Habeas Corpses: When the Forever War Turns Society Into a Gigantic Privatized Prison....

I've been thinking about The Forever War so much that it's triggering all kinds of associations. I'm imagining variations on the dystopic Earth described in the middle section of the book.

For example, incredible imagery from the beginning of the game Half Life 2 flashes through my mind in the darkness while listening to the album I'll Sleep When You're Dead. Picture this: the cattle train transporting you and your fellow prisoners has just rolled into the heart of the black citadel. The door slides open and you and the rest of the chain gang step out onto the asphalt in single file. You nervously raise your manacled hands in an attempt to shield your eyes from the blinding spotlight that seems to hit you out of nowhere and makes you feel totally exposed. You're the first in line, so you do your best to squint so you can see where you're supposed to go next. There's a helicopter circling above you, which makes it impossible to distinguish the harsh commands ringing in your ears from the nearby loudspeakers. However, you can make out the silhouettes of  a group of men standing in front of you. One of them is beckoning you. You take a few tentative steps towards him but then freeze up with a sharp intake of breath: the black silhouetted figures are holding nightsticks, so it looks like the reception committee will be forcing you to run the gauntlet.

You can also now see the uniforms and impassive masks worn by your captors, and in this moment you experience a great blackness rushing through the very core of your being, leaving only a sense that you are now totally owned and that no one will ever be able to help you. A shadow falls across your face as your eyes follow the hand wielding a nightstick that has raised above your head. You brace yourself for the blows you know will now surely come. But then, in that split-millisecond, you hit upon the role-reversal fantasy that you desperately hope will sustain you during the dark solitary years that lie ahead.

 It took no time at all then for you to start imagining what you would do if you stood on the other side of the line. Exactly two minutes in fact. And from that day forth you dedicated yourself to finding love on a prison ship... 

"I found love on a prison ship..." {X5}

"Number 247681-Z, step to the line"

{*gunshot*}

[Cage]

Two types of people in this world to recognize

Conquered, and the one holding the rifle at the next in line

The crosshair in my eye is a vessel to god

The container that kept you around is in a hole in the yard

Sail the cemetery seas, half the crew leaves then move on

You have no idea how right my head is screwed on

When I wake up and put this suit on, I feel escape begin

Expirations are needed, I facilitate the end

[El-P]

There are two types of mornings/mournings in this life I can surmise

I wake early in the first to help supply the second type

Technician of repetition clips in the numbest of traditions its

The little wondrous blunders that can summon one's demise

I know the line to walk, talk softly, punch a clock, aim (pow) done

I see the shelter in contrition, best to limit wagging tongues

But today's a confrontation with a thought that's not assured

She's inching closer to my services and further from my world

"I found love on a prison ship..." {X8}

[El-P]

Does this job ever bother you, darkly creep up in your conscious too?

[Cage]

Nope, in fact I'm so enamored with the standard

of being handed a command to (pow), it's almost romantic

The lead giveth, I take it, if I didn't understand it

[El-P]

I'm saying during the tenure of your gig, have you ever herded a pris

Who despite the traitorous label, makes you nervous as a kid?

Maybe beyond a date with the lead, there's something else meant for

A prisoner with the beauty of 247290-Z

[Cage] 

Oh God, you gotta be joking, I get it she's smoking

Go get a taste, I'll hold you down for thirty, she must be purty, you're open

Your secret's safe with me, go on a raping spree

I gotta couple numbers of my own, just return the courtesy

[El-P]

No, nah man, that's actually not on my mind

Somehow its different this time. I mean

Should a creature so sublime and young really be in line for the gun

And am I the one to dispense it? She seems almost defenseless

And her eyes have the surprising effect of rendering me restless

"You know, you look really pretty without handcuffs on

Without the dirt on your face..."

Like the piss and stench of the huddled traitors evaporates from the room

And in that moment I can see her truly, and she can see me too

Beneath the body armor and weaponry, my heart quietly thumps and whispers

"Drop the guns and grab her, now's the time to make your run"

Sitting in my transport as we slip through traffic veins

She doesn't ask me where we're going, only holds my hand and gaze

She's my only reason now, and my only hope to live

We pull up to the cabin way above this damn metropolis

Me and prisoner 247290-Z

Somewhere that is Soilent Green, we're living life instead

No more war on traitorism, only me and her

She can clean my gun and I could help her clean the floor

Back to something natural, we'll live off of the land

When Radon levels drop we walk the trails and talk and laugh

I tell her she's innocent, and she'll show me she's not

I kiss the number on her arm and lay her on the cot

I'm the first to touch her without gloves on

She's the first to kiss me without crying

Life before this was just dying

Me and prisoner 247290-Z

Away from all this violence, live inside each other's heads... (repeating X4)

"Number 247290-Zed, step to the line"

[Soldiers]

"Dammit Lindt, fire your weapon!"

"Yes sir"

{*gunshot*}

"I found love on a prison ship..." {X7}

[Soldiers]

"She's dead Lindt, just how we wanted it. Great."

"Just how we wanted it (laughing)"

"You shot the shit out of her Lindt. I'm proud of you. Go home"

--(El-P Habeas Corpses [Draconian Love] lyrics)

The Forever War

Busy right now doing a lot of stuff for Japanese academics and students, so no real time to post anything. I get such bad repetitive strain injury sometimes in my wrists, fingers etc, combined with headaches from being forced to stare at a computer screen for such extended periods, that I can't force myself to blog with the same regularity as before.

