And still they always ask: “What have I done?”

Ref. CA20-R

Build peaks, and former highlands become flatlands—ordinary topography loses its allure. The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our lives a waste. The concept of experience turns us into dwellers in a plateau village who hold on to a myth of the happier race of people who live on the peaks. We climb up occasionally, but only with preparation, for short expeditions. We can’t stay there, and everyone is restless and unsatisfied at home.

Ref. CD78-S

They seek to make experience occur wherever you are, and at every moment that you live; to make “life” happen at your bidding, and not at its. The modern era bequeathed us a pair of radical methods that work: aestheticism and perfectionism.

Ref. 50EF-T

Each man reached adulthood in a postrevolutionary middle class that let him see he could choose any one of multiple lives, without ensuring him any inherited livelihood at all. Thoreau got his Harvard degree and worked at schoolteaching, management of the family pencil factory, and finally surveying—knowing no one would pay him for the thing he wanted most, which was to discover his true life. Flaubert escaped law school only by falling down with epileptic fits until he could come home and live as he pleased. Each saw and was fascinated by a market culture, with its multiplication of goods and interchangeable items, and asked himself whether one could freely choose or acquire the good things of a life—spending “life” itself, not money.

Ref. 9457-U

Aestheticism asks you to view every object as you would a work of art. It believes that art is essentially an occasion for the arousal of emotions and passions. You experience a work of art. You go into it. Not just a calm onlooker, you imagine the figures in the painting, and relish the colors and forms, the style becoming as much an object of experience as the content; you feel or taste everything; you lust for it, let it overwhelm you, amplify it to titillate or satisfy or disgust you; you mentally twist the canvas to wring it dry. The discipline is to learn to see the rest of the world in just that same way. Art becomes a training for life, to let you learn how to perceive what you will ultimately experience unaided. Let anyone’s ordinary face fascinate you as if it were a bust of Caesar; let the lights of a city draw your eyes like Egyptian gold or the crown jewels; let a cigarette case you find on the road evoke the whole life of its imagined owner; let your fellow human beings be bearers of plot and motivation as in a work of fiction, possessors of intricate beauty or ugliness as in a painting, objects of uniqueness and fearful sublimity as in a wonder of nature. Over time, and with practice, the work of art will become less effective at stimulating these art experiences than your renewed encounters with the world will be. Art may improve on life, as a painter focuses and humanizes what he sees;

Ref. B49B-V

“Look more closely” is the basic answer of the aesthete to any failure of experience: “For anything to become interesting you simply have to look at it for a long time,” wrote Flaubert. Life becomes the scene of total, never-ending experience, as long as the aesthete can muster the intensity to regard it in this way. We all have a power to find the meaningful aspect of a thing by going onto or into it; by spreading the surface world with experience, and pressing your imagination and emotions into any crack. You must let it into you, too: “External reality has to enter into us, almost enough to make us cry out, if we are to represent it properly.” Flaubert became a representer because he wished to live.

Ref. 0DA1-W

Apply this flexibility of experience, taught by art, back to all objects not considered art—practicing your skill especially on the trivial, the ugly, and the despised. You will find that your old assessment of experience as something rare and intermittent, or bought with wealth or physical effort, was too narrow. By setting an endlessly renewed horizon for experience, from the endless profusion of objects, the aesthete guarantees that life-as-experience can never be diminished—not by age, by sickness, by anything, short of death. —

Ref. FA9E-X

The answers reside in the logic of the fighting itself. I do not mean to excuse the mutilators, or say that they have become Homeric. It is American fighters who have become Homeric—a small set of our frontline fighters, who have attained a kind of value and visibility unlike that of any enemy they face, or anyone else in the recent history of modern war. Mutilation is an invisible population’s response to such power—making themselves visible the only way they know how, by entering the system of American bodies and American lives that our country counts so

Ref. 814D-Y

Jean Baudrillard spoke of wars that didn’t take place. Michael Ignatieff analyzed “virtual war.” Edward Luttwak argued for “post-heroic war.” Even in the Pentagon—most importantly there—the generals dreamt of a revolution in military affairs, and network-centric warfare, information warfare, and a possibility of killing without risking US life, to make the loop between sensing and killing an opponent increasingly autonomous and automatic. It has partly come true. Popular military historians promote the misconception that wars are all the same, in all times, and that contemporary US fighters, despite their technology, are actually continuous with ancient warriors. “As with Xenophon’s hoplites, the engine driving the campaign was not mechanical. Instead, it was a spirit, an unbroken code—” they write, and so on. These commentators remember the past, but they paper over the strangeness of today.

Ref. A6DD-Z

And unfamiliar trappings do surround them. US soldiers wear body armor of great technical ingenuity, flexible, miraculous. They fight with powerful, almost preternatural weapons, in episodes of virtuosic slaughter, until they withdraw to safety. Eyes circle overhead to guide them, superiors to whom they can appeal in times of trouble. Medicine makes more wounds repairable, so long as they are not instantly fatal. And when a military action takes a wrong turn, jeopardizing overwhelming US supremacy, or when any soldier is killed, the military may pause or even stop the operation, as if the primary goal of warfare were to preserve US lives rather than win at any cost.

