Notes · from · Hell's · Bathroom

The Jerusalem Post cites Israeli government officials who confirm that Finkelstein's arrest and exclusion were politically motivated:

"American political scientist and fierce critic of Israel, Prof. Norman Finkelstein, was denied entry to Israel and deported from the country early Saturday morning. Officials said that the decision to deport Finkelstein was connected to his anti-Zionist opinions and fierce public criticism of Israel around the world. . . .

"Prof. Alan Dershowitz of Harvard was active in campaigning against Finkelstein. His most recent book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, is largely an attack on Dershowitz's The Case for Israel. In his book, Finkelstein argues that Israel uses the outcry over perceived anti-Semitism as a weapon to stifle criticism."

Check it out here: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/27/finkelstein/

When the Ideological State Apparatuses falter, the good old Repressive State Apparatuses kick in.  The Israeli government has apparently determined that Norman Finkelstein, former Profess of Political Science at DePaul University is a "security risk"; so not only have they arrested him at Ben Gurion Air Port, but they've banned him from entering the country for ten years.  The absurdity of it all is not only that Israel likes to brand itself as an enlightened liberal European-style democracy that presumably ought to have no need for strong-arm tactics like this, but also that Finkelstein is the son of Nazi holocaust survivors.  This is an absolutely despicable act on the part of the Israeli government, and it simply demonstrates the extent to which it assumes it can act with absolute impunity and violate the principles of justice and international law whenever it becomes convenient. 

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba, when Israeli ought to be reflecting upon the atrocities its founders committed in 1948 and how best to put them right; instead its contemporary leaders are acting very much in the spirit of their predecessors--that is, like a bunch of thugs.

I posted this review on The Panopticon not too long ago, but I thought I'd post it her as well.

Recently, I was in conversation with a friend of mine when the subject worked its way around to politics and the upcoming presidential election.  When he asked me who I favored, and I gave him an honest answer, he seemed truly appalled.  How could I—so his objection went—a person wholeheartedly of the Left, not be a supporter of Barack Obama?  Well, I ran through the usual catalogue of Obama’s shortcomings; I don’t imagine it’s necessary to rehash all of it here—suffice it to say that most of the approbation now being sent his way rightly belongs to the Barack Obama of 2002 rather than his present incarnation.  Remarkable how the hold that American politicians manage to maintain on their convictions seems to vary inversely with their ability to implement them. 

Anyhow, my friend remained unconvinced.  “Don’t you understand?” he said plaintively, “He’s just playing the game.  He’s not actually compromising on his principles; he’s simply doing what’s necessary to get elected.”  And then presumably, after his inauguration, he’ll immediately turn around, grin slyly, and ostentatiously cast off the fetching little sheep ensemble that managed to fool all of those gullible moderates and independents to reveal the anti-establishment wolf that all genuine progressives suspected was there all along.  Well, at this point, the first thing that came to mind (other than the obvious point that, when it comes to speculations like these, it’s difficult to know who’s putting on whom) was, “Wait, I’ve heard this somewhere before…”  In fact, was not the picture my friend of Obama precisely the one bandied about constantly in conservative circles?  The notion that Barack Obama is actually some kind of left-wing elitist, that his own private convictions actually resemble those of Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers (or even Edward Said—an association that hasn’t even made the press yet) though he is obliged to distance himself from them in public in order to keep up appearances, that he is in fact a secret Muslim, which (supposedly) implies an unrevealed set of loyalties—all of these ideas are part and parcel of the image of Obama that the Right has tried to create.  In fact, they are very much in keeping with the greater narrative that the Right has been using to scare the bejeezus out of the uninformed for decades: while it might appear that Communism is dead, it is in reality only sleeping; its agents have failed in their attempts at overt political action, so now they have moved underground; their present objective is to “march through the institutions” by masquerading as mere “enlightened progressives”…etc.

