Year: 2000
Type: article
Abstract: By 1971 the revolutionary energies of the New Left had been pretty much exhausted, though remnant groups like the Weather Underground continued on with their tactics of violence (chiefly bombings) aimed at disrupting the American "war machine."Their actions attracted a considerable amount of mainstream press attention, enough to prompt the poet Allen Ginsberg to offer a rather provocative interpretation of the situation in an interview he gave to the Partisan Review in that same year: "The government is indulging in murderous violence on so vast a scale that nobody's mind can contain it.That's why it's easy to headline the Weatherman's bomb, lonely little bomb, lonely little antirobot bomb, that wasn' t intended for humans, even" (Colbert 304; also cited in Daniels 459).While Ginsberg's notion of some kind of a collective atrocity overload driving the national media may not be particularly helpful to understanding the situation, his statement remains quite interesting because it succinctly captures the deeply rhetorical nature of political violence and hints at the ways the sociocultural functions of these representations shape our readings of them.In his reversal of the dominant media representations of these two types of American bombs and bombers, Ginsberg challenged a clear distinction long maintained by this country's mainstream media-and the public memory it shapes and nourishes-between state-sanctioned violence 1 and those acts labeled as "terroristic."Ginsberg spoke directly to that powerful grammar of violence within our cultural discourse that assigns state-supported uses of force too clearly demarcated space different than that category of violence designated as "terrorism." 2 For the
Author: Richard Boyd
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2108526534