Equalizer

The gun is the great equalizer; All are equal before God; God is a gun.

And you ask yourself, how is it that men that want to jump back to another age, when things were in their infancy, shoot guns so fluidly. How can an identity of piety be absolutely fused with the AK-47 and its crescent trigger.

It is a case of false consciousness.

The relationship to technology is indelible, unavoidable. There is no greater post-modern actor than the religious zealot. There would be no Al Qaeda without the Internet for its networking and fomenting; there would be no identity without the hyperbolic, media-myth-making in the hyper-reality of the news. These Muslims want to do away with it. The flabbiness and decadence of the Western modern world, but they fail to see the irony that their very identities, all the symbols, all the knowledge and forms of communication are absolutely dependent upon the decadence of the West.

The guns they tote, the cellphones, Internet forums and the use of the media to give their terrorist activities meaning. Even the suicide bomber is motivated more by the notion of celebrity-hood, in the terms of the inflated sense of the individual by the hyper-reality of the media, than by a true notion of self-debasement before God. The very experience of committing the act of suicide for religious reasons is informed by the knowledge and fabrications of the Western world's news sources, that slowly trickle out into these Muslim nations. They comprehend their fate by those that have gone before them, and those that have gone before them are silent, shattered bodies that are given a false voice of meaning by news agencies.

Al Qaeda is nothing without the AK-47; they have no meaning without the threat of the equalizing force of technology. Technology continues to develop and allow for levels of freedom ineffable. That a clandestine force can exist across the world through the flow of tiny, clicking sinews of bits. That a few bands of men can possess arms that make them a threat to nations, to civilizations. And they speak about the ineffable and the ever-presence of God in a book, but they are composed by the ever-presence of the ineffable freedom of creeping technology.