I cite

Let it go, let it go, let it go

Could anyone be surprised that the corporate lackeys parading around as Senators have dropped the public option? Should anyone believe that this is simply because the notorious Joe Lieberman couldn't support the pathetically watered down excuse for a public option, the one held up as both significant reform and meaningful compromise? It's a lie that they have no choice: this is what they choose--a massive give away to the insurance companies that continue to deny coverage and increase premium costs to extort every last cent out of us (my copays and emergency room visits just doubled). The bill reminds me of the food in Brazil, the disgusting mush accompanied by images of delicious dishes. The scandal is that the charade proceeds as if something important were at stake, when that was ditched long ago, by Obama himself when he took single-payer off the table.

Escalating war in Afghanistan (in the name of peace!), failure to prosecute torturers, failure to reign in Wall Street (in the name of helping Main Street!), failure to deliver on climate, support for the worst in Haiti, and failure to deliver adequate health care. And all this with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate.

This means that the Democrats are the bad guys. Why assume that they can't get what they want when they control both Houses? The answer must be that they are getting precisely what they want--money from the insurance sector, the finance sector, the arms and security sector. (In this respect, increases in obesity may be our best current resistance--if people are too fat to serve in the military, the military collapses; if obsesity puts too much stress on hospitals, the health system collapses; on the one hand, this doesn't make life any better for the poor and obese; on the other, at least they aren't reinforcing the system that feeds on their sacrifice and humiliation. So it's like another version of Bartelby and refusal. In the face of an injuction, one says, in a complete non-sequitor, Supersize Me!).

Clinton ushered in the reforms necessary for the intensification of neoliberalism. Obama is enabling neoliberalism to do its worst without repercussion. He is intensifying the authoritarian and militarist elements that attempt to control, that continue to develop strategies and technologies for control, and intensifying the already extreme inequalities that make control necessary. What makes Obama worst than Bush is that Obama leveraged progressive, democratic, youthful, anti-racist, multicultural hope that politics could still work for the people, that government could still restrain the strong and protect the less fortunate. He held out the promise that unbridled self-assertion abroad and at home would end. Neither glutonous banks, mortgage brokers, and credit card companies nor war hungry oil companies, private contractors, and neo-cons would determine our futures.

It's not ironic that Obama gave a highly publicized speech on education at the same time the CA system is crumbling. It's 1984, just like under Bush: anything that is praised is falling apart; anything that is criticized is really supported, endorsed. The same thing occurs with respect to finance. Obama wants to 'shame' Wall Street? Please. We know they have no shame. Who needs shame when you make over a billion a year? 'Shame' is what Obama says when the truth is that he has done nothing but feed the gall and hubris of Wall Street. 

Exploiting people's hope for change is key to the damage Obama has done and continues to do. Destroying any remaining sense of agency is crucial to ensuring total compliance. The thing is, last fall and winter, people were ready to make sacrifices, ready to be responsible, ready to grow up. The mood was almost one of relief that the pressures to enjoy, to consume, were over, that our decade long credit orgy had finally come to an end and that finding another way was possible. Green initiatives were not yet completely coopted. The financial system seemed broken nearly beyond repair, a clear indication of the ultimate failure of market fundamentalism--as even Alan Greenspan acknowledged: his entire world view was wrong. A reformed finance sector, green energy, single-payer health care, renewed public transportation and a shift away from car culture--these key programs for a new beginning seemed--and were--possible. Instead, the US of Goldman Sachs has chosen war and finance.

Maybe this collapse of our hope is the opportunity for its renewal. Maybe this collapse is the liberation from the fantasy that Democrats are democrats.

The newest surge isn't only in Afghanistan. It's here via the financial-military complex. And if Afghanistan will persevere (as we all expect it will, just like it has in the face of every foreign invasion), then we can too.

Better off dead

Yesterday's NYT picked up a story out of LA about a man left dead on his balcony for five days.

“He looked fake,” said Austin Raishbrook, 33, who lives nearby. “It looked like somebody had thrown a dummy over the back of a chair.”

and

“I ran over there with my camera equipment,” he said. “There was blood on the balcony, and he was visible from the street. But it really did not look like a real person up there.”

Also reported in the NYT (in a recap from a blog) was that suicide has been increasing:

Worldwide, deaths from suicide now outnumber deaths from war and homicide together: the World Health Organization estimates that each year around one million people — predominantly men — kill themselves

We cannot tell the living from the dead. Many of us choose death.