What unconscious affinities does this tacit agreement between Right and Left reveal?  Well, quite simply, in Lacanian terms, it reveals that the fundamental fantasy structuring American political desire is, today, a Rightist one.  The fantasy, you will recall, is what instructs us how to desire, it determines for us what outlet the satisfaction of our libidinal energies out to seek.  As such, it is the quintessential field for the operation of modern ideology.  So, for instance, to the extent that we remain mired in patriarchy, women are only able to channel their desires into modes of expression that are, in the last instance, in keeping with the dynamics of masculine fantasies.  Hence Lacan’s formula: the hysteric is homme-sexual; she desires like a man.  Analogously, such as been the extent of George Bush’s invidious influence that the Right, in America, now occupies our unconscious.  Their hegemonic control is, in fact, so complete that we can only conceive of resistance on the terms dictated by Rightist discourse, so that we imagine that what we need is some kind of bizarre combination of a Leninist van guard Party and a quasi-terrorist sleeper-cell (fantasies are always over-determined).  Are we not thereby confirming every caricature and misconception of Leftist politics that has existed since the days of the anti-Communist purges?  Are we so thoroughly convinced that we have no independent existence outside of the framework of the dominant culture?  I mean, imagine if the Jews decided one day that the program outlined in the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion wasn’t really such a bad idea after all, or some equally absurd conscious enactment of stereotypes.  Would we not say that it betrays the worst kind of self-hatred? 

In short, I say “No” to Barack Obama because I am obliged to say “No” to defeatism.  My “No” is directed not simply at him but at the terms on which the choice has been presented, premised as they are an cynicism and manipulation—manipulation not of the “ignorant masses” whom we’ve managed to dupe into supporting our “Leftist-in-disguise”, but a much more subtle and insidious manipulation of the Left as a political movement by the ideology of our enemies.  When the very terms of the game itself seek to interpolate you as a political subject in a manner that is unacceptable, the only choice is to refuse to participate.  You may say that the costs of such abstention could be dire in times such as these, but I say that cost of participation is that reality itself comes to resemble the worldview of the John Birch Society.  I’ll be buried in my grave before I become party to that.  Unlike Barack, I maintain that some concessions are simply too great to be endured by men of conscience. 

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the UN’s Partition Mandate which divided the land of historic Palestine between Palestinians and the Jewish settlers in order to create what is now the state of Israel.  It has often struck me that Israel is perhaps not so much a country as a kind of living “Abridged History of the Modern State,” condensing as it has the over-arching historical trajectory of the nation—from the violence of its original foundation to its first independent military conflict (the “baby steps” of the nation-state, to be sure) to the acquisition of nuclear weapons and a seat at the neocolonial table—into a period of just sixty years.  I mean, John McCain is older than Israel.  Perhaps the Israelis are within a different time frame, like the microscopic civilization in that old Twilight Zone episode. 

We’re all familiar with story of Israel’s foundation–or with the story of the rationale behind it anyway; the actual history of the 1947 war remains relatively unknown to most of us.  When it comes to the logic behind Israel’s foundation, it appears that there is a dual causality at stake: that is, there a religious rationale behind the formation of the state of Israel, as well as a secular one.  For now, let us set aside the first and assume that there is a legitimate secular reason to honor the claim of a contemporary ethnic minority scattered throughout the world to a piece of land they allegedly occupied for a period of sixty years some two millennia ago.  Really, the most common reason given for the necessity of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is, of course, the Nazi genocide, and the idea that the Jews are entitled to a safe haven so that they will be protected in case anything like it should happen again.  This is perhaps an odd piece of irony because, to hear the Israelis tell it, the groups of people most committed to their destruction are the very ones whom the Jewish state has territorially displaced in the course of its foundation.  Israel would seem to have helped exacerbate the very problem it was formed ostensibly to combat.  

But what did it really combat—Israel, that is?  Hannah Arendt, among others, was notoriously skeptical about what the foundation of the Jewish state had actually accomplished, “After the [Second World] war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless.  On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people” (cited in Said, The Question of Palestine xxxix).  The Jews were indeed stateless prior to 1948, yet according to many commentators, such as the theologian Franz Rosenzweig, one of the virtues of Jewishness was its “cosmopolitan” identity, its “homelessness,” its inability to be reified within geographical or cultural boundaries.   As Eric L. Santer would have it, “[Rosenzweig’s] radical claim pertaining to Judaism is that it opens the possibility of community on the basis of a shared orientation with respect to a nonrelational remainder/excess, to the signifying stress that every ‘normal’ community attempts to gentrify by way of some sort of simulated ‘holism’” (The Neighbor 107).  This radical openness of Judaism—this, by the way, is also at the heart of Joan Copjec’s reading of Moses and Monotheism: there Freud lays implicit claim to a kind of membership in the Jewish community in spite of the fact that he shares none of the concrete characteristics associated with that community: he did not keep kosher, he was an atheist, he wanted no part of Zionism, etc.—can only be betrayed when its expansive potential is channeled into the drawing of national boundaries or the expulsion of the Arab Other. 

