Death, 9-11, and Iraq http://www.counterpunch.org/davis01062003.html A very interesting article by Walter A. Davis which applies a psychoanalytic/political analysis to the tragedy of 9/11 and the "war on Terrorism." The article was written before the war against Iraq but would apply just as well to it. It explores the death fixation of the Bush regime. Of course, the death fetish is consistent with the religious right. Can what is true for individuals also be true for nations? And thus with respect to 9-11: our task being not to resolve the trauma but to do all in our power to assure that it is fully constituted? But for that to happen it is not enough to cite the traumatic images that were blazed into the nation's consciousness that day: a plane embedded surrealistically in a building; bodies falling from the sky; that great granite elevator going down; the terrible black cloud rushing forth to engulf a fleeing multitude; and then the countless dead, buried alive, passing in endless queue across the shattered landscape of the nation's consciousness. ........Images from the present must speak to other images that are tied to memories buried deep in the national psyche; to things forgotten, ungrieved, vigorously denied; things in the past that have never been confronted and worked through. Such as this: on 9-11 did many Americans realize, if only for a moment, that we were now experiencing, in diminished form, what it was like to be in Hiroshima city on 8-6-45 when in an instant an entire city disappeared, no where to run from the flash that vaporized over 200,000 souls and condemned the survivors, the walking dead to a condition of nameless dread, to wandering directionless in a landscape become nightmare?