News Correspondents As Lacanian Seers Of War

The media-person (or news correspondent) who tags along in an on-the-ground war operation is considered by the soldiers to be some kind of seer of war, able to predict the war's course with expertise, sophistication and prophecy, a prediction which he/she does in his war reporting for the camera. Once the camera turns on, the news correspondent has an intense feeling of awareness of what is going on around him/her, and treats the war with utmost seriousness and problem-solving ability. Soldiers who realize the importance of such a skill-set in their team may enlist the help of a media-person, who typically has years and decades of expertise reporting in wars all over the world, something which the soldiers themselves, ironically, may lack.

Although the media-person seeks for perfect camera-work on the ground, this aspect of his/her part in the war effort is indeed amateurish today, the camera-work often being shaky and too narrow to take in the whole context of war. But curiously enough bad camera-work does not disqualify them from war and war-reporting. The media person's problematic camera-work is compensated for with his/her knowledge, which he/she does not necessarily need to share verbally, with direct commands to the soldiers, but which can be visible in his/her psychology when someone is firing at him/her, his/her bodily behavior/movement when there is gunfire, and the way he/she chooses to interact with his/her “team/unit” when the enemy is further away and there is brief safety. How, we can ask, is the news correspondent ready to engage in war without a weapon of his/her own?

The media-persons are enlisted by the war effort as prophets, akin to ancient “wise men” who saw the war's course, or other things such as “potential war weariness” in the soldiers, before the army's soldier himself/herself saw these future events. The media-person's claims of their neutrality in no way makes them exempt from war, but enables them to be a seer of both sides to a conflict, in order that this knowledge be shared with one particular side over another. When the media-person makes a final analysis report, it contains a lot of original knowledge and conclusions that the army personnel/warlords scrutinize carefully. Hence the media-person may not necessarily be an outsider in the war-effort, but may indirectly, perhaps even without his/her conscious intention, participate in the war-effort. Even if the media organization as a whole may be outside/neutral from the war-effort, the media-person on- the-ground may have agreed to share his/her expertise, or become, in a sense a “model soldier” for the other soldiers on-the-ground, in exchange for good shots for his/her camera.

These news correspondents on-the-ground are Lacanian “subjects-supposed-to-know” for the warlords during a war effort. The news correspondents' analysis is not doubted and not further analyzed, but trusted as a kind of final knowledge on the situation. These media-persons play two roles, in the television and in the army, in order to become these Lacanian analytical subjects-supposed-to-know for warlords as well as for the television viewers around the globe. They can be crucial Lacanian subjects who blend together a television persona with a more aggressive “war driven” attitude, but they need to share their spot more with others with differing analysis regarding the war. The interaction between two news correspondents would be significant today, as would be comparing the two news correspondents' on-the-ground bodily behaviors between different news channels/programs, but not to select a winner and reward his/her abilities with prizes. To get a look at two news correspondents negotiating the gunfire differently while in the same on-the-ground event could indeed reveal how both their statuses as subjects-supposed-to-know is problematic.  

Endangered Seas And The Tactic Of Environmentalist-Pacifists

The disputes over seas and islands seem to be more than strictly political struggles and instead appear as the result of concerns to save the sea environment. These disputes are about nations wanting to claim or own the very last and rare natural sea-water bodies in the planet, given that the future in a warming globe is desertification of the seas.

Also, the environment's status will become important in planning the trajectory of war or dispute. Environmental groups will become more assertive in their publications on the impact of war on the natural environment. The smoke from explosives becomes problematic for being a pollutant. War becomes problematic for being harmful to the natural environment.

A kind of primitive territorial war will take place given the desertification of the seas: not the fighting in trenches or cities for a conflict far away and remote like in the colonies, but the hands-on fighting for the very land on which one is standing, or the sea on which one is floating, that is, a fight for the natural environment around one itself; the fight as both a local environmentalist and a local patriot.

The way to stop the environment-related wars is up to the environmentalists who are also pacifists. An endangered dolphin or bird may be introduced into the war-zone in the sea or land, and the warring parties informed about this, so that they will be compelled to stop the war, at least from that territory, for fear of harming or killing the endangered animals.

