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.

Zombies

Most of us have probably already seen the recent news regarding zombie warnings. For example:

On Tuesday during the morning rush hour near Collinsville, Ill., hackers changed a sign along the interstate to read, “Daily lane closures due to zombies.” And signs in Austin, Texas, recently flashed: “Zombies in area! Run.”

The press hoopla proceeds as if this were a prank or a joke. What if the real joke is that its not a joke? From David Sirota, an account of zombies in the Obama administration:

Now, this pinstriped band of brothers is proposing a "cash for trash" scheme that would force the public to guarantee the financial industry's bad loans. It's another ploy "to hand taxpayer dollars to the banks through a variety of complex mechanisms," says economist Dean Baker - and noticeably absent is anything even resembling a "rival" voice inside the White House.

That's not an oversight. From former federal officials like Robert Reich and Brooksley Born, to Nobel prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to business leaders like Leo Hindery Jr., there's no shortage of qualified experts who have challenged market fundamentalism. But they have been barred from an administration focused on ideological purity. In Hindery's case, the blacklisting was explicit. Despite this venture capitalist establishing a well-respected think tank and serving as a top economic adviser to Obama's campaign, Politico.com reports that "Obama's aides appear never to have taken his bid (for an administration post) seriously." Why? Because he "set himself up in opposition" to Wall Street's agenda.

The anecdote highlights how, regardless of election hoopla, Washington is the same one-party town it always has been - controlled not by Democrats or Republicans, but by Kleptocrats (i.e., thieves). Their ties to money make them the undead zombies in the slash-and-burn horror flick that is American politics: No matter how many times their discredited theologies are stabbed, torched and shot down by verifiable failure, their careers cannot be killed. Somehow, these political immortals are allowed to mindlessly lunge forward, never answering to rivals - even if that rival is the president himself.

and, from someone trying to prepare for the worst:

Haiku Dave on the face cutting incident

When a zealot cuts
her face to smear, one trembles
at the depth of hate.

Heaven help us

Link: Guardian Angels Are Here, Say Most Americans - Yahoo! News.

More than half of all Americans believe they have been helped by a guardian angel in the course of their lives, according to a new poll by the Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion. In a poll of 1700 respondents, 55% answered affirmatively to the statement, "I was protected from harm by a guardian angel." The responses defied standard class and denominational assumptions about religious belief; the majority held up regardless of denomination, region or education - though the figure was a little lower (37%) among respondents earning more than $150,000 a year.

Evil in politics

Steve Shaviro's comments regarding Republican evil have met with some left critical distain. Steve writes (More electoral ruminations):

Rather, we should make it clear that even the most minimal sense of human dignity requires us to throw the Republicans out of power. It is not stupid to vote for McCain/Palin; rather, it is evil.

As I mentioned at Steve's blog, this point about evil is what turned me to Obama. Up til then, I've been repeating my third party/press the Democrats from the left/safe if you're in a blue state schtick. But the remark on evil changed my relation to the election.

I should say that I'm against evil as a moral and political category. I wrote about it here for a while a couple of years ago. And I have an article in Theory & Event about it. Perhaps the crudest way to put it is in terms of Schmitt's account of liberalism as effacing the political in favor of ethics and economics. Evil, then, marks this effacement. And here is the thing: I still agree with this point (as well as with my much more nuanced and detailed ruminations on the discursive habitats in which evil flourishes). Why, then, did Steve's use of evil change my position?

Two reasons. First, no argument or category is without remainder; there is always an irrational stain. We can think of it as an insistence, a signifying strain, a remainder, objet a. It is that extra bit of force or compulsion that makes something feel right, that is, feel like truth. Evil (in Steve's discussion) occupies/identifies with/claims this excessive dimension, this stain that is beyond arguments pro and con. It steps outside debate and discussion, recognizing that there are points where reason cannot reach (even as it remains attached to and dependent on them).

