The Lottery (1948)

Was the 2005 remake of War of the Worlds (1953) inspired by the 9/11 attack on the WTC? In the original War of the Worlds, Earth was invaded by extraterrestrials, while in the remake, an extraterrestrial army embedded in the planet millions of years earlier is activated by a "weather" event. Same with the 9/11 attack: the towers were in place, as was the Law of Gravity, as was the Bush Administration; the "activation" in this instance was not two fuel-laden airplanes piloted into the towers by Arab-speaking hijackers, but a White House that had knowledge of the plot and turned a blind eye because the attack would provide a pretext for a U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, and from there allow the U.S. to "regain" control of the narrative (oil, in 2001; the world economy, in 1941, after the White House learned of a planned attack on Pearl Harbour and allowed it, too, to happen in order to justify its entrance into World War II, a "game" those running the U.S. needed to be in). Same too of the nuclear power plants the Russian army has been shelling in Ukraine -- to cut off the country's power supply, but also to poison its enemy, make it radioactive. 

Everything about us and our world is always already in place. Things we can see, like towers and power plants, and that which we cannot see, like the internet and the beliefs we shroud ourselves in to disguise our ulterior motives. Where once we physically struck each other in anger, now we push each other's buttons, play with each other's circuitry, encourage it to short out, and the cycle repeats, expands. It's no way to live, but in an effort to relieve ourselves of what ails us, we carry on, using the same devices that enable us to do our jobs to do harm to those who remind us of our doubts, interfere with our turn at whoever we choose at the kissing booth. And in many ways it seems like it's never going to change, let alone end. Even the effort to change these patterns and systems and structures can be excruciating. We see this especially in our symbolic forms -- in today's art, music, literature and film. Bad things happen, people grieve, our patterns and structures and systems are blamed and, as the American writer Shirley Jackson reminds us in her critique of Democracy, "The Lottery" (1948), the majority are guilty -- of stoning.