Agamben has suggested that, today,  it is, in fact, refugees like the ones driven out of Palestine that occupy the position of the uncanny excess left over after the formation of the nation-state: “If refugees (whose number has continued to grow in our century, to the point of including a significant part of humanity today) represent such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state, this is above all because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty into crisis.  Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presupposition of the political domain—bare life—to appears for an instant within that domain” (Homo Sacer 131).  Now, if Žižek is right about the essence of “Jewish-ness”—“Jews lack the ‘inner form’ that pertains to any proper national identity: they are a non-nation among nations; their national substance lies precisely in a lack of substance, in a form of infinite plasticity” (Welcome to the Desert of the Real 110)—are we not then forced to conclude that where Israel-Palestine is concerned, today, the only proper “Jews” are, in fact, Palestinians?  This notion is very much in accord with another one of Žižek’s scandalous theses concerning Israel: “Are today’s reports on the secret Muslim fundamentalist plans to destroy the West the new version of the infamous Protocols of Zion?  Does today’s ‘war on terror’ signal the paradoxical point at which the Zionist Jews themselves joint the ranks of anti-Semitism?  Is this the ultimate price of the establishment of the Jewish State?” (WDR 151). 

Well, these are all rhetorical questions, but let’s see if we can’t formulate something in the way of an answer.  Now, what are some of the telltale signs of anti-Semitism?

1.       A penchant for “creative” historical bookkeeping?

Well, just recently a group of pro-Israel advocates called CAMERA (The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) was caught trying to infiltrate Wikipedia and obtain editorial positions in order to “rewrite Palestinian history.”  One of the group’s primary objectives was to make alterations in articles dealing with the 1948 Palestinian exodus so as to deny or at least cast doubt upon events such as the massacre at Deir Yassin by Zionist militiamen.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9474.shtml

 

2.       Advocating the sterilization and/or ethnic cleansing of undesirables?

A coalition of parties within Israeli known as the National Union alliance recently acquired, I believe, twenty seats out of the 120 in the Israeli Knesset.  One of the member parties, Moledet, calls itself, according to its website, “an ideological political party in Israel that embraces the idea of population transfer,” which means, it goes on to explain, that it has a plan to expel all of the Palestinians to Jordan (Ali Abunimah One Country 99).  Support for the idea of an ethnic cleansing of the Occupied Territories, and Israel itself, has grown steadily since the onset of the second intifada.  Furthermore, Novosti, a mainstream Russian-language newspaper within Israel published an article in 2003 suggesting that “Arab men should be threatened with castration and that Arab families ‘who have more than one child’ be ‘deprived of various benefits, lose their jobs,’” and be threatened with exile (95). 

3.       How about threatening an outright holocaust?

In March of this year Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said in an interview, apropos of the siege in Gaza, “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”  Shoah, in case you don’t remember, is the Hebrew word for “holocaust;” it literally means “burnt offering.”   I suppose it’s superfluous to note that it’s illegal for a government even to threaten genocide according to the Genocide Convention of 1951. 

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9387.shtml

What can I say?  I suppose they need their Lebensraum in Israel too.

 

Karl Heinrich Marx, rabble rouser and agent of history was born on this day in 1818.  Ordinarily, I feel a bit absurd celebrating someone’s birthday who is no longer with us, but if there ever was a figure whose posthumous life has outstripped his organic life, it was surely our friend Karl.  In fact, many of his followers seem to take a kind of perverse pleasure in describing to the last detail just how utterly abject and destitute he was during his time on earth—how he and Jenny were so poverty-stricken, when their oldest child died, they had to borrow from friends in order to be able to afford the coffin; how eleven people were in attendance at Marx’s funeral, etc.—almost as if the wretched condition in which he existed in life were, in fact, the necessary obverse of the illustrious place among the great cultural luminaries he was to assume after his death.  It is as though the former were the sign of the latter; as though his miserable status in life were itself a kind of negative evocation of the greatness to come; as if the mortification of his literal, physical form were the necessary price to pay for the almost metaphysical degree of immaterial, cultural, and political influence he was to exercise later on.  His own well-being, after all, mattered little when compared with advent of Marx-ism as a force for emancipatory politics.  What all of this amounts to is that, in effect, Karl Marx suffered for your sins.  His poverty was a small price to pay to redeem humanity from the scourge of industrial capitalism!  Let’s just hope Mel Gibson never gets a hold of his story. 