Transition In Nepal, Micro-Politics In Jamal And The Doubts Of Nepali Fringe-Cadres

A recent change in Prime Ministers in Nepal occurred smoothly, without protest in the streets, even as we have come to expect protests around political events of some magnitude. This smooth transition does not speak of order and discipline, but rather suggests that what looked like a transfer of power was in fact nothing but the change of personnel precisely in order to leave the same power in place: there is an outward change in leadership but problematically Nepal will remain the same, there is predictability with regards to the important steps and decisions the new leader will take, and hence he has been accepted without protest from the major elements. In the major level of national politics in Nepal, there is no vacuum and chaos after one leader steps down and before another one has to be sought. Rather, the transition has been planned and calculated in advance so that the needs of unchanging core power are quietly met.

It is when there is such a smooth transition at high levels of power that a micro-politics must become active. This micro-political whim could have posited a new party with a new leader, simply as a disruption and not as participatory in filling the vacuum after one leader has left. An important goal of disruptive micro-politics in Nepal is to show that any action in the vacuum between the major two or three parties is interpreted as disruptive, regardless of its content, and thereby dismissed or actively suppressed, so that no place remains for the general population to act without participation and support to the major political parties or interests.

One could raise oneself as a candidate for Prime Minister out on a busy street in Jamal, cause confusion in the fringe-cadres walking to or from a political event, and thereby mobilize the major political parties' resources to reflect on whether their own candidate is worthy, or to cause them to become more alert and prepared for the planning of a rapid election campaign, so that their own party can win against this new political element that announced its candidacy quite randomly out on the street.

But the goal of disruptive micro-politics would not be to register one's micro-political event in the ears of the major elements and interests, but to make the few fringe-cadres around one more aware of how chaotic the fringes to their respective political parties are, where their very own beliefs and understandings of major political figures, events and processes are never fully certain. This roadside micro-politics is interested in enacting small and undetected chaos in the fringe-cadres' minds rather than initiating activity in the major political elements, organs and systems of Nepal.

The purpose of micro-politics is not to distance itself from the major national-level political events, but to position itself in-between major political events, in between major leaders who are orchestrating the transfer of power, precisely in those places/moments where major political elements least expect there to be resistance or disruption. The purpose is to show that the major elements and interests cannot decide on their own when politics is going to be smooth and when it is going to be volatile, but that a whim in some individual of the general populace, or from a small group of friends, can cause the fringe-cadres walking by to re-evaluate the biggest tenets, symbols and leaders of their parties.

California's Wildfires And The Firefighters' Philosophy

We see the might of the fire department when it tries to contain enormous wildfires, and we know that this fire department could replace the police and the army in places that are susceptible to fires. The fire department's up-to-date technology, such as the latest cutting-edge chemicals to tackle the blaze, and its highly skilled manpower consisting even of airplane pilots, enable it to manage large swathes of land and large numbers of population, making it very powerful, sometimes literally overnight. But this power is dependent on the whims of the fire.

The sustenance of power in the fire department depends fully on the duration of the blaze: if the blaze lasts for days, the fire department is powerful for those days, and if it lasts for weeks then the fire department is powerful for weeks. After the wildfire is extinguished, the fire department dramatically loses power and once again goes back into oblivion. Its oblivion and inactivity is complete, for the fire department maintains no internal “office politics” because its experience of power is intense, short-lived and accompanies the fire, as opposed to being the result of careful and farsighted political planning, team-building and manipulation.

Today's intense and panicked focus in the media on the wildfires of Canada and the USA are not so just because the fires have been particularly intense and active, but because of the anxiety that the longer the fires last the longer the fire department stays in power, and gets the chance to further strengthen its role in a certain place and in wider society, toppling even the police and army from certain places, for one.

The fire department dictates the flows of people out of dangerous places and evaluates when the population's private property has to be left behind. Giving the painful instruction to leave behind one's home and other belongings which cannot be taken along is made far easier by the philosophies declaring the impermanence of things. It is this idea in philosophy of impermanence which can be carried forward, thought over and espoused by the fire department more than by other organizations. It is this philosophy with which the fire department is engaged in while doing its “office work,” when the firefighters directly face the blaze, as opposed to being politicized thoroughly like the police and the army and thinking of the tactics and strategies to gain more political power for a certain team or leader within the department, even when they are supposed to be completely engaged in on-the-ground operations. Politics is of no interest to the firefighter, politics ultimately being the search and problematization of the “other” of a certain society, which the firefighter is not concerned with, given that his/her “enemy” is the natural fire itself and not the foreign or criminal “other.”

