Terrorism Theater

(Picture from here.)

I don't like to talk about terrorism. I'm a creative person. I can think up many, many nasty things that can happen. I'd just as soon not go through life frightened.

That said, recently botox is now on the terrorism watch list. (See here.) The use of an item used by the Western Rich to make themselves more beautiful (and more vain) as a means of attacking those same Western institutions cannot be ignored. It, or some similar idea of it, changes the playing field.

Terrorism is theater. It is a dramatic means of getting a message across. It was not an accident that the Twin Towers were targeted. Theater has an audience and the nature of that audience determines the nature of the dramatic act.

In Terrorism Theater, Americans are not the audience. Let me repeat that. We are not the audience. That we reacted the way we did is a happy accident for Al Quaeda. The meaning of the act was to destroy an American symbol and show the audience Al Quaeda's power and ability. It was a very successful act.

Americans like simple answers to things. Suicide bombers and terrorists attack us because they "hate freedom" or other similarly inane arguments. The world circles around us in our own minds. That we are incidental to the cause doesn't sit well with us. We're not the most important country in the world; in terms of power, we're the biggest and most obvious. We occupy a symbolic point in the theatrical rhetoric that would be occupied by someone else were we not available.

How we make ourselves available is the subject of another post.

Now, botox comes along. In 9/11, the target of Terrorism Theater was the symbol of American wealth: the Twin Towers. That they fell was a tremendous propaganda coup. But the mechanism of the fall was unimportant. If a car bomb had been used, the coup would have been pretty close to identical. Planes striking the tower were media hot but the fall of the towers was so incredibly hot it made the planes insignificant.

What makes botox so different is that the means of the terrorist act is symbolically hot. What better symbol of Western materialism and arrogance than using a poison as a means of creating physical beauty? Botox could be so symbolically compelling that it could make the target less symbolically importance-- something I think that has been inadvertently protecting us. As long as the target has to be symbolically hot, we can get by protecting hot targets. But as soon as the means becomes hot, then the targets can be broader.

Houston, we have a problem.

==================================
Wall of Idiots
High speed glacier melt
Dwelling on Climategate

Links of Interest
Eclipse photographs
Running barefoot
Ginger dinosaurs and here
Humans killed off the megafauna
Exercising good for aging
Aliens in plain sight
Excavating China's dinosaurs
Handling your web affairs post mortem
Ghost peaks of Antarctica
Quantum simulation of Hydrogen
Wind and the grid

DIY
5 minute projects
Dessert recipes
Fermentation