Popular culture is overrun by the dead--vampires, ghosts, zombies. They are more alive than the living, demonstrating the kinds of freedom and agency (or, more precisely, the fantasy of freedom in the undead circuits of drive) we can only dream about. After all, no worries about health insurance here--it can't get any worse.

Do we fear them, these dead, these zombies or vampires? Do we seek in them a kind of release from our own entombment? So are they fantasies of agency or passivity? Or is part of the fantasy the very posing of a choice or opposition?

I read The Lovely Bones. The freedom of the dead narrator, the one at the center of the horror who as that very center escapes it. The contemporary tethering to the dead has replaced American dreams of progress, manifest destiny, hope, change, a better world. The zombie banks that are Obama's obscene underside are the truth of embrace of the dead, are failure to distinguish between living and dead (there are other elements of this as well: enthusiasm for Antigone, a new book on the blurring between life and death, everything written by Agamben).

Can we come back to life (especially a life that is not biopolitical--as I posted here a number of months ago, biopolitics is best understood in terms of the death drive). Can we engage living and the living, without having to talk about valuing life, and thereby inserting it into arguments over economies? Can we hold onto living as a necessary element of the axiom of equality, without getting dragged into ridiculous arguments over fetishization of the human? What is the fear of life? A fear of responsibility, agency, accountability, of the day to dayness of its processes and requirements?

Don't bring out your dead. Our dead are already here and they are enough.

The Real Birth Certificate

Deflecting attention from health care and doing whatever it takes to undermine Obama's popularity are not surprising conservative political tactics.Pursuing an old theme, already debunked, and circulating primarily on the fringe is maybe a bit more surprising, particularly insofar as the claims are empirical ones that are easily disproved. So why does the birther conspiracy have legs?

The most obvious answer is racism. An African-American isn't really an American. Ergo, an African-American must be born in Africa. The birther conspiracy, then, expresses whites' sense of threat to their own identities as it seeks to shore up a line between one of us and one of them.

I don't think this answer is false, but I don't think it's compelling. It's not compelling because it doesn't account for why the story persists in the face of evidence to the contrary.

A better answer needs to account for this persistence. A better answer, then, has to take into account the decline of symbolic efficiency. The 'evidence' of the certificate of live birth, the birth announcement in the papers, doesn't register. It doesn't appear as or seem real. And it doesn't appear as Real because there is no functioning symbolic order that can legitimize or guarantee it. The problem of the decline of the symbolic is the loss of the Real.

Any certificate that is on the internet or reprinted in print media is of course a copy. To say that one has seen the certificate is to say that one has seen a copy. But what can make the copy Real, particularly if one disrupts all the mechanisms of verification. The rupture of the conditions of possibility of credibility prevents verification from guaranteeing any copy that might appear. Differently put, there is NO piece of paper or certificate that could assuage the birthers. Their skepticism goes all the way down; they lack the basic dimension of trust necessary for a statement to qualify as valid.

Tattle tails

My first news of right wing whining about the Obama administration's release of the torture documents was last night's Daily Show's clips from Sunday morning shows. At first, I wasn't surprised. Since they can't make an ethical argument for the prosecution of those who authorized torture, they attack from a different position, one that actually repeats/relies on their Straussian underpinnings: the leaders must keep secrets from the people. This horrible burden of secrecy, of being will to do the dirty work when necessary while nonethless publicly espousing the law is the true burden of political responsibility. That the nightly law is obscene does not make it unnecessary.

As I thought about it, I recalled comments by students several years ago: the government doesn't have the right to tell us what it knows. These comments manifest the same logic of right wing rule. The compact between leaders and followers is you, leaders, keep us safe, and most of all keep us safe from the knowledge of what you have to do to keep us safe. In return, we will respect you and your awful burden, we will observe your commandments, most of all, your commandment that we enjoy (our bovine ignorance, our hatred of the enjoyment of others, our obsessive preoccupation with the very ethics that our obscene social compact stains).

