From: Ryan Whyte
Subject: the new aesthetic (pathetic attempt at an essay)

the new aesthetic is the totality of totalities, the absolute confluence
of authorial guilt with the crystalline transparency of the object of
writing. it is not the work as obdurate thing but the words as the total
and everlasting incrimination of the author and the author's family.

it is the poisoning of all forums of discourse and distribution by
sectarianism, the eternal register of good and evil, by wiretapping,
packet sniffing, key capture, the brilliant cultivation of paranoia, the
managing of the civilian population and the everlasting presumption of
guilt and the capacity for terror.

it is the knowledge that everything salutary in democracy, technology and
globalization has been wounded to the core by the hunger for war and
retribution, by the hatred for the demotic, by the slouching beast of
opportunistic, savage and byzantine foreign policy. it is the harrowing of
hope, the cultivation of every last form of misanthropy.

the new aesthetic thrives on the eroticism of terror. it is the crushing
of unreason by the rationality of war. it is the silencing of art's
unreasonable struggle against alienation. it is the channeling of the
disruptive energies of unreason into the managed distribution of the
eroticized hatred of one's neighbor.

let us abandon aesthetics. let us unreasonably care for men and women and
children.