Many on the left prefer to deny such points, perhaps because they are persuaded by a vision of liberal democracy they purport to criticize (or trouble or critically interrogate or seek to read in terms of its exclusions or whatever). The left reflex is too often to avoid decision and dogmatism, to undercut itself with anxieties over moralism and exclusivity.

Second, Althusser writes of the conjuncture as a specific political moment. Machiavelli, too, writes of the challenges of dealing with fortune, challenges that demand choices within a temporally defined yet changing setting. To my mind, Steve's evocation of evil is right in this moment, this context. No matter what their good intentions, no matter what fairy tales they tell themselves to shore up their endorsement of Palin and McCain, those who vote for the Republicans in this election choose evil. They may have fantasies of politicians who are just like them, who know what they are going through and all the rest. Insofar as votes allow themselves to be lulled by such fantasies or actively indulge in the excesses such fantasies enable, they choose evil, an evil of shortsightedness, of revenge, of ego-centricism, of envy, of attachment to the excesses of a way of living that is destroying the world and may have already destroyed a constitutional experiment with aspirations to something closer to shared responsibility for a common project.

Evil marks an exception. We should eschew it as a term for politics. But it can happen that we find ourselves in exceptional circumstances that call for their own acknowledgment as such. Sometimes, proceeding with business as usual supports a fantasy and a lie that we use to justify cynicsm, apathy, and hopelessness, that we use as a defense against a realization that not only are we on the brink but we have stepped into it. It's not a reasonable term. It's not a reasonable time.

A horrible list

1.   Climate change. I read the NYT magazine today. One of its reminders--that US gas mileage is pathetically worse than that in Japan and the EU. That the structure of our communities around driving is killing the environment. It may be that little nudge that pushes me to start a vegetable garden although I hate gardening. There are good reasons for this: I will be changing my practices, decreasing my carbon footprint, all that stuff. But I'm really doing it because I think that the society is so close to the abyss that I need some skills and some kind of provisions for the calamity to come.

2.    Economic collapse. With no Soviet Union to keep it in line, capitalism has accelerated and intensified unbearably. I can't get over the fact that 50 hedge fund managers (combined) made over 20 billion dollars this year. And that the numbers of workers making 20 dollars or more an hour has declined to levels below where they were in the seventies. The greed is mind-boggling. The 'oh well, there's nothing we can do' attitude is unbearable. There has been a massive counter-revolution in the US since the 70s, brought on by finance capital, its corporate allies, and conservatives in the wake of the unrest of the 60s (this was what makes Reagan so popular, the not quite human face of counter-revolution in the guise of greed is good and sex is bad). And the thing is, people have gone for it, swallowed what was screwing them whole. Cheap credit, tons of consumer goods, constant entertainment and socially acceptable prescription drugs. Who needs economic equality when we've got You Tube? We are all creative. We entertain each other and let the rich take more and the environment collapse.

3.   That the Bush administration will get away with torture (waging aggressive war, undertaking illegal surveillance). How could the NYT have ignored the White House torture story for more than a week and then only produce one editorial on it? The editorial was pathetic, saying things like we need more information and we won't get the information and using the Orwellian euphemisms for torture promulgated by the White House. Isn't it their job to dig up this information? Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats are pathetic, too weak and spineless (and I include both presidential candidates here) to call for resignations, press for indictments, and all the rest (maybe if folks had been giving each other blowjobs in the Oval we'd have a case...). The sickness will fester, continuing to kill the Constitution until it rots away completely (or is just the building blocks of children's toys Agamben evokes). Do we have anything to offer in its place?

Addition: Global food riots, shortages, and massive price increases, the flipside of American obesity (think corn syrup).

Hell House

I watched Hell House this evening. It's about a halloween presentation written and performed by members (and friends of members) of an Assembly of God church in Texas. Scenes in the hell house show sin leading to death. They also enact struggles between demons and angels over human souls. After going through the hell house, attendees are asked if they know whether they will go to heaven and hell and given an opportunity to accept Christ.

