ABSTRACT
Several weeks ago, I received a draft of the comments Ruth Linden would make here today at the panel “Locating Ourselves in Our Research.” They began, “By the time I read these words to you, it is likely that a full-scale war will be raging in the Persian Gulf.” That likelihood is now a social fact, even if the facticity of this war is predicated on disinformation; even if what is factual is that a war appears on television trying to masquerade as an entertaining video game with sophisticated lock-on targets and laser shows. A border dispute has become a full-scale war charting the map of power George Bush’s “New World Order” will establish. Bordering on the hallucinatory, the Cold War has become hot again with thousands of American soldiers sweating it out in the Saudi Arabian desert.
