The Best Essays Of 2005 - Page 3

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph,

6. Naomi Klein's "The Rise Of Disaster Capitalism"(The Nation/Alternet): In a year when Time Magazine's Best Photos issue features more disaster vignettes than anything else, when we saw the horrors of land, air and sea, it is a tough proposition to overlook the truism that every man's challenge is another's opportunity. Naomi Klein brings this home in her essay by detailing the beneficiaries of reconstruction - not just the sufferers of disaster, but the corporations, governments and regimes that move in to claim the new 'terra nullus'.

Few ideologues can resist the allure of a blank slate--that was colonialism's seductive promise: "discovering" wide-open new lands where utopia seemed possible. But colonialism is dead, or so we are told; there are no new places to discover, no terra nullius (there never was), no more blank pages on which, as Mao once said, "the newest and most beautiful words can be written." There is, however, plenty of destruction--countries smashed to rubble, whether by so-called Acts of God or by Acts of Bush (on orders from God). And where there is destruction there is reconstruction, a chance to grab hold of "the terrible barrenness," as a UN official recently described the devastation in Aceh, and fill it with the most perfect, beautiful plans.

7. Aidan Wasley's "
Star Wars: Episodes I-VI The greatest postmodern art film ever"(Slate): The culmination of an epic as old as I am young has brought out the deconstructionists and revisionists. Critics revel in interpreting life through art, often merging the simulacra with the original. In this essay, Aidan demonstrates how Star Wars is "really just one big elephantine postmodern art film." He explores how the film(s) unravel the fundamental mechanics of storytelling.

Every text depends on the balance between inspiration and authorial control, and Lucas makes that tension the principal subject of his film. Lucas, like every author, is Luke to his own Palpatine—both the surrenderer to chance (as in Harrison Ford's memorably ad-libbed "I know" in response to the scripted "I love you" from Leia), and the rigorous, arranging schemer (as epitomized in the films' elaborate special effects).

8. Christine Rosen's "The Image Culture"(The New Atlantis): Being a word artist, one is is in constant fear of the seductive power of the image. In the fragmented post-modern world we live in, images control our perception of events and society more than we realize. Christine explores 'our contemporary confrontation with an image-based culture'. In an essay that spans centuries and tectonic paradigm shifts, she exposes the danger at the heart of image - the loss of memory.

...So it is with those who resist an image-based culture. As its boosters suggest, it is here to stay, and likely to grow more powerful as time goes on, making all of us virtual flâneurs strolling down boulevards filled with digital images and moving pictures. We will, of course, be enormously entertained by these images, and many of them will tell us stories in new and exciting ways. At the same time, however, we will have lost something profound: the ability to marshal words to describe the ambiguities of life and the sources of our ideas; the possibility of conveying to others, with the subtlety, precision, and poetry of the written word, why particular events or people affect us as they do; and the capacity, through language, to distill the deeper meaning of common experience. We will become a society of a million pictures without much memory, a society that looks forward every second to an immediate replication of what it has just done, but one that does not sustain the difficult labor of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

Article Author: Aaman Lamba

Aaman Lamba is a Blogcritics editor, as well as the Publisher of Desicritics.org, a Blogcritics network site covering media, politics, culture, sports and more with a global South Asian focus

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