Limited, Inc.

Western man, according to some accounts, was born out of a traffic altercation. It was the same kind of thing you can see any day at the intersection of Wiltshire and Lincoln. Here comes the geezer with the bigass Lincoln, and here comes the young hotshot with the convertible Lexus. The argument about who yields the right of way proceeds to murder, of course, and then a future that includes incest and the fall of a principality for the young hotshot. It is no surprise, to the Gnostic historian (who takes coincidences seriously) that psychoanalysis and the automobile arose at the same time. And thus it is that Western man with the parricide watermark floating in his unconscious takes to the road.   Look for details in Ballard’s Crash. Myself, I’ve never been much for Western man – I keep saying to Western man, don’t you come around. But imagos to us humans are like mousetraps to the meezes: we are so entranced by the bait that we don’t recognize that we’ve crossed into the danger

As in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, the world war ii analogy has been let loose to justify the bombing/whatever of Syria. Famously, there are huge problems with arguments by analogy. But if we brush those to one side, for a second, the biggest problem with the perpetually recurring analogy to WWII is that it is an analogy of form that represses the content of the analogon. But as any Hegelian or Freudian can tell you, it is the destiny of the repressed to return. World War IIs are not cheap. They require, for one thing, an immense mobilization of the population. In the U.S., all males between 18 and 30 had to sign up for the selective service. Taxes were hiked to the world war I level, and they did not substantially fall again until 1960. The occupations that ended the war were manned at a militarily appropriate level. The end of the war itself caused a fallout among the victorious allies, which led to a series of wars during the long cold war period. In brief, the ana