First -"Lone wolf" - from the WSJ - "The Phrase Lone Wolf Goes Back
Centuries A phrase used to describe the culprit in the Sydney siege
stretches centuries back to Native American chiefs, Kipling and Crane."
I've heard it all my life.
Second - The bridge and what happened at Johnstown is quite different -
two books are David J. Beale, Through the Johnstown Flood, and David
McCullough, The Johnstown Flood. As I mentioned, I think, a minimum of
2209 people died from drowning, the physical force of buildings bearing
down upon them, and fire. The bridge was a retaining wall for debris,
buildings, fire, people dead and alive, and animals dead and alive.
It seems problematic to me - having been up and down in Johnstown, seeing
the poverty there now, and so forth - to immediately have this slip into a
dialog about the Olympics and the usual discussions on terror. Johnstown
wasn't this; it was also very much about class differences, etc., but it
was also about heroic efforts to save thousands and thousands of lives
(which involved everything from creating hospitals from scratch to
building railroad tracks in a very few days, etc.). It's not that I don't
think the other issues and dialogs are important - they're absolutely
critical - but the issues are not the same between the two.
When I was in Johnstown with Azure, we walked to the damsite (where the
dam gave way), where the Little Conemaugh River still flows - and for us
and many people there, the issue is the vile pollution from mine runoff -
which kills but slower - that's evident everywhere; the River ran bright
orange, nothing lived in it at all, and it's part of the watershed.
I apologize if I'm overstepping my bounds here, in the discussion; I just
feel odd about the slippage into a discourse which seemed to me to efface
what happened 5/31/1889 in Johnstown, what's happening there now as well.
Alan
On Sun, 24 Jul 2016, Johannes Birringer wrote:
Dear Ana
not wanting to engage in ideological fracturings here, to be honest; you
must be refering to the passage that my friend from Houston had sent me
in the reference to the Olympic Games of 1972, he spotted a sinister
irony in the choice of the site; you will recall that the militant
group 'Black September' , a palestinian organization, took
responsibility for the hostage taking, there is little disputing that,
and i had no intention of causing harm with labeling.
I was more interested in the perversion of term lone wolf (which was a
literary term i think, from Hesse's Steppenwolf). My friend from Texas
also pondered the scene he found on the internet captured during the
Munich shootings last Friday: "An extraordinary altercation took place
between some individuals filming the Munich killer as he wandered around
a roof car park which was empty. A fair amount of invective was directed
from the group doing the filming at the killer below. His response to
this was to repeat, "I am German." A strange response. There is perhaps
no easy answer to the question, 'What did he mean?'"
maybe you have an answer.
regards
jb
________________________________________
From: [email protected]
[[email protected]] on behalf of Ana Vald?s
[[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, July 24, 2016 9:11 PM
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] stone bridges, QRRR and counter-Munich
Johannes I am always moved by your words. You have such a touching way to paint
with words:)
When you use the words "Palestinian terrorists" I react. Because I has been in
Palestine several times and the only terror I met was that exerced by the Israeli
soldiers at the checkpoints making us run from their rubber bullets and from their gas
grenades.
And many of the old Israeli politicians, as Menachem Begin, Sharon and others
were called terrorists by the English when they bombed the King David Hotel
killing many civilians and when they killed the envoy from the United Nations
Folke Bernadotte.
You are born in a country who exerced terror over Europe and Africa killing
civilians and executing Jews, homosexuals and dissidents. The English exerced
terror over the Boers in South Africa and were the first creating concentration
camps.
The French called the time between 1791 and 1794 the Regime of the Terror when
not only the French aristocracy but also the political dissidents paid with
their life their dissent.
My point is terror is such an ambiguous word and I think no one should label
others with it since terror seems to be inherent to all people and to all
cultures.
Ana
On Sun, Jul 24, 2016 at 1:56 PM, Johannes Birringer
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Receiving a note from Alan Sondheim, on the road, he mentions a stone bridge
where he
created a piece "changing the bridge lighting to produce,
sequentially, and on different lighting levels/apparatus, SOS, QRRR, and
MAYDAY (QRRR is an old radio code for warning/danger/disaster); this
alternative with flame-light images on the bridge side (invisible from the
trains that run above it) representing burning crushed buildings and
people....."
i am not sure why I think of the bridge, but a friend from Texas, after I told
him
about the chaos in Europe, the shootings, the terror, the military putsches,
purges,
and the new security measures, the increasingly heated debates on refugees
and migration, Islamism, fascism, and violence, well, he noted that the
shootings
in Munich took place on the site of the former Olympic Park.
The Olympia shopping centre is a two-tiered glass-covered mall that was built
on the site of the 1972 Olympics.
The Munich Games were overshadowed by a terrorist attack in which 11 Israeli
sportsmen and a German policeman were
killed after being taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists.
Now we hear that the shooting last Friday was by a young "lone wolf" (and what
exactly do they mean by lone wolf).
A Munich-based poet, the late Paul W?hr, once wrote about Die Wirklichkeit
unter Beschuss (reality under shooting attack)
alles ist doch in Ordnung /
es geht weiter /
ich glaube /
ich glaube es geht weiter /
ja des glaub ich schon.
(translated)
everything's all right, no? /
life goes on /
I believe /
I believe life goes on /
yeah, I believe so /
that short QRRR, I tend to think, was meant as W?hr's satirical comment on
"weltfromme Bekenntnisformeln" , pious liturgies that we tell ourselves, as we
must repeat them and murmur them in the face of the all the constant flare ups.
Johannes Birringer
c/o Interaktionslabor G?ttelborn
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