Some things are so obvious they are invisible.

Prophets see them, prophets like Marshall McLuhan who lived between two eras and had the courage to say what he saw. Hence he was ridiculed, caricatured, and for a generation, largely forgotten. It’s all there in his breakthrough works – The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media – the so-called Internet Era described in terms of television networks. Long before the Internet, McLuhan saw how electronic communication redefined the space of human life.

Make no mistake, human life does take place in a unique space, one of our own creation.  Distinctively human space emerged with the co-evolution of the brain and the system of throat, tongue, teeth that enabled us to make these symbols. Reading the writing on this screen means that you participate in the space of electronic communication, the content of which is literacy, the content of which was speech, the content of which was gesture.

This is that space, this virtual domain that we humans fall into so easily we mistake it for reality. It is not reality. It is a consensual hallucination that came into being long before the Internet. 

Some things are so obvious they are invisible. This space of interaction and communication is invisible. Modern war is invisible. Weapons that do not look like weapons are invisible.

We are at war, we have been at war, we will be at war. Our society and economy are predicated on the existence of war.

The recreation of the terrorist attacks on Washington DC and New York by the mass media on the tenth anniversary of the event was more than amplification, more than collusion. It was terrorism redux, masquerading as the rectitude and righteousness of journalists, as scandals, exposes, and terrorism often do.

Without mass media, September 11^th” as an event-scene does not exist. It would never have existed because it would not have been a weapon. The repetition and amplification of traumatic images by the media made it what it has become.

The theatrical violence we call “September 11^th” was designed to keep on exploding not in New York but in the mind of society where this war is being fought. “September 11^th” is a  mosaic of linked meaningful images. The meanings have been generated by “reports” and “features” and “analyses” which define and reinforce those images. It is a kaleidoscope of images turning unceasingly in our minds.

Ten years later it is obvious that September 11^th was an intentional symbol full of explosive charges which would keep on exploding the way secondary bombs are built to explode when rescuers arrive on the scene of a terrorist attack.

The first goal of terrorism is to degrade the confidence of a people in its government. The second is to undermine the economy.

The attack on September 11 was a fuse. The crash of the airliners was ignition. The explosions have taken place in your mind and my mind ever since and they get into our minds through mass media. We are fused symbiotically with that media. Whether you read this on a smart phone, a pad, a desk top computer, or on paper, the images we see and believe flow through cables plugged into our skulls, blinding us to our complicity as signal repeaters.

In 1967 Marshall McLuhan said that two wars could no longer be waged at the same time in the world. He meant, of course, the “space” of the world, that virtual space of collective awareness that we humans inhabit. He said that the Arab-Israeli War put a momentary halt to the Viet Nam War because news services sent everyone to the Middle East. 

Asked about the kidnapping of Aldo Morro by an Italian journalist, McLuhan said, “You can end the Morro incident any time you want by just ceasing to cover it. Terrorism is an ingenious invention by which any two or more armed people can take over an entire billion dollar industry with the complete cooperation, not only of its workers, but of its owners.”

Sometimes I feel as if every single thing I think is a footnote to something said by McLuhan. But then, I have that feeling in relationship to Nietzsche too, a feeling reinforced every time I return to his work. That tells me that dead societies can take lots of bullets and walk for a long time before they fall.

The rectitude and righteousness of the pillars of society, unconscious that they are selling rope to those who would hang them, is the kind of blindness that made Jesus, for example, hate hypocritically religious people.

Because he wouldn’t shut up about it, they whacked him. Hammers and nails were the preferred weapons. Today the weapon of choice is cotton wool.  We are wrapped in it, living in it, dying in it, blinded by it, looking through it at white space everywhere, hearing nothing but white noise.

There is war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. There is a long war in Iraq. There are wars in Columbia and Mexico, wars in Israel and Palestine, Lebanon and Syria and Bahrain, wars in Somalia and Libya, wars everywhere, everywhere in the world but there is no war here. Here there are only tracer bullets arcing in the night sky that seem to originate here or there or somewhere, but we are curiously disconnected from the historical causes that bind countries everywhere in all of these wars. How have we, we well-intentioned innocents, somehow gotten mixed up in all of these other people’s wars?

Look! Here is an image of heroism. Look! Here are waving flags and martial music. Here are eulogies and grieving relatives interviewed until they cry on camera. Here is everything but war or the origins of war which when we seek them disappear in blinding light.

We are opposed to knowing because we are afraid. We fear instability, authority and poverty, pain and death. Fear is leverage, fear is power. Fear is the visible effect but what are the causes?

The causes are invisible. Perhaps the nightly network news programs when they next describe what they call “news in depth,” eighty or ninety words over a dozen images, will illuminate these causes of global war for us. Perhaps they will explore the deep political and economic causes. Perhaps they will follow the money to names.

Or, more likely, perhaps not.

 The war is a moving target that we can’t hit because the wars we think are taking place are not the real wars.

 That war is invisible. That war is sanctioned. That war is profitable. We can’t see it or hear it because we live in cotton wool.

 McLuhan saw the obvious and said what he saw. That made people uncomfortable. Discomfort was not pleasing  It is not pleasing now, which is why –again – we choose not to see, not to know.