However, there is a political-philosophical problem in the fire department when it engages in the Greek philosophers/thinkers who consider fire to be one of the important four or five elements which compose the universe, and influenced by the ancient Greeks the firefighter celebrates the importance of fire and becomes a supporter of fires, and considers fire to be his/her leader and indirectly lends support to the sustenance of the fire department's power through his/her desire to see the fires burn for as long as possible. He/she ceases to fight the blaze, and builds all kinds of protests in the department in order to ultimately support his/her budding revering of fire. We must continue to reward the firefighters as enduring heroes and heroines of society for their role in dousing fires even long after they doused the blaze, which may convince them to abandon Greek philosophy's emphasis on and exaltation of fire.

Kathmandu's Widened Roads And The Marginalization Of Nepal's Nomads

There can never be an ideal, true nomad: being born is being born stationary and being introduced to a sedentary life. There is a significant moment of nomadic rebellion within the mother's womb, when the infant kicks his/her feet against the wall of his/her mother's womb, asking to be let go from his/her stationary and sedentary life, and be submitted to a “life of the legs.” But the kick is misinterpreted, and the child once born is introduced to a sedentary world, placed on its back, given illusory empty space where his/her kick does not meet an object to push away, and displayed for the pleasure of other sedentary figures that surround him/her as a special destination.

Reading Lacan, one feels that the mother's walking away from the child is due to her own nomadic impulse to walk, or her way of kicking the child back as a response to her child's kick on her womb. Yet contrary to Lacan, the child does not ask the hurt-filled question “Where does my mother go?” because indeed the child itself has kicked the mother away from within the womb before the mother actually walked away. The mother walking away from the child is a result of his/her kick to her womb; the child demands the mother to walk; the child is the originator of a nomadic impulse in the mother.

Some of Nepal's villagers become nomads when they leave behind a previous more sedentary life in the village for Kathmandu. The Nepali villager comes to Kathmandu for the first time, and in that very first moment of stepping off the bus, he/she is completely directionless, lost from familiar sedentary life, nauseous from the bus travel, with the solid and firm tarmac below him as a kind of support, a kind of sign that the urban world he/she is in can be navigated. Then as he/she travels on foot, taking hesitant steps at first, he/she becomes nomad, a traveler of Kathmandu's roads, criss-crossing Kathmandu's roads without more than the most basic purpose, at most to sell his/her village goats in the market he/she cannot locate, but moving beyond that purpose too as he/she keeps walking freely. He/she doesn't care to read the sign-posts that tell him/her where the goat market is and he/she doesn't try to understand the prevailing dialect/accent.

Yet Kathmandu's main roads have been widened significantly as a part of a big development project. Supposedly the roads have been widened to aid the growing population of drivers, but these widened roads marginalize Nepal's nomads. The pavements, which are the paths that once allowed nomads travel on foot, are nonexistent in many places, and even where they exist they are unsafe to walk given drivers driving fast and reckless. Crossing Kathmandu's widened main roads is impossible given the fast and heavy traffic flow, and so there is no possibility of changing directions based on the whim of the nomadic legs, of criss-crossing Kathmandu freely, like there used to be.

Driving within the confines of their small cars, Kathmandu residents miss the nomadic travelers once found walking the pavements. Hence authorities must interpret Kathmandu's automobile collisions as expressions of a wish for all the cars to be “kicked” away and life to be enjoyed by foot again. But a large crowd gathers around the road accidents in Kathmandu, and it is a mysterious large crowd of sedentary individuals that seems made specially for the purposes of surrounding accident scenes. This sedentary crowd blocks the drivers involved in the accident from running away on foot and instead forces them to become sedentary. For the drivers this crowd signals the real possibility of imprisonment, that most sedentary of experiences.

