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I have 13,300 posts on these boards, and I'd guess that maybe 1,000 of them are very simple. They say just this in the subject line:
Welcome to the Desert of the Real...
There's no text in the message, just another ellipses, like this "..." That's it. One thousand posts of just that, and maybe many more. Two thousand? It's possible. You might have seen them. I post that post in LBN whenever I see a news story about the deaths of American military personnel in Iraq. Just that: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. I thought on this day when death is so much in the news, so to speak, that I'd take the time - finally - to explain it.
Most people faintly aware of pop culture probably recognize the reference. They are the words spoken by Morpheus (Samuel L. Jackson) to Neo (Keanu Reeves) in the film The Matrix. When are they spoken? At the precise moment when Morpheus detaches Neo from the Matrix, the simulacrum of a society that exists only in the minds of bodies being exploited for energy (i.e., wage labor). The Matrix is a fairly obvious metaphor for the old Marxist version of ideology, or (to simplify considerably) the system of signs and ideas we create that obscure our relationship to real (bodily, structural) conditions, which is to say, conditions of exploitation. Neo, in shock, looks at the desolation of the world created by the exploitative system of power, surveys it in a bodily way. Morpheus drones Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Not the imaginary anymore, you see. The Real. Those with more theoretical chops may also know that Slavoj Žižek wrote a little essay/book using the same title in the wake of 9/11. Without getting into the neo-Lacanian theory, the complex structuring of the Imaginary and the Real or (the sublime object of) Ideology, we can at least say this: Žižek suggests that 9/11 exposed Americans to the utter catastrophe that the global capitalist system had unleashed on the world, just the briefest glimpse beyond the imaginary relations in a Morpheus moment. Beyond the sounds of the explosions, September 11 whispered to us faintly, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real."
And so with US troop deaths in Iraq. The Iraq war was and is a farce. Iraq was imaginary. This is what Baudrillard meant when he said of the first Gulf War: The Gulf War never happened. Well of course it happened, you might protest. That's ridiculous! Yes, it happened, but what most Americans got of it was a simulacrum, a picture show, a war on TV. We never got to the Real. But the movie didn't end. It went on through the 90's, with a major villain and various characters, and intensified with a bumping soundtrack and snazzy graphics and tones of high seriousness in 2002 and 2003. We told the most outrageous tales about our little imaginary Iraq, our imaginary little WMD, imaginary little ties to al Qaeda, and the plot goes on and on and on. You know and I know that the American elite media apparatus was complicit in creating this imaginary set of relations. You know it. Everybody knows it, now. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. You know and I know that the American elite media apparatus is part and parcel of the State, the mouthpiece for global capitalist catastrophe, and the perversions of the State-form. The perversion of democracy. It is an ideology machine, a fantasy. There is no journalism. Only screen-writing. But the screen is in our heads. Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
But the imaginary has to brush up against the Real constantly, in the same way Neo's body had to be fed. And sometimes, the imaginary bumps up against the Real so hard that the film strip skips, like when your 19 year old son gets his face - his Real face - blown to fucking pieces by an Improvised Explosive Device. And then the fantasy is not so amusing, or compelling, or even serious anymore. It just stops. Welcome, friends, to the Desert of the Real.
And that's all I have to say about that, if you follow...
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