Sunday, March 30, 2008

Abu Ghraib



From this disgusting and incredible New Yorker article: (I found these pics online, not from article.)

“The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost,” Davis said. “They’re in there, in their little jumpsuits, outside in the mud. Their rest rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn’t want to touch anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it—the place you would never, ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy.”

Saturday, March 22, 2008

Delaney/Obama

Interview with the always charming Samuel Delaney. Reminds me of the issues facing our next Prez!

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Prescience

Reading Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City_ and watching mainstream media's lead up coverage of tonight's primaries. It's like reading a diagnostic manual. (I mean that in a good way!) Example:


"[F]ollowing the Reaganite tendency to fetishize both the offensive example and the patriotic norm, the increasingly monopolistic mass media act as a national culture industry whose mission is to micro-manage how any controversial event or person changes the meaning of being "American." The constant polling used by this media apparatus, which includes the solicitation of testimony on talk radio and television, along with telephone interviews, has paradoxically enabled the standards and rhetorics of citizenship to become so privatized and subjective that even privileged people can seem legitimately to claim "outsider," if not "minority," status. With political ideas about the nation sacrificed to the development of feelings about it, nationality has become a zone of trauma that demands political therapy."

While I think that nationality has in many ways always been a "zone of trauma"-- perhaps indeed created or determined by the various "political therapies" applied to traumatic encounters of nationalism-- I take Berlant's points here to be spot on in terms of the diagnosis of the present situation and its extreme creation and reinforcement through public images and narratives of private citizenship, which ultimately reduces public claims of legitimate trauma to private experiences available to anyone. This is what perversely allows power brokers like Hilary Clinton to claim victim status. Question is: what kind of "political therapy" might we exercise to correct this development? Voting? Hah! More like a national lobotomy.