One way to honor Marx on his birthday is to learn more about him via the Mark Steel lectures:

1.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEBz_ZfZzmU

2.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShcL1gYKhLE&feature=related

3.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPWrJNhMeBI&feature=related

4.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wbWdzDiuF8&feature=related

5.       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHSb9j4TnDw&feature=related

(they’re absolutely hilarious, surprisingly informative, and virtually unknown in the US). 

Another way, I suppose, would be to bring about the liberation of working class.  It’s quite surprising how often we lose sight of the poor devils, preoccupied as many of Marx’s followers tend to be, with formalist aesthetic criticism and avant-garde art.  I often think that Jameson and his ilk would prefer a piece of authentically “Utopian” art to a world revolution.  “What is a revolutionary movement,” so the reasoning goes, “compared to Van Gogh’s peasant shoes?”  I imagine them all glancing out of their windows as the shots are being fired, and the infrastructure of global capital is crumbling and declaring, “Yes, that’s all very well…but back to the negative dialectics of Schönberg’s atonal scale…” or something to that effect.  Granted, Marx himself did have a propensity for this kind of thinking.  When he first heard about the Paris Commune in 1871, he was initially distressed because he had not yet finished with Capital.  “What’s the matter with them?” he wrote to Engels (I’m paraphrasing), “Couldn’t they wait?”  Yet, we should also remember that Marx was not just a theoretician; he founded the International Workingmen’s Association and was active in it until the end of his life.  In fact, the idea that theory ought to be divorced from practice within movements of social transformation is actually a relatively recent one.  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even local trade unions had all kinds of radical (and often elaborate) ideas about the structure society ought to adopt.  It was widely understood among the members of these unions that their struggle was only one step in a much broader political struggle.  This was simply because they understood that, as Chomsky once said, paraphrasing the newsletter of a women garment workers’ union from New England, “It’s not enough to make the autocracy less brutal; the point is to get rid of it.”  Wouldn’t it be remarkable if contemporary unions operated according to this insight?  Instead, the liberal ethos of reformism has replaced that of radical transformation in politics just as, in the field of psychology, the New Age-derived ethos of endless self-discovery has replaced the psychoanalytic ethos of self-overcoming.  Both Freud and Marx are routinely reviled for their harshness: Freud for his model of the analyst as the cold clinician who hands down his “dictatorial” diagnosis from his position behind the patient, refusing even to look him in face (where’s the empathy?); Marx for his part, is accused even by people as astute as Hannah Arendt of being “inherently totalitarian,” and so forth, in his advocacy of the revolutionary overthrow of the middle class.  And I often wonder if the (academic)reduction of Marx to nothing more than an aesthete—the Wilde-ization of Marx—isn’t simply another branch of the movement to vitiate him, to gentrify him, to have Marxism without the alluring and yet terrifying traumatic core that is the specter of revolutionary violence, to have, in essence, Marxism without Marxism.  If you really want to appreciate the genius of Marx, you’ve got to appreciate all of him and his ideas, including those that might occasionally appear dark, dirty, or undesirable.  A very useful corrective to the photographic image of Marx, which resembles nothing so much as Santa Claus, would be an image of something disturbing or unpleasant associated with Marx—perhaps a picture of the carbuncles on his ass. 

"for months, even before most Americans had heard of Wright, prominent pro-Israel activists were hounding Obama over Wright's views on Israel and ties to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In January, Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), demanded that Obama denounce Farrakhan as an anti-Semite. The senator duly did so, but that was not enough. "[Obama has] distanced himself from his pastor's decision to honor Farrakhan," Foxman said, but "He has not distanced himself from his pastor. I think that's the next step." Foxman labeled Wright "a black racist," adding in the same breath, "Certainly he has very strong anti-Israel views" (Larry Cohler-Esses, "ADL Chief To Obama: 'Confront Your Pastor' On Minister Farrakhan," The Jewish Week, 16 January 2008). Criticism of Israel, one suspects, is Wright's truly unforgivable crime and Foxman's vitriol has echoed through dozens of pro-Israel blogs."
             -Ali Abunimah, The Electronic intifada, March 31, 2008
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9427.shtml

It was predicted, and so it has come to pass!
I trust Obama's handlers at AIPAC are duly satisfied.

