July 01, 2005
Generally, the concepts tower and freedom stand in opposition to each other
At what point does the use of the word "impregnable" start to seem like you're just asking for it: the first, fourth, eighth time?
The following three stories go together: the suggestion that the new honcho d'Iran may have been one 1979's hostage-takers; the Gaza settlers' passionate refusal to leave the Strip; and last week's surprising Supreme Court decision (the one that didn't involve file-sharing or Ten Commandments).
The link is most apparent between the latter two, not for the legalities, but for the actual actions of the humans involved, the extent to which individual actors conceive of themselves as serving at the pleasure of the state, or being the state. One can certainly see, whatever one's stance on Israeli occupation and the struggle for a Palestinian homeland, that the settlers identify themselves less as subjects of policy than as the form a policy takes in the sphere of life; to accept the dismantling of the policy would be to accept their own non-existence.
The idea that one makes the state via one's actions, rather than that one makes one's actions acccording to the demands of the abstracted "state," seems like a belief that would be proper to new republics; surely this the proposition that haunts the Ahmadinejad narrative. By one measure, Israel and Iran are profoundly old, but by other accountings, their current forms are artifacts of recent awakenings into orders considerably less entrenched than the regime at home. The strangeness which for us shrouds these actions abroad is an index only of the depth of our historical sleep.
Posted by jane at July 1, 2005 01:36 AM | TrackBack