6 June 2009: "I want to reconnect with my country."

This post is about the red holidays of genius. Carles is obviously composing in this entry an homage to Italian avant-gardist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, whose manifestos in the early 20th century called for a cleansing war to brace the modernist generation for the new world they inherited. With the industrial revolution trivializing human work and human subjectivity, the futurists sought to restaor dignity to man through a vigorous embrace of technology and a thorough rejection of pre-industrial traditions. Marinetti declared, "We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the Lame and Paralyzed, have glorified the love of danger and violence, praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are happy to finally experience this great Futurist hour of Italy."

Carles tries his best to emulate this breathless rhetoric: "This 4th of July, I realized that I want America to go to war soon, so that I am not part of a generation defined by the internet + 9/11 + ’social networks.’ I want 2 die fighting in the Final_War_of_Mankind. This will be our legacy." But curiously, rather than embrace the new possibilities afforded by technology, Carles seeks a cleansing war to efface them. War, in Carles's pointed formulation, rather than sweeping away the dessicated past, will forestall the coming of the future, will do away with our being intimately defined by the digital technology that does so much to shape us. But is war always the systematic implementation of the most advanced technology? Can a total war be atavistic? Carles wishes he were in a country that would not face this dilemma: "Sorta wish I lived in Iran, or possibly a ’shitty South American country’ where some sort of revolution/Civil War was happening. Feels like I would have ‘a real reason’ 2 use twitter, like to organize people for protests." Under such conditions, technology could still be embraced, but in conditions of hegemonic dominance, the citizenry are too insulated from the conventional cleansing force of war, which thus must be directed against itself. When Carles calls for war, he calls for a bloodthirsty civil war in which we joyously destroy ourselves.

Carles notes that, unlike liberals, "I feel different from ‘my generation’ because I ‘get’ that America is ‘bad ass.’" He tests the possibility of a cross-generational alliance, fitting with his posited rejection of digitalization, in which he would seek to strike at the heart of the hipsters he so loves to mock and challenge. He complains:

I just want to fight in a war, and kill a foreigner. I want to take control of my life, and prove to this land that I was born in that I deserve to be a part of it. I don’t want to stand around indie rock festivals for the rest of my life.

Notice how the "foreigner" that he wants to kill quickly transmogrifies into the image of his blase contemporaries "standing around at indie rock festivals." Is Carles suggesting that these become grotesque carnivals of gladiatorial combat and mercilessness? What would allow Carles to feel he "deserves" to be regarded as different from those he sees at such events? Who would he have to kill? This is the terrifying question he asks us to consider in contemplating the perplexities of modern youth identity.