Rex Murphy;

First, a note about Reckless Endangerment‘s authors. They are, respectively, Gretchen Morgenson, a Pulitzer Prizewinning New York Times business reporter, and Joshua Rosner, a financial analyst -solidly competent and authoritative both. Reckless Endangerment does not come, in other words, out of the wild territory of hyper-partisanship or the backwaters of conspiracism.
Any person with a regard for the United States, or with some surviving faith in the virtues of representative democracy, will finish this book severely angry. It’s a good game to play, should you start to read it, to keep count of the number of times you lay the book down in exasperated wonder that the American system could have been so twisted, so abused and so turned against itself.

Abstract

This thesis examines representations of evil through the rhetorical figure of the face and its dissemination through mainstream and alternative media. I am interested in the extent to which representations of alterity contribute to, and make possible, a sustained War on/of Terror. Furthermore, I am interested in how these figures of alterity are apprehended in their suffering. As Judith Butler points out, the ability to suffer is what marks one as human. She asks “[w]hat is real?…If violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated” (Precarious Life 33). My project questions who is left out of dominant constructions of what constitutes the human, and examines how the encounter with a suffering body reconstitutes the “evil other” as human. Specifically, I will focus on the images of torture inflicted on prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the online execution video of Saddam Hussein. While the desire to protect and maintain the life of the innocent other is becoming an increasingly allocated social norm, I am interested in what such applications of responsibility or responsiveness might mean for those who are not allocated similar forms of protection. In other words, how do we present the relationship between culpability and precariousness and what might be the implications of re-inscribing figures such as Saddam Hussein with fragility? This thesis questions what is permitted to be seen as a suffering body in the context of the War on Terror and how dominant frameworks of representation foreclose the recognition of suffering in particular bodies.

Translations are invited in the comments.

Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and “There is no choice — the change has to come.”