I was completely struck by the participants' commitment and investment. The amount of volunteer hours was incredible; the volunteers were also extremely dedicated. A great deal of emotion accompanied every part of the process, from the initial planning, to the casting, the rehearsals, and the performances. Much of this emotion was expressed in prayer. Since Assemblies of God are pentecostal, the prayer was often in tongues. But, it also involved music, touching, embracing.

Participants also had a sense of mission--they were actively involved in saving souls. In one scene in the church, the pastor told the congregation that they were sent to infect (I think that was the word, it might have been infiltrate, the metaphor matters but I can't recall it and don't feel like goofing around with the DVD, especially since it is in my son's play station and I'm really awkward with the controller) the world or society. His message, overall, was pretty loving.

Another man who was followed during the course of the film also seemed very loving. Both he and his daughter were actors in Hell House. His wife had left him for another man. He was now raising their four kids, including one son with cerebral palsy and epilepsy, alone. Even though he played a demon tour guide, he also went through the house and was very moved, moved to want to continue to pray after the invitation at the end. His daughter plays the 'abortion girl.' She is shown covered in blood because of taking RU-486.

One of the organizers was properly straight-forward and unapologetic about the role of fear. He didn't deny that hell house used fear to win souls. Instead, he said that fear was part (not the whole) of salvation and faith.

One really great touch--having kids in a kind of hole in the floor, illuminated with red lights, filling with smoke or fog, and covered with plexiglass. The kids press their hands and faces up against the plexiglass like souls trapped in hell's eternal torment.

The film ends with a number of people talking about the imminence of the Rapture, their conviction that we are living in the end times.

"A Godless America is a dead America"

I finally picked up my campus mail. In it was a glossy publication (referred to inside as a 'book') from the Great Commission Center International edited by Thomas Wang and titled, America, Return to God. Psalms 33:12 is printed on the front cover: "Blessed is the Nation whose God is The Lord." On the back cover, in addition to a number of endorsements from evangelical ministers, written in red is the following:

America is courting self-destruction
A Godless America is a dead America
Time is not on our side
Repent now

The book is a call to arms in order to make American into a Christian nation. According to the introduction, 500,000 copies of the book are being printed and 'sent as gifts to American leaders at all levels (federal, state, and local) and in all professions (political, judicial, educational, scientific, commercial, societal, church, media, etc). The book (a collection of short pieces by different authors) includes explicit denunciations of the enlightenment, feminism, homosexuality, the media, and Herbert Marcuse.

The first section of the book ("from faith to unbelief: American in decline") documents the decadence and decline that have been wrought by secularism and liberalism. The second half ("from unbelief to repentence: American in restoration") begins with an emphasis on repentence and revival but moves quickly to a language of warfare. Thus, a chapter by James Dobson is called "How can we win this war?" The answer is by passing a Federal Marriage Amendment. What's interesting here is thus the ambiguity in the referent 'this'--it could be that the original article was clearly part of an attack on gay marriage. In the context of this book, however, the war in question seems more a war for the soul of America. Gay marriage thus works in this context as a particular standing in for a universal, as a consolidation of multiple evils and crimes (it should come as know surprise that Dobson rails against tyranny, oligarchy, and a runaway court). Dobson writes:

We are involved in nothing less that a civil war of values--a collision between two ways of seeing life. This is not an issue of two alternatives from which to choose, but a life-and-death struggle. And one value system is going to predominate. One is going to rule the country.

Praxis of Evil

An account of the summit: artforum.com.

SCENE AND HERD 04.08.05 Larissa Harris on "Regarding Evil"

All told, Cambridge's summit on evil last Sunday turned out to be good. Budding gnostic and MIT graduate student Ross Cisneros, one of six candidates in the institute's visual-art program, had convened "Regarding Evil," bringing together a "wise clergy" (in his words) that included natty artists Ronald Jones and Julian Laverdiere; bespectacled political scientist Jodi Dean; black-clad,... READ ON