“The Medium is the Massage”

“This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.” – TS Eliot the Hollow men

“You will die with a whimper,” Judge Leonie Brinkema sentencing Moussaoui to spend the rest of his life in prison with no possibility of release.

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects is a book co-created by media analyst Marshall McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and coordinated by Jerome Agel

Today, we sent one man to jail for life.
He will become invisible, free
from the sun, human contact,
and when he talks to walls,
they will answer silent; the sky
will have no windows to his cell.

His mother in France will never see him.
She will die; he will be an empty space.
The dead will not meet him in Hell.
The Angels will not be virgins.

I am troubled by guilt, almost
as if the trial purged our failure:
what failure, you ask? We had
“credible” information; no one acted.

We are at war? Prophets of Jihad
are everywhere? Moussaoui mocks us
because we allowed it?.

What if he had been shot
an enemy of the state?
No one would have missed
him except politicians
and newscasters:
“the medium is the massage”

4/5/06