Check this out:

http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/04/19/martin-luther-king-jr-if-anyone-is-listening/

It's the blog written by the now infamous Bill Ayers, the former member of the Weather Underground and current member of the UI-Chicago faculty mentioned in last week's debate.

I swear, the comments section was composed by monkeys. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/23/usa1
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24220130/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/19/hidden-pentagon-hand-help_n_97576.html

I've often thought of joining that hilarious "Students for an Orwellian Society" organization, but when I hear something like this I think 1. we're a hell of a lot closer than we think and 2. it's really not all that funny. 

According to the New York Times, the Bush administration, in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, hand-picked a number of sympathetic retired military officers, schooled them on administration "talking points," and quietly nudged them toward the network and cable news shows so that they might appear as "impartial" military analysts.  Many of these people also work as consultants for the defense industry--a sector of the economy that has a considerable stake in prolonging the war. 

And, perhaps most alarming of all, do you know how much attention this story has gotten from the 24-hour news networks?  Exactly Zero!

I wouldn't have known about it at all if I hadn't caught the segment that PBS's Newshour devoted to it last night (it's been public knowledge since Sunday).  Even NPR has given it no coverage whatsoever.  Ditto for Stewart and Colbert.  By all rights, this ought to be a scandal, but instead it's a virtual footnote.  It's completely absurd to think that it's simply a coincidence that the cable news networks will refuse to touch a story like this one, since they themselves are implicated.  It's positively monstrous, because all of those TV and radio journalists you've come to know and trust, all of them read the New York Times, you can be sure of that.  They all took a glance at this story and then deliberately decided to bury it.  You'd think they could take a breather from spelling out every elaborate fantasy-scenario of how the Democratic primary could end to report some actual news for a change.  But no! 

One upside to this protracted mudslinging contest between identicals, it's that for once, the popular press has really come under critical scrutiny.  The public is gradually coming to realize that they are essentially another branch of the entertainment industry and that they care far more about sound bites and simplistic labels than they do about any specific policy issue that will ultimately affect you or me.  I was profoundly surprised and gratified at the outcry over ABC's Democratic debate last week (although I can't say it was all that different from every other debate we've had since the start of this whole fiasco); it gives me a glimmer of hope that, just maybe, we're not quite as vacuous as they obviously think we are.  Clearly, they expected the public to eat all of that garbage up and ask for seconds, but we didn't.  We sent the food back and said, "Bring us something with a little more meat, could you?  We're starving in here!"  It won't be long before we get fed up with not being fed, just like those people in Haiti. 

Dear ABC,

About the debate Wednesday night; top notch job for about the first 50 minutes, but what was up with all of that garbage at the end about the so-called "issues?'  I mean, when I tune in to network news, I want to hear as much gossiping and name-calling as you can cram down my happy little throat.  As far as I was concerned, you guys were just getting started with the innuendo and character assassination when you completely dropped the ball by asking about the economy.  You never even got around to asking the question that's on all of our minds: "So, who loves America more, you or your opponent?"  Don't get me wrong, you've got the right idea: if you want to cater to the American public, you've obviously got to reduce everything to a flashy soap opera and a horse race.  (Man, do you have us poor slobs pegged!) But you just didn't go far enough.  We are the lowest common denominator and we vote with our remote controls!  You've got some work to do if you want to compete with American Idol.

