[NetBehaviour] Bad Subjects Issue #87::Weapons

[furtherfield]

*BAD SUBJECTS Issue #87
<http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/intro87.htm/document_view?portal_status_message=Document%20changes%20saved.>*
Edited
by *Molly Hankwitz* with *Mike Mosher* and *Tamara Watkins*, investigates
war, guns, bodies, and mass media—weapons, as part of the human condition.
In the post-cinema, post-television, social media, information and war
spectacle of today, a significant portion of human subjectivity is bound up
with imagining, utilizing, and conceptualizing weaponry of all sorts and
description. Our international "selves" (as we pass through airport
security checkpoints, for instance, as bodies in transit) are scanned and
scrutinized for explosives. And "National identity" is being newly
redefined. From the perspective of defense, in the age of gigantic border
wall constructions, high-tech gun-toting drones, and the ubiquitous mobile
phone, borders between nations are increasingly physically demarcated and
policed. Both experiences, the international "self" monitored and approved,
and the bordered "self" effectively identified and accounted for, are part
of an overall heightened, perceived bureaucracy of security brought about
in the wake of the 911 bombings in New York. We have become public audience
to distant web cast enemy beheadings and inter-corporate, inter-state,
international cyber attacks (see Sony Pictures vs. North Korea) which
continue to bring home an ever more weapons-packed geography of crisis.

Since the turn of the century, when the World Trade Center was ambushed
live on television, unauthorized surveillance, international policing,
military misconduct, and a fistful of expensive (American-lead) "just" wars
have generated paralytic mistrust, widespread use of torture by powerful
governments, and the destructive theft and occupation of land through
ruthless war. These states of brutal, lopsided siege upon humanity offer,
on the one hand, huge powerful armies and on the other, frequently
impoverished, barely defended nations of the poor. Hundreds of thousands of
innocent people, many brown and black people, in fact, in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Iraq, Gaza, and the Sudan --- have been slaughtered, and even
more left homeless and landless.

>From personal handguns and bullet-proof children's backpacks to military
drones, we have a problem. The technologically-enabled "global village"
once utopian, has given rise, instead, to a dangerously oversimplified
monoculture, disproportionately sucking up the wealth, protecting itself
with guns and armies, and fusing into an all encompassing God's eye of
surveillance. It is from this perspective--- that we have perhaps gone too
far and that we need to think in order to show our way out of the bottle,
that the theme  of 'weapons' for Issue 87 was conceived.

Within, weapons are defined by some of the authors in how they manifest in
specific regions or merge with memory and personal history.  Still others
define them through narratives structuring argument in film, television,
social media and literature.

Several new Bad writers have joined us and we wish to thank them
especially, and all of our contributors for the excellent work. In Gun Lust
in Hollywood, <http://bad.eserver.org/upcoming/87/articles/powell.htm> *Thomas
Powel*l draws a bead upon the normalization of gun violence and conflations
of sex and violence in which Hollywood film and TV engage. In Stupidity as
a Weapon of War,
<http://bad.eserver.org/upcoming/87/articles/alter-stupidity.htm> *Walter
Alter* reveals the blinding use of stupidity as a pervasive tactic in war.

*David Cox* offers an history lesson Weapons are Extensions of the Body,
<http://bad.eserver.org/upcoming/87/articles/weapon-extension.htm> ghost
warfare and other strategies. Artist *Carol Morris *depicts the extended
body of Putin on his Handcuffed Horse.
<http://bad.eserver.org/upcoming/87/articles/morris-putin.htm>

In a snowy state that might be called America's Russia, *Mike Mosher* opens
the arsenal of Michi-Gun, Land of A Thousand Contradictions
<http://bad.eserver.org/upcoming/87/articles/mosher-michi-gun.htm> while,
150 miles further, *Patrick Powers* loads Weapons in Northern Michigan.
<http://bad.eserver.org/upcoming/87/articles/powers-weapons.htm>

In 19 Kids and Shooting: Jessa Duggar, Her Trip to the Gun Range, and
Anti-Choice Rhetoric in the Quiverfull Movement,
<http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/19kidsandshooting.htm> *Tamara
Watkins* gazes upon Duggar's pretty face for ugly ideology. In Ploughshares
to Swords: The Weaponization of the Internet,
<http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/plichty.htm> *Patrick Lichty* looks
at the increasing militarization and weaponization of the Internet.

*Molly Hankwitz *examines survivalist monoculture in Survivalism and the
Global Mind: Recent Films of Dominic Gagnon,
<http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/hankwitz.htm> a French-Canadian
videographer.

*Colin Scholl* gives a disturbing picture (factual? fictional?) of how ad
hoc weapons are The Great Equalizer
<http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/scholl-weapons.htm> behind prison
bars. While the forces of control try to make us think its casualties
aren't racialized, *Steve Martinot *offers An Examination of Some Recent
Police Killings,
<http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/examination-of-recent-police-killings.htm>
 *Mike Mosher*provides A Modest Proposal About Police Killings,
<http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/mosher-police.htm> and *Joseph*
*Natoli* is outraged by Fatal Eruptions on the American Scene
<http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/eruption.html> around us.

In Where We Live, <http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2015/87/eruption.html> *Holly
Eskew* takes us on personal journey into the memory of a young friend's
life and death from a gun.

These essays and images, *Issue 87 *look at the psychological and physical
effects of weapons upon populations in American life and on a global scale.
They are a collective nod to the possibility of another world.

—*Molly Hankwitz, Bad Editor, Issue 87, Jan 2015*
Thank you to Tamara Watkins for her graphic design.
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