"Of course there is hope, all the hope in the world. Except not for us."-Kafka, ca. 1923
"it comes late at night/without warning/it's near dark..it's near dark"-Lebenden Toten, "Near Dark," 2009
So a decade ago the CIA engineered simultaneous attacks on "civilian" targets, and ~3,000 people died. Who gives a fuck. This is nowhere close to the ~500,000 children whose deaths the U.S.A. directly enabled via medical and food sanctions on Iraq from 1991 to ~2001.
But I do give a fuck, if only because I have to live under the consequences of this post-modern Reichstag fire. While things have become inestimably worse for Afghans and Iraqis, conditions in the USA since 9/11/01 have become unbearable, too. The gutting of what small welfare state existed in this country, pre-Ronald Reagan. The beginning and continuance of 2 full-scale (Afghanistan, Iraq) and many small-scale (Pakistan drones, Phillipines "counter-insurgency," the bin-Laden assassination) wars, the rise of a violently nihilistic, extreme-right wing party, the ascent of a corporate oligarchy. The knee-jerk, violent hatred of non-white immigrants. The planned assault on public education and the Supreme Court.
It's not that the U.S.A. was a great country before 9/11/01. But since all of my teenage-to-adult-life has been spent under the sign of the Twin Towers, this has become my frame of reference.
So I bring you Lebenden Toten's Near Dark LP. Eleven years ago, I would have said that the ideas this LP expresses were conspiracy theories: a military-corporate dictatorship of the U.S.A.; the presidential elections as a reality TV show. All of this, a joke in 2000, is reality now. Personally, like Adorno, I still sometimes feel "...shame that there is oxygen to breathe in hell." But mostly I just don't care anymore.
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