Sincerely,
R---

Newsflash: Marxists have nothing better to talk about than the former princess of pop! 
So, recently I went down to the Sunshine state (I believe that's Florida and not California, but I could be wrong) for an academic conference as us geeky types do now and then.  It was at the U of F in Gainesville, home of the world-famous Gators and all that.  This particular get-together was hosted by U of F's Marxist Reading Group and it featured Michael Denning as the keynote speaker.  I'm sure that name means nothing to you, but I assure you, he's absolutely huge in certain circles.  He's practically the Justine Timberlake of American studies, to compound the pop-culture references. 
I was pretty apprehensive about this because my background is really in psychoanalysis, not Marxist theory, but I figured I know enough to get by.  I even threw out some of the Freud references in my presentation and threw in some Walter Benjamin, Adorno, and Althusser, just to let them know I was one of them. 
If you've never been to one of these things, how it works is that three people appear on a panel, they each give a talk lasting about 15 minutes, and then the audience asks them some extremely pretentious and long-winded questions, so that the whole thing lasts about an hour and a half. 
Now, I think it's fair to say I'd prepared extensively: I'd presented my paper before in front of a gathering of Notre Dame students--to rave reviews--and I'd even sent it to Prof. Joseph Buttigeig, the Marxist of our department, and he gave it four stars.  By all accounts, my paper was "a comic tour de force," "the feel-good hit of the...late Spring," etc.  But apparently the Marxists didn't see it that way.
I knew they wouldn't know the author I'd written about (Robert Coover), but I was sure there were plenty of other viable topics for conversation addressed in my paper: Freud, Benjamin, culture and crime, and whatnot.  However, after I'd finished reading and they finally got around to asking me questions (you know they don't like you when you're the last one they ask) they wanted to talk about positively everything except what I had written!  One girl I'd made affable conversation with earlier asked me how my paper could be applied to the execution of Saddam Hussein!  This was an occasion for absolute panic, because, truly, I had no idea whatsoever.  Somehow, I managed to say something passable and I thought that now we'd move on to the important stuff.  The next question, however, was even more a ridiculous curve-ball.  (I suppose I should tell you my paper was on The Public Burning, Robert Coover's infamous retelling of the Rosenberg executions;  I'd talked about the relationship between culture and some kind of communal sacrifice) When I thought things couldn't get more ludicrous, this professor said something like, "Yeah, I was watching South Park the other night, and they made the hilarious suggestion that Britney Spears has assumed the role of a kind of sacrificial victim--that she's made to look like a train wreck so that the rest of us can all be saved, and all the rest.  How does that relate to your argument? ...Oh yes, and maybe you could say something about 9/11?"  Once again, I had no idea what to say.  This was like one of those horrendous dreams of public humiliation.  I think I just rambled about the second part of the question without getting to the first. 
But I mean really, South Park?  I'll tell you what I wanted to say: "Well, I don't really have the slightest idea what South Park has to do with the question at hand, any more than the latest plot twist on The Hills.  I mean, I'm sorry but South Park is garbage.  It's written by people who discovered long ago that they don't have to come up with any actual jokes, so long as they can be perpetually offensive and over-the-top.  Everyone who has more than two brain cells to rub together gets tired of that 'Oh, I can't believe they went there!' gesture after about ten minutes.  I can honestly say I feel dumber every time I've watched even a few seconds of it.  It's not worth my time or yours.  And, incidentally, can we get off the subject of 9/11 already?  I've heard it so many times in this room today, I feel like I'm listening to a Guiliani speech."  (I guess I didn't mention that before, but yes, 9/11 had come up ad nauseum in previous discussions.  God, these people make me want to become some kind of cultural elitist like all these assholes here at Notre Dame.  For the record: yes, I think television can be a valuable artistic medium; however, we also need to recognize that there is also a considerable amount of garbage on it, and garbage needs to be eschewed, lest we all become infected with something; we don't need to recycle everything. 
Frankly, you people at the U of F should know better than to devote your time to garbology.  If you want to spend your days analyzing shit, you can jump up my ass.

Amen, brother.

I'm off to Chicago to protest this war for the fifth year running. Wish me luck!

Check this out:
http://www.mondofariano.org/pagina_ingles/index.html

This guy doesn't sound so crazy to me.

Context:
 
Amnesty International has repeatedly called for cutting off all US military aid to Columbia because its government has continued to collaborate with paramilitary death squads: http://www.amnestyusa.org/Colombia/US_Military_Aid_to_Colombia/page.do?id=1101863&n1=3&n2=30&n3=885

In fact, if you look at Amnesty International's page on Columbia, you'll notice that it has relatively little to say about the supposed FARC terrorists except to applaud them for releasing several groups of hostages recently.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/By_Country/Colombia/page.do?id=1011135&n1=3&n2=30&n3=885
By contrast they seem much more concerned with the government-sponsored paramilitary groups who have racked up death tolls of approximately 1000 per year since the late 90's.

Chomsky on Columbia:
http://zmag.org/ZSustainers/ZDaily/2000-04/24chomsky.htm
According to this stuff, much of the fear-mongering about the guerrillas is an excuse to kill trade unionists and human rights activists.
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200412--.htm
There's also no evidence at all that the hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid that we've pumped into Columbia (approximately $700 million in 2006) has led to any serious decline in drug trafficking. 
Don't be fooled by all of the half-cocked synopses you here in the mainstream press.  Columbia has one of the worst human rights records in Latin America, and given that, it's entirely understandable why its people would want to resist. 

Stay strong everyone (members of my nonexistent audience).