But what about Obama? Has he chosen the worst, the option of knowledge without accountability: torture is now undeniable (for many of us, it's been undeniable since the Abu Ghraib photos; for some of us it's been undeniable as a basic fact of US militarism). He has put the country (and even the world in so far as others could arrest US officials traveling abroad) in the position of knowing that it's officials have tortured people, that it legalized some forms of torture, and that that's. It's in the past, we won't do it, in the future (or will we). So we have the knowledge of evil/jouissance/obscenity but no responsibility for it, no attempt to bring to justice.

Is this ethically responsible: we face up to evil in the world, our own evil, and accept moral ambiguity? So, such a move is a component of putting away childish things (like a hope for justice)?

Is it a move that says justice does not exist? There is no big Other capable of turning back the clock, of carrying out a necessary bringing to justice. So all we can do is persevere, carry on, look ahead? Resolution is old school--in the face of the decline of symbolic efficiency it won't work anyway (trials are a circus, overly politicized, truth commissions in the US have resolved nothing but produced sites for the flourishing of conspiracy theories).

Is it possible that the subjects who could prosecute the crimes have not yet been called into being and that this is the responsibility of the left? Sometimes it's necessary to dissolve the people and create a new one.

More right-wing crazies: Obama's Fraudulent Filings

After Obama was elected I started wondering whether we had returned to an era of symbolic efficiency (although the travails of the finance sector, their utter failure to produce a standard of valuation, their inability to comprehend their own books and assets--or, their failure to acknowledge that this very failure of valuation is precisely the collapse of value, proof, in other words, that their CDOs and similar 'toxic assets' (sounds like another word for liability) are actually worthless). It seemed that political meaning had been restored to a degree. That there was some kind of stability (I won't call it a new Master, despite proclamation or hopes to the contrary; I will think of it/him as a knot of attachment/investment that can momentarily knit together some terms and feelings into a strand of meaning) seemed clear.

Silly me. Tricks are for kids!

The right-wing crazies are loud and vicious and determined to say that night is day and day is night, to assert the implausible and the false in their effort to maintain an unraveled symbolic, a psychotic world. Here's an email I got a few days ago on "Obama's Fraudulent Filings". The sender was identified as Christian Response: info@christianresponseupdates.net. (Test: how many leftists will latch onto this just as they did to 9/11 truth?)

Basic themes: Obama is not who he says he is; he's an imposter, a usurper, not 'one of us,' not a real American but an African. He isn't a 'natural born citizen' but someone unnaturally born, someone who cannot serve because of his unnatural birth. Obama can't be president because he has no right to be a candidate; he has no right to be a candidate because he is not one of us, he is African. He is a 'pretender to the throne,' as if the presidency were a hereditary monarchy (and thus he is a usurper by birth and by blood). Evidence to the contrary (his Hawaiian birth certificate) is false, a forgery, a lie that Obama is preserving by force as he 'comes after the United States Justice Foundation' with 'a vengenance.' 

And, in case the racist support of this particular account of usurpation were not quite enough, in case it fails to mobilize a deep loathing of others on the basis of blood, on the basis of an African-ness that cannot conjoin with American, in case this isn't enough to call into question the legitimacy of Obama's presidency, the authors add an element of hatred for those understood as poor and undeserving and out of place: he is a squatter in the White House.

Right wing crazies

t r u t h o u t | Appomattox Again.(An excerpt form William Rivers Pitt; the article takes up the discussion of the role of Fox News in inciting the murders of the three police officers in Pittsburgh.)

Consider the curious historical synchronicity of all this: after the inauguration of a new Democratic president, there has been a sudden upsurge of right-wing polemicists agitating right-wing citizens into right-wing-motivated acts of violence. The last time things came together like this was back in 1993, after the Waco and Ruby Ridge debacles, combined with the passage of NAFTA and the Brady Bill, detonated into a militia movement that was wildly active, and exceedingly violent, throughout the entirety of President Bill Clinton's two terms. Dozens of militia-related incidents, including the Oklahoma City bombing, took place during those years.

In 2001, however, these incidents stopped almost completely, and for the entirety of George W. Bush's two terms as president, hardly a peep was heard from the militia movement that had been so robustly vigorous during the administration of Bush's predecessor.

A Democratic president takes office in 1993 and the militia movement explodes, egged on by a whole host of right-wing media voices.

A Republican president takes office in 2001 and the militia movement, along with those media voices who sponsored it, all but disappear from the American political landscape.

A Democratic president takes office in 2009, and once again, right-wing media voices begin their clarion call for armed revolution, and once again, a portion of their listeners erupt into violence.

