A Violent Dialogue

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I'm not so bold as to propose an answer to this right now, but I will at least quicken this question: can, and--then--when does, violence become a part of dialogue?

First, I would suppose we should wonder at a political conversation--with molotovs, but I am not opposed to thinking about other interactions and collections of people. Not now though, perhaps not ever, unless of course you speak up...

Secondly, and perhaps something that could shutdown this conversation before it even started is how we define violence. I forced myself too far towards a strict reading of violence as physical violence, political or otherwise, towards the marginalized and radicalized who use physical violence, individuals who tend to be treated as monsters demonstrating that they are something not to be empathized with. Far from it, but I digress.

The point here is that we should be willing to expand how we define violence beyond specific acts to cause physical harm in a militant sense but to a more general consideration of causing harm to a person. We should be able to define violence as the use of power against a person, or persons.

Society has apparently come to agreement that we shouldn't be up to our necks in fist-a-cuffs and more general use of arms--besides the ones you were armed with at birth. In fact, I would be willing to dare that military force pales in comparison to the type of violence that really bothers me.

What seems to me to be a more dangerous and far reaching form of violence are the actions of the powerful against the weak. On a smaller scale, this could be the use of physical violence, or even mental intimidation, but does this compare in the slightest to the Gulf Oil Spill or the molesting of our geists by individuals in marketing.¹  After all, what else can we call these afflictions of corporate power on actual human beings but violence?

I won't be the first to call the corporation a psychotic imaginary frenemy acting as a veil for even more rabid and ravenous bunch of hounds masquerading in human flesh. Our brave blue dirt ball has been left scarred, bleeding, perhaps in shock by the acts of men with a full spectrum of moral intentions, dating all the way back to the days when those who wielded power could be slain and the power would be taken from them.

But, still, that power would persist. Kings fall and rise. But, we live in strange times now. Leaders can be killed and their dreams dashed, their stories rewritten, but it's harder to kill something that never was. A corporation is not quite the same tyrant. It's a man made monster that demonstrates what happens when you breath life into greed itself, but at the same time it is a composite entity of human wills. But, perhaps like Devastator, this gestalt of mines only lets the most rotten things come out.

Now, this is not to say that a corporation can't do good, but this is either a mistake on its part or the result of people who are wary of what they are dealing with. It's nature is to cause harm, to amass power so as to preserve itself. It is the worst thing inside of us: the lizard like thing that sees to its own desires at the expense of others, and, inevitably, to the expense its own needs and rational limits.

So how can you punch out BP? How can you pound the metatarsals of villainous HMOs into a fine dust that no medicine can recover? How can you do to Blackwater what's it done to the world?

How can we exact justice? And, in this situation, we are looking for justice to be a force.

I suppose what really is coming to question is when can we take back what we seemingly gave up at birth without a choice: a right to violence, for self defense or otherwise. As a citizen, this right is defaulted to the state, since it seems to at least make things more comfortable, for some, and peaceable to recognize, to some extent, our fellow man's right to life without harm. It removes fear from the general population, but at what cost?

There is no cost if the state is acting for the people, if it is acting redress the wrongs that are committed upon them. But it doesn't seem to be doing that, at least not forthrightly. It's not acting to right the wrongs done by these spectres, which may have minds but no body or soul to strike at.

Still, I'm not sure it would be any better to resort to physical violence. After all the power, the violence we are talking about now--the capital, which is also the capitol, of these phantoms--can buy all the pretty weapons they might need to drive justice to a halt. And this need not be a mere gun or blade, but their magic is best spent on shouting lies and distortions to the highest mountaintop till they coalesce into a form that brings acid rain and hateful thunderbolts on those who presumed they were praying to, as they were told, the rain gods. But these demons do not "make it rain" for the people, or even let it "trickle down."

I'd like to suggest that we can still do violence to them, we can still bring about justice and even invoke the bloody call of an eye for an eye without the use of bodily harm. Their greatest weapons are ideas, because, like their transnational forms, ideas can appear ethereal and can be hard to combat when deeply ingrown and well metastasized.

I will not say that we need to remind ourselves, constantly, of what is right, because we don't have a value as such to revolve around. But, instead, we can try and nullify the gravity of our worst crimes. Which perhaps is how we should perceive these injustices. To still believe in any war of us and them is foolish, even the us and them of the people and the corporate powers. Corporations themselves are but an idea, an idea that we can tar and feather and lock away in the books of law so as to be put back into the box that it crawled out of. But the people who run those companies are still people, just as you and I.

And just like they do to us, we should do to them. They send us wild with their burning visions of paradise, while their workers, truly their slaves, are left to suffer. If our government is unwilling to help us, then the violence we have left is to assault their bodies, real and incorporeal, with protest and boycott and to wage war on their minds and demand life be breathed into their mirror neurons such that their empathy, the seat of their humanity, drives them to take responsibility for the living hellscape that we are now chained to and help us break the chains that man has forged for himself. If they still refuse, then mayhap this be the natural ends of the human machine, unable to convince itself that another is real, and the simple brilliance that that heralds.

Lastly, I'll leave you with something that I've been listening to for quite a bit, and I highly recommend the rest of the tracks that you might comes across from the bar and, later, cantina jukebox in Starcraft II.²



1. My feelings on people in marketing sympathize with those of Bill Hicks. 
2. With minor exception to "Terran up The Night/"