It has often been the case recently that, collectively, we've found ourselves pretending to be outraged about something we've actually either known about or strongly suspected since time immemorial.  There is, for instance, CIA director Michael Hayden's "revelation" that the CIA waterboarded people in 2002.  You don't say.  Well, if you think that's shocking wait till you hear what their saying about the religion of that guy in the Vatican with the over-sized hat!  You won't believe it!

Really, it's one of the eccentricities of our age certain things that are perfectly obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention can become the subjects of heated controversy.  I can remember listening to extended panel discussion on PBS just a few months ago all about why the CIA might have destroyed those video tapes of those notorious "harsh interrogation techniques."  Really, now; it anyone in serious doubt about that?  We all know why these kinds of "mistakes" are bound to happen.  This isn't rocket science here.  Have you read 1984 or Animal Farm?  Then you know exactly why those tapes were destroyed.  It's completely obvious to anyone who isn't so thoroughly blinded by propaganda that they've lost their capacity for common sense.  Oddly enough, the only people who appear to be so disadvantaged are the one who are perhaps to most "well educated" among us--that is, the ones who are most well versed in the art of sophistry and apologetics. 

So, to tell the truth, my reaction to this new development about the NAFTA memo form an Obama campaign member was quite blaze.  If you haven't heard by now, which would be difficult to manage, the Canadians are getting a little nervous over all of this anti-NAFTA rhetoric from the Democratic candidates, so its come out that someone from the Obama campaign made an effort to reassure them. 

http://www.slate.com/id/2185753/entry/0/

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20080227/dems_nafta_080227/20080227/

The memo summarizing the meeting between the economist Austan Goolsbee (an Obama campaign member) and Canadian official Georges Rioux says that Goolsbee assured Rioux that all of the noise being made over NAFTA was only because of "the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign."  This is really nothing to be concerned about, said Goolsbee, because these diatribes against NAFTA "should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans."  In other words; it's all really just smoke and mirrors.

Well, of course it is.  I mean, don't we all know by now how this sort of thing works?  Look at the Democrats electoral victory in 2006.  They ran largely on an anti-war platform and then subsequently voted to fund the continuation of the war at every opportunity (a strategy as old as Woodrow Wilson's 1914 campaign, by the way).  Of course it's all political posturing, and if you think otherwise, you simply haven't been paying close enough attention.  This is what American politicians do; it's how they've always operated: they capitalize on popular sentiments and then simply do whatever their campaign contributers want.  And in case you haven't noticed, the same sorts of people give money to both Republicans and Democrats.  What are we gaining by pretending to be ignorant about this?  Are we exercising some kind of willful naivete?  If we'd only swallow hard and acknowledge that we, the voters, are essentially powerless under this system, maybe we might be able to do something about it instead of pinning our misguided hopes to one "savior" after another. 

In a way, I suppose, I've been asking the wrong question.  The point was simply that we've been acting as though behavior like this were the exception, when we know perfectly well that it's the rule.  (That's the psychoanalytic formula for fetishistic disavowal, by the way: "I know perfectly well...but still I...")  Really though, the question ought to be "Why aren't we more outraged?"  Even among the Clinton people, the reaction to this news has not all that angry or reproachful: they seem much more interested in Obama's relationship to this Rezko character.  Well the meaning of this response seems clear: we've become much to inured to incompetence and corruption from our political leaders!  We're like that dog in the Pavlov experiment who realizes he can't escape the electric shocks no matter where he jumps, and so he just lays (lies?) down and accepts it all!  Well, no more!  Laboratory dogs of the world unite; you've got nothing to lose but your electric collars!

My friend Brooke kind of goaded me into attending this little soire that the department had on Friday night.  It was a rare opportunity to witness perhaps the nerdiest form of partying imaginable.  There's a local pub called Rumrunners I'd never been to before, which apparently features a tropical decor and a kind of "dueling pianos" arrangement every Friday night.  First of all, I kid you not, the thing was scheduled from 5-7 on a Friday night.  Suffice it to say, unlike NY, South Bend is a city that gets a more than adequate amount of sleep.  It was a bit strange as well because Brooke and I had vowed to be mutual social safety-nets at this thing, but when I got there, she hardly spoke to me.  I always think this sort of thing means something when it probably doesn't--like maybe she's put off when I try to be artificially charming with other people.  Well, that's what you do in polite company, isn't it? 

