The new USS ship New York apparently contains 7.5 tons of steel taken from one of the Twin towers, melted down and turned into part of her bow. The New York is part of about 600 ships or so that ply the seven seas. To defend what exactly? In asking that question, I’m thinking especially of the 40 + US nuclear submarines, 30 of which perhaps are operational at any given time, each with more power to kill people indiscriminately than many or all of our present potential enemies put together.

I cannot get dewy-eyed about the USS New York and her steel rostrum. I was moved when I watched the terrorist attack unfold on my TV screen on 9/11. I was moved because I knew that this terrible destruction of human lives didn’t have to be. It didn’t have to be because violence serves no good. It didn’t have to be because, as this catastrophe was about to happen, many of the financial and insurance mechanisms served by the offices located in those buildings did not serve the good of the people. I’m not thinking about the people in those two buildings, but about the mechanisms. No one can separate the good from the evil with any finality. But the extraordinary returns that investment funds expect as a matter of course in the frenzy of competition called the market depend in the end on the manipulation of labor and natural resources that should be treated with justice always in mind. And one may recognize part of oneself in them: ordinary salaries and pensions are tied to those operations. So, when I hear that the same stuff that went to make buildings serving universal greed is now part of a military ship, I think: how logical. Whether the steel is in the tower or in the ship, its purpose has not really changed. If anything, it has been clarified and become unalloyed in a new kind of crucible.

Are we to believe that this piece of steel became holy by its proximity with the victims of the attack on the twin towers? And that molding it into the prow of a military ship makes all of the military operations now going on in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Irak, Persian Gulf, somehow holy and therefore beyond discussion? Like pieces of Jesus’ putative cross placed as relics in all the altars of mediaeval Christendom? Who would have thought that many Christians in this country would condone the trafic of relics? Can’t they remember at least that the tomb of Jesus was found empty and that the source of holiness is nowhere to be touched and approximated? Who would have thought that a “liberal” US secretary of State, surely aware of all of this, and who knows her Isaiah, would go along and say at the commissioning of the ship, somewhat in the style of John’s gospel: “In that steel, burned but unbroken, lives the spirit we saw on 9-11. Sometimes our pain can lead us to purpose”? What purpose?

The public operation is clear: to draw political power magically from innocent victims, to transform an object that was near them into a holy relic and hope to sacralize an aimless war machinery (a transport ship in this case), from the bow to the rest of the ship, sailors, navy, army, Pentagon, and political establishment. And rope all of us in the same devotion. I do not want to be part of this kind of synecdochic, fraudulent transport of the senses. But then, how do I show respect to the victims, all the victims, and resist the violent, all the violent? I believe there are other ways…. As for politics, nothing new under the sun: much of Washington’s power derives from the proximity of monuments to mostly young innocent lives sacrificed (in many cases at least) for the good of the people. As does that of the Kremlin, with its heroes buried in its walls, and a still unburied, spectral, embalmed Lenin being visited by crowds. One could go on and on, beginning with the story about Abraham who was tested on that very thing, the need to use innocent victims to build institutions and capital. That is where we are now: we do not have an ounce of rationality left in the defense of economic interests run amok and we resort to all tricks, including the religious shenanigans of a Constantine and successors in the 4th c. CE.

For memento, Isaiah 2.3c–4:

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;

One final word on this subject: the distance from sources of wealth, be they workers and employees or natural resources, is constitutive of financial instruments. The symbolisation inherent to money since the 6th c. BCE, towers as tall as can be, the marvelous symbolization of symbols (derivatives), everything spells distance, as well as a fascination with leveraging and the miracle of making things happen from afar, almost effortlessly. That distance is the opposite of the nearness and physical presence sought in sacralizing the instruments of power which permit and defend the overpowering controls and injustices that distance precisely allows and fosters. There is a proper use of distance and leverage, as there is of nearness and presence, but we have lost sight of it here and now.