Ref. 6911-A

But the importance of the eye above a contemporary soldier at all times—just as it was with the eye looking down on the ancient soldier—is not really the efficacy of these gods, in pulling out wounded fighters or sending in bursts of terrible fire. It is, rather, the knowledge that someone is always up there, a peculiar reliance by the soldier on the sense that he is always, in some way, beneath the hovering US helicopter, under the range of the satellite, under the eye. He matters as a subject for attention. Even his agony registers in a higher consciousness.

Ref. 9758-B

The real uniqueness of the US fighter is located in his being seen and counted, monitored and protected, simply worth more than any enemy he could face. The maintenance of his life seems more important than any goal he could achieve.

Ref. 826A-C

One is also struck by two deep differences between Homeric and contemporary war. The first is that US postmodern fighters, unlike Greeks and Trojans, do not expect to die. The second is that US postmodern battle is one-sided—a fight against no other commensurable force.

Ref. 0D3B-D

Rescue becomes the ruling angel of warfare; rescue and bare survival.

Ref. E7DF-E

Whenever things go right, our adherence to certain conventions of war, at the level of planning and training especially, is admirable. But whenever things go wrong, a different order obtains. The strategy of survival bleeds into a reality of extermination, and a form of warfare in which, for the Americans, there may be an enemy group, but there is no equal other side.

Ref. 3188-F

A Marine rifleman now wears a ceramic plate in his SAPI vest, like a Delta operator ten years ago; an Army infantryman can be watched by drone planes, and his vehicle followed on the “Blue Force tracker” at headquarters. This

Ref. CC19-G

Zucchino gives figures for some of the dead in the fighting around Baghdad—where the massed dead can be counted in one-mile stretches of highway, and intersection by intersection. In a morning-long engagement on April 5, “the Desert Rogues [tank] battalion had just killed between eight hundred and a thousand enemy soldiers….It had cost them one dead.” On April 7, at one intersection, US forces may have “killed as many as two hundred and had destroyed at least forty-five vehicles. The company had not lost a man.”

Ref. 7374-H

The US heroes are consistently mystified by what the Iraqis are thinking, as they stick up their heads and have them blown off. Don’t they know we have thermal sights? The Iraqis aim wildly, but the US machine guns, used properly, can’t miss: “their computers corrected for range, lead, temperature, wind, munitions temperature, and barometric pressure. The tanks knocked down the fedayeen one or two at a time as they ran across open spots.” The Iraqis continue to fight in the only way they know how—on their feet, with small arms, breathing and therefore generating heat images. They die as they are glimpsed. “They were not giving up. It seemed

Ref. 2FC7-I

During the Baghdad fighting, Iraqi forces mounted counterattacks at three crucial highway cloverleafs on Highway 8. The US fighters fired tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, but still more attackers appeared, and the commanders began to fear the enemy might break their perimeters and overrun their positions So they lowered their restraints. Residential buildings bordered the highway. It became necessary not only to shoot the visible enemy inside the windows, but to take down the buildings. Zucchino:

Ref. 0D8C-J

With the threat continuing from neighborhoods along the route, the commander of China Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Twitty, gives an order to stop asking for orders, and just bring mortar fire down on the residential neighborhoods. If you sense a threat, he orders, “just level it. Take it down. Call artillery.” He will end any threat to his men—no matter who may be in those neighborhoods.

Ref. C05F-K

Some people claim that war is just the application of force to another group or nation until it submits. Ideal war then tends toward a totality of violence. Clausewitz began the tradition of modern thinking in this vein. Though he understood war’s motives to be based in state policy, he believed war’s prosecution to tend inevitably toward the “extreme,” toward “limitlessness.” This is often called a “realist” position. The first thing you have to believe, to view war differently, is simply that war is a distinct long-standing human enterprise, bound by rules, and that it’s a conflict between populations, rather than mere combat by soldiers or conquest by mighty rulers. Our ordinary language holds to this, in retaining such distinctions as those between war and massacre. The rules of war, too, grant immunity from violence to those who surrender, are wounded, or are taken prisoner. The rationale is simple—anyone who cannot provide a threat is no longer subject to killing. Certain actions which seem morally allowable along the progress toward their perfection, when their goal is possible rather than actual, may became disallowable if they ever reach that goal, arriving at a perfected state. Every general in history may have dreamed of a