Be this as it may, I've just finished reading Joe Haldeman's The Forever War and found it so powerful that I feel obliged to take the time to blog something about it: a chill ran down my spine in the section where the veteran returns to Earth and finds life there so miserable, not least because his accumulated pension fund and savings can't sustain a decent living, that he decides it is preferable to return to combat. A critical point here is that, at least before "the fog of war" sets in, jingoism can simplify a soldier's involvement and choices for survival into such Manichean terms that there is no felt need to question one's involvement. The trauma of how meaningless it all is hits later. For another superb treatment of this theme, I recommend trawling through the archives of this blog to find Hans Joas's piece on violence and contingency (which he emailed to me several years ago). Likewise, Haldeman demonstrates the insidious nature of the process back on the homefront, where the veteran starts to feel like an alien. For some the solidarity of a small "band of brothers and sisters" provided by a combat unit, which has to be based on trust to ensure its survival, is apparently preferable to the death from a thousand cuts that results from the anomie of everyday existence under liberal capitalism.

 Eerily enough, subsequent to publication of Haldeman's book, it becomes all too easy to find devious politicians who are willing to blur these lines further by resorting to "battlefield nationalism". In Australia, for example, this has meant celebrating "the ANZAC spirit": as neoliberal policies under the Howard Government attempted to convert everyday life into a forever war through tactics such as removing the "unfair dismissal" law from workplace agreements, Australians were constantly reminded of the sacrifices that needed to be made for the greater (ahem) good. It was particularly amusing when this fanatically doctrinaire revisionist historiography would backfire on them, like when a besieged minister Brendan Nelson complained bitterly that "politically correct" teachers were hampering nation building, and that this could be rectified by instead teaching students about the legacy of "Simpson and his donkey"--i.e. a soldier who had bravely risked his own life to save his fallen comrades by carrying them from the Gallipoli battlefield on a donkey. The inconvenient truth for Nelson was that Simpson had been a dedicated communist, so the motivations for his actions didn't exactly do wonders for the agenda of the Australian Liberal Party.

My earlier reference to Durkheim by way of anomie was therefore quite deliberate, as battlefield nationalism proves that even individualizing ideologies need to be ritually consecrated into forms of collective effervescence before they can be used to promote "the national interest".

Hopefully also in the same spirit as Joe Haldeman, I'm posting a couple of pics here to remind us of why we should prevent a forever war from taking hold.

Attention Prisoners of Gravity: The Polymath, Or The Life And Opinions Of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman

"The Polymath isn't about just [Delany's] sex life, but a good chunk of it is and it all relates to his writings. Take for example an early scene in which he is reading, to an audience, the opening paragraphs of his 1966 short story, 'Aye and Gomorrah' (which first appeared in fellow science fiction author Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthology, Dangerous Visions). The story begins in France in a pissoir and Delany describes this as 'an early attempt to deal, in a highly coded fashion, with homosexuality.' That it involves a public restroom invokes the obvious autobiographical element.

"This is also true for Times Square Red Times Square Blue. In this nonfiction opus, Delany argues that 'cleaning up' Times Square and turning it into Disneyland is not a good thing because, once upon a time, people from different races and classes, normally kept separate, met and interacted in the only social situation available to them and that was the porn theaters. Delany is one of the few writers alive who can explicitly describe the public sex, involving himself and others, that went on in these venues and work it into an essay about the infrastructure of cities.

"But all of his metaphors aren't carnal. The ruined and mostly abandoned city in Dhalgren (a book that is the science fiction equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses) was inspired by the real burned out inner cities he knew from life. He explains that the reasons for making the gender of certain characters ambiguous in Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (1984) was because he once lived in a hotel with several transsexuals and it drove him crazy, at first, when he couldn't discern the sex of some of the people in the elevator with him.

"Besides his writings, Delany also discusses his life and his family's history. His grandfather was a freed slave, a cousin was killed by the Klan, his two famous aunts (who both lived to be over 100) organized a picket line at a movie theater showing Birth Of A Nation in 1924. Chip has much to say on the subject of racism, comparing the attitudes of white students towards Paul Robeson at Columbia Law School to the skinheads who dragged James Bird Jr. to his death as he was chained to the back of their truck."

"Sexuality & Science Fiction 101" by Michael D. Klemm





"Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation has acquired the rights to The Forever War, an award-winning 1974 novel by science fiction author and MIT writing professor Joe Haldeman. The film will be directed by Ridley Scott, whose last science fiction films were Alien and Blade Runner. The producers are now searching for a writer.

"In Haldeman’s novel, a physicist is drafted into a long-fought war against an alien race, where distant battlegrounds are reached by faster-than-light travel. The battles are short, bleak affairs against an uncommunicative enemy, with frequent casualties. When he returns, the protagonist finds that the world has changed in his absence.

"Basically, The Forever War is 'all about Vietnam,' said Haldeman, a draftee who served in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 1968. 'I didn’t sit down and make a chart or anything,' he said, 'but the [Vietnam] war was my model. The book won a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award, two of science fiction’s most coveted honors.

Prof. Haldeman’s Novel ‘Forever War’ Picked Up By 20th Century Fox Film
By Michael McGraw-Herdeg