Glenn Beck and the Rise of Fox News's Militia Media

Below is an item on Glen Beck, conspiracy monger Alex Jones (also a 9/11 conspiracy head), and the recent murder of  three cops in Pennsylvania. The item is excerpted from an article by Eric Boehlert. I'm posting it primarily because of the term 'militia media.' It makes me think of other terms: independent media, corporate media, mainstream media, tactical media. And I wonder, how is it that left media efforts don't go so far as right ones? Is the matter one of decency? One of rage? One of a sense of what is possible? Does it indicate a sense of power or disempowerment?

More specifically, if left media don't call for revolution and invoke totalitarianism or if the invocations of fascism sprinkled throughout left writing during the Bush administration didn't register what does that mean? Does it mean that the media is primarily conservative so that leftists legitimately fear prosecution if they suggest violence? Or does it mean that the media is primarily liberal so that leftist opposition doesn't register as such?

It seems to me that the right goes totally freaking batshit crazy pretty easily, saying the most outrageous stuff, repeating it, proceeding as if this garabage were true. And I can't figure out if I am blind to similar such things on the left or whether there are no leftists who register in their doing/saying of such things. Why don't they register? And, insofar as Alex Jones has been slinking around for years, is it possible that analogous leftists will appear? Or is there no analogy, no symmetry, no parallel but a fundamental incompatibility, two totally separate and differentiated logics?


t r u t h o u t | Glenn Beck and the Rise of Fox News's Militia Media.

We don't know if Poplawski tuned in to watch Jones' star turn for Fox News last month. But is there any doubt that Fox News is playing an increasingly erratic and dangerous game by embracing the type of paranoid insurrection rhetoric that people like Poplawski are now acting on? By stoking dark fears about the ominous ruins that await an Obama America, by ratcheting up irresponsible back-to-the-wall scenarios, Fox News has waded into a territory that no other news organization has ever dared to exploit.

What Fox News is now programming on a daily (unhinged) basis is unprecedented in the history of American television, especially in the form of Beck's program. Night after night, week after week, Beck rails against the president while denouncing him or his actions, alternately, as Marxist, socialist, or fascist. He felt entirely comfortable pondering whether the federal government, under the auspices of FEMA, was building concentration camps to round up Americans in order to institute totalitarian rule. (It wasn't until this week that Beck was finally able to "debunk" the FEMA conspiracy theory.) And that's when Beck wasn't gaming out bloody scenarios for the coming civil war against Obama-led tyranny. In just a few shorts months, Beck raced to the head of Fox News' militia media movement.

Just prior to the Pittsburgh massacre, Beck's often bizarre on-air performances, in which his rants against the Obama administration's dark forces were mixed in with his tearful proclamations of love of country, had turned him into a highly rated laughingstock. "That is a shaky cat," Dennis Miller recently giggled while describing Beck. MSNBC's Joe Scarborough broke into hysterics after a montage of Beck's most weepy moments. And TV satirists have had a field day at the Fox News host's expense. (Stephen Colbert: "Crank up the crazy and rip off the knob!")

Zizek's blurb for Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies

I was delighted to get the following from Duke University Press yesterday in connection with my forthcoming book, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies:

“Jodi Dean’s new book provides what we have all been waiting for: the authentic theoretical analysis of how ideology functions in today’s global capitalism. Her diagnosis of ‘communicative capitalism’ discloses how our ‘really-existing democracies’ curtail prospects of radical emancipatory politics. Dean demonstrates this status of democracy as a political fantasy not through cheap pseudo-Marxist denunciations, but through a detailed examination of social, symbolic, and libidinal mechanisms and practices. To anyone who continues to dwell in illusions about liberal democracy, one should simply say: ‘Hey, didn’t you read Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies?’”—Slavoj Zizek, Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

Discrepancies

Excerpt from a long discussion: The Ultimate 9/11 'Truth' Showdown: David Ray Griffin vs. Matt Taibbi.

David Ray Griffin responds: You suggest that all of the timeline discrepancies I have documented are "minor." Let's look at some of them.

As I mentioned earlier, the military had originally said that the FAA notified it about Flight 175 at 8:43, which was 20 minutes before the flight would strike the South Tower. But the 9/11 Commission claimed that this notification did not happen until 9:03, when the building was being struck. This 20-minute difference cannot be described as minor: It makes all the difference with regard to whether the military could have intercepted the flight.