Nepal's Holidays And The Disciplining Of Politics

When everybody else is on Republic Day holiday in Nepal, the politician goes to work. In the holidays, the politician produces a holiday-related document, such as a policy paper on improving work condition for laborers, released aptly on and for the occasion of Labor Day holiday. The politician also engages in other activities like visiting the site of significance given a certain holiday, or engaging in healthy debate with his peers about the holiday.

“Holiday politics” is the result of the disciplining of the political system. One is effectively told that one can only say and do certain things during a particular holiday, like discussing the plight of women strictly on the occasion of Women's Day, when it is allowed and indeed given a lot of exposure. But there is yet the space for rebellion against such a disciplining of politics: one can write something on the plight of women even when it is not Women's Day, or write about an important event long after it has elapsed so that the “holidays” around it is already over, when it is as if a normalization after the event has led to the origin of conditions for the event to re-emerge. It is problematic that we celebrate Women's Day again next year precisely because we have already forgotten or erased the significance of this year's Women's Day and its achievements; what we need to do is originate and re-originate Women's Day and not just celebrate it and forget it.

Problematically, we have written history to create more holidays. We have become historians to unearth events in any given day which could transform that ordinary day into a holiday, and we have come up with techniques of studying history in order to produce more holidays. This is how history writing is so close to the politician, because the historian provides the politician with holidays. Thus, even if a small group of women rebelled against the significance of “Women's Day” and wrote a paper on women on an ordinary day, the historians are able to magnify and glorify this event to transform that day into a new broad holiday related to all women, and make it distinct from other more ordinary days.

The ordinary people must try and enlist historians to downplay the official holidays rather than transform ordinary days into holidays. Or, ordinary people must show that they are always thinking of their causes, and indeed, that every day should be a holiday. The creation of holidays must be taken up by the stakeholders of a certain cause and not left to the historian-politician team. 

Olympic Fantasies In Nepal's Torch Rallies

Protesters in Nepali torch rallies having daydreams that they are carrying the Olympic 2016 torch instead of protesting some issue with an ordinary flaming torch...First, this quite peaceful fantasy of carrying an Olympic torch helps to deter the protesters from using the flaming torch for arson, and hence this fantasy may be thoroughly crafted by the figures like the road-side Television stores that do not wish to see physical disturbance through torching. However, this fantasy of being an Olympic sportsperson leads to a moment when the protesters become more athletic, making the protests louder, more physical and even more violent.

The Nepali torch rally becomes a site of sports-like competition: who can run the fastest without tiring? Who can shout the catchy slogans the loudest? Who can cause the most disturbance in the streets? Ultimately, whose body is more healthy and better? This competition fractures the unity of the protesting crowd, dividing the protest itself between winners and losers.

It is entirely possible that a small team of very athletic athlete-politicians win in the torch rallies of all the political parties and hence cement a leadership position in all the political parties, forming a kind of authoritarian element in the whole political system and thereafter dominating the other losing political figures. Indeed, the danger of Nepal's unhealthy and non-athletic politicians is that it will allow authoritarian power to develop among an athletic set of political figures who keep winning the torch rallies across the political spectrum.

In the torch rally, it is the body of the protester which is scrutinized, not his/her mental ability with regards to politics, or even his/her emotion or passion towards a cause. Especially in the case of Nepal, with aging politicians, politics in the public event of a protest becomes a thoroughly bodily activity: the body dictates how long the politicians walk, and the unhealthy politician's body's need for exercise may be accompanied by an upward surge in torch rallies.

But for some politicians the torch rally is not an exercise or a training for a bigger athletic-political event, rather it is itself the most important event for which they prepare with other lesser events such as charity football matches. Whereas in a more romantic time in the past, the body was given up in the fight for a cause, as for instance through lengthy imprisonment of the body, today the politician's body has to be kept fit and well-exercised in order that there be sufficient energy for winning torch rallies across a variety of causes. The cause in the torch rally has stopped dictating the protester, rather, the distance of the protesting route may be more important, or the protester's diet. In the future, as a kind of real blow to the passionate politicians' attempts to be sensitive to real problems, the torch rally may be made more routine, with the artificial manufacture of more and more dubious causes to protest, if the torch rally becomes part of the exercise routine for the leading politicians.