Thus, he masters men.

Our class discussion on February 5 about the parasitism of humanity with regards to itself, animals, nature, etc. sparked so much contemplation in me that I came home and immediately began to type this blog entry. Since I'm covering the Vietnam War in another one of my classes, the YouTube video about the Air Force pilot in Vietnam was unfortunately nothing new.

A classmate pointed out that if he were to run into this guy on the street, he wouldn't be afraid of the pilot. The things he's saying are rather grotesque, but are not cause for concern to the everyday American. This pilot is fixated on a particular target (his idea of a parasite): Victor Charlie, Viet Cong, Vietnamese people. And the point that faded from my mind as I was trying to speak in class was this: It is easy to kill the target if your target is homogeneous and inhuman.

Examples can be found from most wars worldwide. Since wars are often between people of different nationalities, races, cultures, tribes, etc. it is a common tactic to dehumanize the target by turning them into a caricature or an animal. This propaganda poster from 1942 depicts a Japanese person terrorizing an innocent young blonde woman… but this isn't a Japanese person at all. At first glance it looks rather like an ape, and it even has claws.

"…history hides the fact that man is the universal parasite, that everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving. He bends the logic of exchange and of giving in his favor when he is dealing with nature as a whole. When he is dealing with his kind, he continues to do so; he wants to be the parasite of man as well. And his kind want to be so too. Hence rivalry. Hence the sudden, explosive perception of animal humanity, hence the world of animals of the fables. If my kind were cattle, calves, pigs and poultry, I could quietly maintain with them the same relations I have with nature. Such is the peaceful dream of my contemporaries, descendants, and ancestors" (Serres 24-5).

Man bends logic in his favor. If logic told him that all men were created equal, he would bend the logic to determine that his enemy is not a man at all, but a beast. And men and beasts are not created equal. The aggressive human parasite here views all enemies as lesser beings, whether or not they are truly human. This sort of powerful reasoning is what allows for war. If your target is not an equal, it is easy to destroy. If you refer to everything as targets instead of people, it's easier to carry out your job. "The one who plays the position plays the relations between subjects; thus, he masters men" (Serres 38). But who is the parasite: the soldier or the people being bombed? That's context, but I've been over that already; you get the idea.

We also talked in class about the Animal Planet/Discovery Channel mentality of portraying animals as beautiful and somewhat sacred creatures. I brought up the point that in the media, this is how we convince ourselves that humanity is not a brutal parasite: see, we make these touching shows about animals; we LOVE nature! But in reality we go out and hunt, trap, kill all of these animals. There are certain exceptions for certain religions or nationalities (in India the cow is sacred, and in the United States we would never harm an eagle), but for the most part we feed on nature completely. We aren't just a parasite with which animals and the rest of humanity can coexist. No, we're determined to kill and feed off of them: we're parasitoid to our chosen targets, be they fellow human or otherwise.

And yet, if we listen to the screaming humanity buried in us, we can stop the parasite from within. If we disallow brainwashing, disallow those who "play the position" to dictate our actions, we could regain compassion. The following is a short passage from the book Why Are We In Vietnam? by Norman Mailer, which on the surface has nothing to do with war and Vietnam, but in its narrative of hunting in the wilderness of Alaska, you start to see parallels. That is, if you can understand what the fuck the narrator, D.J., is saying. The book is fraught with racism (it was written around the time of the war and is partly about D.J.'s closed-minded middle-aged Texan father). Each time they describe an animal, they relate it to a human of a non-white ethnicity performing some stereotyped action. This ties in with the war propaganda I mentioned earlier. I've only included part of a sentence because frankly, a sentence can go on for pages in this book. Plus D.J. talks in the third person, and there are a lot of typos and a lot of colloquialisms.

"…if you good, you're up there, up above Master Mountain Goat, and when you start to shoot on him, he does a step dance like an old Negro heel-and-toe tap man falling down stairs or flying up them, and the first animal D.J. got in Alaska was a mountain goat at two hundred and fifty yards, and with one shot, animal stood on its nose for one long beast of a second, and then did a running dying dance for fifty yards down the rocks like a fakir sprinting through flaming coals, and when he died, Wham! the pain of his exploding heart shot like an arrow into D.J.'s heart, and the animals had gotten him, they were talking all around him now, communicating the unspoken unseen unmeasurable electromagnetism and wave of all the psychic circuits of all the wild of Alaska, and he was only part of them, and part he was of gasoline of Texas, the asshole sulfur smell of money-oil clinging to the copter…" (Mailer 99-100).

"…it wasn't until that night when he was in the bunkhouse back at Dolly Ding Bat that D.J. relaxed enough to remember that goat picking his way up and down rocks like a slow motion of a skier through slalom, his legs and ass swinging opposite ways, carefree, like take one leg away, I'll do it on the other, and it hit D.J. with a second blow on his heart from the exploding heart of the goat and he sat up in bed…" (Mailer 101-2). This time he relates the goat to an athlete or soldier: something he respects rather than scorns. Hopefully we'll all start to feel that way with animals, and likewise stop relating other races and other humans to animals that are only there for us to kill.