Ref. F4F7-L

One of the peculiarities of the newest US technologies of war is that they make enemy soldiers resemble disarmed persons or prisoners of war. At the start of the war in Afghanistan, the United States quickly destroyed all Taliban defenses against high-altitude aerial assault. The United States then began bombing Taliban soldiers. We killed Taliban soldiers sitting in “frontline” positions. We destroyed personnel in rear supply positions. The United States at no time stood to the front or rear: only above. Our pilots stood out of range of any threat these soldiers could present them. A ground force had not entered Afghanistan. It is a paradox of technology to make armed combatants as helpless before our weapons as the categories of disarmed soldiers whom it would be unlawful to kill. Elaine Scarry once defined war as a reciprocal contest of injuring. Behind any military conflict—she agrees with Clausewitz—lies a crisis of policy, as one group wants to compel another to accept its will. But how should it be, Scarry asked, that wars can be won or lost between populations in a way that prepares each side to consent to rewrite its deepest ideologies, or remake the constitution of its society—and all because of an action so uncivilized and terrible as the maiming and killing of soldiers in war? As occurred in Japan and Germany in 1945, and as we are hoping

Ref. EC80-M

Some wars end without ending, and without producing a state of peace or stability, as is the case today in Somalia, in Afghanistan, and—so far—in Iraq.

Ref. EFAA-N

The Marine tactic seems to have been to enter the city to draw fire, then pulverize the sources of fire. Close air support was used in neighborhoods inside the city, from Cobra helicopters launching Hellfire missiles, to cannon-firing AC-130 gunships, to bombs from F-16s. The director of the Fallujah General Hospital reported six hundred people killed and twelve hundred wounded in one week. He said the majority were civilians; the Marines

Ref. 0F49-O

The purpose of touching by police is to make persons touchable. Touch readies more touch. It is preparatory.

Ref. 3443-P

Police are different things to different people. Not because each person has his or her own subjective view on the constabulary, but because the meanings of the functions of police vary with a citizen’s identity, as one

Ref. A14D-Q

stops and pedestrian searches and must justify themselves, they speak with pride of the fact that they will not just stop and question black people but also stop and question white people caught in black neighborhoods and rich people cruising in poor neighborhoods. This, to their minds, is parity. They don’t recognize their role in making up the boundaries of these neighborhoods in the first place, or why not all neighborhoods are functionally the same for the activities of life.

Ref. 2721-R

The basic ambition of a policeman is never to cease to project force, stolidity, an unbroken front, seriousness, intimidation. But that’s impossible. Policing contains daily humiliation at each inevitable failure of the policeman’s front. The uniform itself, the badge in its widest sense, like the luster of all shields meant to dazzle, is meant to maintain this front regardless of the individual inside. But the uniform can never succeed entirely. You would need RoboCop. All police are mortal. There is something in the cladness of police, their preoccupation with holding the uniform together, that makes us aware of all

Ref. C46A-S

The coupling of awe and shame among police comes out in our awareness of police symmetry and asymmetry. A shield is worn on the peak of the hat, while a second one covers the heart. The gun descends from one side of the utility belt, and, traditionally, the stick hangs from the other. Sometimes a heavy flashlight substitutes. Looking at individual police, they almost always seem lopsided. The belt pulls down on one side. The blouse comes undone. They are constantly hiking up their pants. The regulation shoes are the same as those of nurses, waiters, and mail carriers. Heaviness gathers at the waist, in a sedentary, slow, caloric job. There is something in police that droops.

Ref. 6500-T

The symbol of police in this dimension in North America is the donut. The donut is equivocal. It is not loved as apple pie is. It has no national or official standing as apple pie does. It has a local message only. Donuts, like other deep-fried delicacies, do not travel well. Yet donuts have our rueful affection. Really, it is the pursuit of coffee that drives police to donut shops. Donuts confirm what they will not admit with their badge and gun, that they are the ones who must be awake all the time, in public, in the extremely boring job of sitting in a place, either thereby to assure passersby and the public that they are sitting there, watching, or to ensure that other people don’t sit there. This sitting is being added to their nature; the stasis gathers at their waists. They are living traffic cones. Traffic cones, too, would drink coffee and eat donuts to stay awake.

Ref. 0B51-U

here: What we call dirt is only “matter out of place.” Police clean up.

Ref. 6E37-V

racial profiling….Davis began by asking the assembled officers a simple question: “What is your job?”…“What I want to know,” he asked, “is, what is your mission, and the mission of your department? To what are you dedicating your time, day after day?” Most of the answers were variations on “fighting crime”: “Catching bad guys”; “Getting criminals off the street”; “Keeping the streets safe from predators”; “Chasing crooks”; “Taking down the guys that need to be taken down”; “Responding to nine-one-one emergencies”; “Helping the department achieve its goals”; “Carrying out the chief’s orders.”…Then he asked, “What does your oath say? When you graduated from the academy and became a cop, you all raised your hand and took an oath. What did you swear to do?”…Silence….Eventually, an officer gave Davis the answer he sought: “We swear to uphold the law and the Constitution.” Another officer spoke up. “Well, sure, that’s the oath,” he said, “but everyone knows what this job is really about.”

Ref. 3A1D-W