After 9/11, the Middle East — seen through American eyes inflamed by fear and anger — took on an amorphous, undifferentiated otherness. The threat was called “terrorism” but really it was the unknown. And because we couldn’t isolate it, suddenly it seemed to be everywhere. The tenor of the political moment was captured in a single sentence as President Bush said, “We will make no distinction betwe
en those who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” With those words, as though wielding a scalpel, the president deftly lobotomized the nation. At a time when discrimination was in desperate need of refinement, instead, it was thrown away! War in Context, from its inception, has been an effort to apply critical intelligence in an arena where political judgment has repeatedly been twisted by blind emotions. It presupposes that a world out of balance will inevitably be a world in conflict. The site's tagline -- with attention to the unseen -- comes from my observation that in America we inhabit a culture marked by its inattention to the unseen. The unseen to which I refer is the amalgam of non-material entities whose co-existence and interaction produces culture. What makes culture work is shared meaning. This has an ephemeral life in a space of resonance that ties together individual human beings. The spark that animates that space is language — a vessel that circumscribes experience and makes it exchangeable and through the aggregation of that exchange gives rise to this amorphous entity that we call culture. In a materialistic age we have come to confuse culture with its products; we have devolved from being creators to consumers and by so doing come to measure our wealth in terms of what we possess rather than what we share.
