Secret Smile. posted by Richard Seymour

Some don't bother to conceal glee in extreme, ruthless violence. In one of Bush's 'State of the Union' addresses, he addressed the controversy over the assassination of some alleged 'terrorists' with a snigger and the words: "Let's just say they won't be a threat to us and our allies any more". I'm paraphrasing from memory, of course. From Bush, this is all too predictable. Having grown up in the most reactionary part of West Texas, with its Klan history, its culture of patriarchy, hierarchy, frontiersman-style exploitation of people and environment and its casual racism, he has an easy affinity with the cracker-asshole voter. Being a C-student, a failed businessman and a recovered alcoholic, he has open lines of communication with millions more. A family lineage that hails from the East Coast aristocracy also leaves its mandarin disdain for the poor, the subterranean and the insurgent. So, it is no surprise that the only truly elevating moments in a Bush speech are those in which he exhibits his taste for killing and whupping ass (or, since some readers will insist, 'arse').

The citation of a column sound-bite from Lord Stevens ("the brain must be destroyed instantly, utterly") prompted one commenter to note that he could practically hear the old pervert's gums beating together. Indeed, it did seem rather salacious. All of which led Mark Kaplan at Long Sunday to remark that:

It’s not just that the secret enjoyment of violence can be passed off as mere neutral description, smuggled in under guise of realism or whatever, and therefore disowned. Hard-nosed unsentimental description isn’t merely the alibi for an obscene enjoyment. The clinical neutrality of the description, the uncompromisingly unsentimental tone is itself the very object enjoyed. To talk about murder, death, suffering in purely technical, medical or scientific terms already constitutes a brutalism of its own, a tone so neutral as to be itself a kind of cold violence. Paradoxically, what is enjoyed is the very elimination of affect.

Unto which :

"Blow up a different power station in Iraq every week, so no one knows when the lights will go off or who's in charge."

...

"Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too."

...

"It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road, and war-related factory has to be targeted."

And :

"He was the author of his own misfortune."

Further :

"Stuff happens".

Finally :

“The biggest mistake was not to properly prepare the public for the sustained campaign of violence facing the country. Even when Mr. Menezes was thought to be a bomber, witnesses were shocked by the ferocity with which he was killed. More should have been done to prepare the public for the forceful response needed to protect them.”