When I wake up, my first movement is usually the pathetic grab for the phone.  A few thumb swipes through the usual fodder: a text from my bank account, an Instagram like notification, an Al Jazeera update about so-and-so IS emir being killed by such-and-such country's drone; and then it's back to tossing and turning on the pillow until the alarm or my guilt wills me out of bed.  So it is.

On Tuesday,  I was surprised to find this banal ritual completely saturated with every news update imaginable.  The stupid morning scroll was awash with the big names; BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, AP.  "Terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo office in Paris" was the gist of all of them.  The drunk stupor of sleep still blanketing (and my weighted contacts struggling to adjust my sight to the waking world), I took in the expected droll of bourgeois coverage of Islamist armed reaction.  A morbid insistence that the catalyst of such violence was Hebdo's shock-value humor (with social commentary infused) and caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad was the line the European and American media was taking; a stance that placed the perpetrators as simple takfiri Islamists violently enraged by liberal values of free speech and free expression.  Indirectly, all mention of the social and physical marginalization of Arab and North African immigrants in France and Europe became equatable to Salafist apologist rhetoric.

To find actual analysis and theory as to the true reasons two young men would commit such a heinous act, one had to dig a little deeper and go beyond the headlines and mainstream narrative offered.  Even then, it's easy to feel guilted out of rational discourse by the imposed psuedo-solidarity with the victims that the mainstream media began to enforce.  Who could have ever guessed that the "us vs. them" mentality, espoused by the Bush administration during the months following September 11th, would not only eradicate a sane middle ground but would also function both ways; in aligning previously unaffiliated and disenfranchised Western youth with the "them" categorization Bush casted dubiously as the enemy, the terrorist, the dreaded usurper of neoliberal values?

It did.

The blatant insistence that the shooting spree, ignited by Cherif and Said Kouachi, was an evil reaction to the proud defiance of French satire journalism is a convenient way for the powers-that-be to strip the social, political and spiritual contexts from the final picture and allow for self-serving narratives of war and vengeance to develop.  They choose to paint it with a brush that only works in black and white: Islam is incompatible with the unquestionable and sacred rights of the Enlightenment and beyond.  Islam is an affront to the tyranny of liberal democracy.  Islam is inherently backwards.  Add "and therefore Muslims" to any statement about Islam in the coming days and you have the same thing with different words.  It's a thesis whose positing will undoubtedly flourish into far-Right political capital and allow for the seemingly cyclical return of non-subtle Eurofascism.

This isn't to presuppose that an honest look at the forces that drive young men in the West to a life of struggle against their "home" ideology would slow down the National Front, et al. from their path to electoral power.  It can, however, add volumes to the way in which liberation theology, specifically, and radical Leftism interacts with the continued gravitation towards takfiri Islam by the exploited people and cultures of the 21st century.  Working backwards, one can start with the focal point placed on the massacre by the bourgeois media.  While clearly a story in urgent need of international attention and, during the period between the Hebdo attack and the Kouachi brothers demise at the hands of French special forces, a round-the-clock stream of information, a double standard can be easily detected by anyone familiar with this same media's treatment of similar incidents.

It's not hard to imagine the massive devaluation of human life that begins when one views the double edged blade the powers that be have wielded when it comes to reporting acts of militancy.  For a society that has an often fanatical obsession with the cold, ahumanism of statistics and numbers, the somehow-never-even scales of justice balancing the 3,200 or so deaths of 9/11 and the 200,000 of Iraq alone are a glaring sign that "human life" takes on different definitions depending on the skin color, spiritual doctrine and national origin of the bodies to which it is haphazardly attached.  The "cult of 9/11" continues to creatively adjust the circumstances of the present in such a way that they are never quite free from the shadow of the past; a practice that isn't condemnable on its own until its inconsistency is revealed.  If only the birth of the Islamic State cancer could be attributed to the war on Iraq by coalition forces, much in the same way that cancer of the bodies of thousands of New York emergency workers has 9/11 as its roots in the events of September 11th, 2001.

The liberal (read: caffeine free Left) response to the rise of the Right is to inject a "not all Muslims" or "not true Islam" rhetoric into the conversation.  There is tantamount truth that obviously not all Muslims subscribe to the Wahabbist-bred theology of spiritual exclusion and physical expansion, but it's worth asking whether their is truth to the statement that Islam (or even Abrahamic monotheism overall, as according to it's scriptures) is incompatible with Western modes of governing and thinking.

(to be continued)

There are a few moments where I miss my hometown.

Fleeting moment, albeit; sprinting across the mind's eye when I'm shoving a sweater into undoubtedly the wrong location or taking a shit or trying to listen to someone talk.  It's the thought of driving down a road nestled between cornfields and smoking shitty weed that tends to come first.  Seventeen and on the precipice of actually having to try and appear somewhat responsible (or responsive?).  The location was the home with the least amount of parental oversight.  Vacations, divorce and neglect were the gifts of a God we hoped agreed with us; when the cats away, the coffee table book of substance abuse jumps from one lap to another.  Maybe tonight we'll find sex somewhere in that stupor of whiskey and mids.  Blow the smoke on your sweater so it doesn't smell like weed.  Not old enough for cigarettes but what's the lesser of two evils?

Even when I go back and race down the navel of those same cornfields; slipping uncomfortably in the back seat with the ghost-face-mask of youth and fingers crossed, it still escapes me.  I peak my nose in every bathroom at Denny's, every park bench, every shitty trailer that your parents scoffed at, every blackened Bud Light bottle.  It's not here anymore.