Turning to the discrepancy about Flight 77: NORAD had said in 2001 that the notification from the FAA had come at 9:24. The 9/11 truth movement asked why, then, was the plane not intercepted before it struck the Pentagon at 9:38. The 9/11 Commission, agreeing that the 9:24 notification time "made it appear that the military was notified in time to respond," solved this problem by claiming that the military "never received notice that American 77 was hijacked." This claim, besides contradicting what NORAD had been saying for almost three years, also contradicted the aforementioned FAA memo sent to the Commission by the FAA -- which said that the FAA had actually notified the military long before 9:24. The Commission, besides simply ignoring this memo in its final report, also contradicted statements by the FBI and the Secret Service. The discrepancy cannot possibly be called minor.

The same is true of the discrepancy about Flight 93. The 9/11 Commission claimed that the military "first received a call about United 93 at 10:07," four minutes after it had crashed. But General Larry Arnold, the head of NORAD's Continental region, had testified that the military had been aware of the flight for over 20 minutes before it crashed. He and many other officials -- including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz -- even said that the military was tracking Flight 93 and was in position to shoot it down. Hardly a minor discrepancy, especially given the evidence that the military did shoot the plane down.

Less Than Half the World Believes al Qaeda Was Behind 9/11 Attacks

Link: Less Than Half the World Believes al Qaeda Was Behind 9/11 Attacks | ForeignPolicy | AlterNet.

Among our closest allies, very slim majorities believe al Qaeda was the culprit. According to the study, "Fifty-six percent of Britons and Italians, 63 percent of French and 64 percent of Germans cite al Qaeda. However, significant portions of Britons (26%), French (23%), and Italians (21%) say they do not know who was behind 9/11. Remarkably, 23 percent of Germans cite the U.S. government, as do 15 percent of Italians."

Whatever one thinks of "alternative" theories of who the perpetrators were that day, the results are an eye-opening indication of how profoundly the world's confidence in the United States government has eroded during the Bush era. The researchers found little difference among respondents according to levels of education, or to the amount of exposure to the news media they had. Rather, they found a clear correlation with people's attitudes toward the United States in general. "Those with a positive view of America's influence in the world are more likely to cite al Qaeda (on average 59%) than those with a negative view (40%)," wrote the authors. "Those with a positive view of the United States are also less likely to blame the U.S. government (7%) than those with a negative view (22%)."

I was up too late watching MSNBC replay NBC's 9/11 coverage in real time. I went to sleep after the towers collapsed. I noticed that the initial eye witness reports were unclear regarding whether planes hit the buildings. The newscasters reported that 'they've been told' that planes hit the buildings. I noticed that from several angles I didn't see the second plane hit. When I did see the plane come in, it looked fake. But that doesn't mean much today when special effects look more real. Initial reports from the Pentagon did not mention a plane. I never saw a plane in any of the Pentagon footage. When the south tower collapsed, it first seemed like part of the top of the tower fell off. Then the tower collapsed from the top down.

Most surprising: the newscasters seemed calm. There was none of the fast, nearly shrill, hyper significance that characterizes news-speak today. These days, there is more intensity around everything than I heard in the initial reports on 9/11. It made me wonder if the psychotic media surrounding us was born on 9/11, if there excessive speech and affect is somehow compensatory for their initial calmness and seeming objectivity.

I was in Vienna on 9/11 so I wasn't submerged in US msm. Watching the show last night in something like real time, not edited into 9/11 highlight real, I could imagine reactions that were not crazed, vicious, psychotic. I could imagine other potentials in the event, potentials that would have led to world radically different from the one in which are currently entrapped. There was concern for the people in the buildings, concern for the fire-fighters; there was an early statement from Arafat condemning the attacks. There was none of the rhetoric of evil.

Perhaps because I wasn't in the country, I've always felt like 9/11 didn't really happen; like I still can't imagine that the towers ever fell. This inability to accept it is likely an indication of the traumatic nature of the event. But now I think it is something else: not an inability to accept the events of 9/11 but an unwillingness to accept its inscription, its interpretation and manipulation in the interests of militarism and the strengthening of the presidency, in the surveillance of US citizens and attempts to isolate us from the rest of the world. That horrible reality is what's hard to accept.

So we shouldn't.