Anyway, the festivities start up around 8 o'clock and these two "piano men" start pounding away at their instruments and bellowing out a thoroughly predictable (Jimmy Buffet-dominated) barroom repetoire.  Soon, a very extroverted medievalist elects to put on a drunken exhibition for which, I'm told, she has become infamous.  It all begins with a request for "Baby Got Back," with which she sings along boisterously, and ends with an appearance on stage alongside her reluctant fiance.  It's very easy belittle this sort of behavior, but hey, at least she actually cuts loose once in while, which is more than I can say for most of my fellow English-ers, who seem all too eager to reach middle-age. 

I'd been seated with a few acquaintances I hadn't seen for quite a while.  It was all amiable enough, but I much preferred the conversation of my friend Jeremiah, who isn't quite so eager to show his erudition at every opportunity or sneak in clever and arcane references to popular culture into every casual conversation.  I was all set to leave around 9 or so, and I had already resolved to visit another alehouse on my own before the night was through.  I had recently decided to cut down on my alcohol intake, and I needed a more liberating indulgence; it's difficult to enjoy alcohol around a group of other people who are (1) not drinking and (2) desperate to appear thoroughly professional and competent even in their off-hours.  In fact, despite the general saturnalian atmosphere, Jeremiah was the only other member of our little colloquy who was drinking. 

Unexpectedly, Jeremiah then asked me if I could give him a ride home.  I replied that I'd be happy to but asked him if he wouldn't mind going somewhere else for another little spout beforehand.  At this point, Jeremiah, irrepressibly friendly mensch that he is, insisted on asking absolutely everyone if they wouldn't like to join us.  I was sure they'd say no, but it turns out that our fellow-travelers were about check out themselves in search of food.  So as it turned out, we all congregated at the local Chili's, of all places, where it was agreed that they could eat, while Jeremiah and I would be allowed to continue to drink.  Not what I had in mind for a second venue. 

As I feared, the conversation proved to be absolutely insufferable.  These people must have devoted the first 25-30 minutes of our time there to professional gossip and departmental griping.  I didn't say a word until we got around to something modestly interesting, mostly because those people make me nervous.  It just baffles me that they're all so career-obsessed that they can't simply "punch out" for a single evening.  Needless to say, it thoroughly ruined whatever buzz I had left; there's no joy at all in drinking around people who make you feel self-conscious, who seem so utterly serious that you start to become fearful that you'll slur your words or stutter.  And at the end of it all, they all made a big show of how prematurely tired they were, even though it was only 11pm.  "Jeez, how old am I?"  "I'm getting tired already?"  " It feels like midnight!"--that sort of thing.  I wanted to say, "Well, I've got news for you, sweets: what you're experiencing has got nothing to do with getting older; it's simply that you've become a massive tool, an amalgam of everything you used to despise (assuming you had recalcitrant impulses to begin with).  Every single one of you has become a ridiculous carricature of middle-America.  I bet you didn't even have to make an effort.  That's the way it happens in America: you let your guard down, and you become the J. Crew couple from Best in Show.  I understand why you did it; I'm not blaming you.  I just refuse to sit here and make witty-yet-erudite chit-chat with the robotic inhuman shells of people I used to know and love.  So how about you do us both a favor and just fuck off once and for all?" 

I dropped Jeremiah off and knew immediately that I needed another drink--one that would be free from the scrutiny and professional supervision that attaches itself to department devotees like the eye of Bentham's panoptic prison.  So I stopped off at the Mishawaka Brew Co. for a pint.  As soon as I got hope, Brett texted me to say that he and a few of the usual suspects were out at Club 23.  Now, that was decidedly more like it.  Thank the great good lord he's around.  In this instance, unfortunately, I elected to stay home because I was afraid that, if I had any more to drink, by the end of the night I'd be unfit to drive.  However, I picked up Sideways by Rex Pickett this afternoon, and the characters in that novel are constantly drinking and driving.  Maybe I was unduly cautious--I mean if they can get away with it...

When Che Guevara first encountered Fidel Castro while the two of them were in Mexico, they apparently hit it off immediately.  Che promptly invited Fidel for dinner at the home of Hilda, his romantic partner at the time, and her roommate.  Fidel later exasperated his hostesses by showing up two hours  late.  However, once he did arrive, such was his personal charm that all was immediately forgotten.  He began to tell them all about the horrid abuses of the US-supported Batista regime in Cuba and his ambitions to overthrow it.  At this point, Hilda's roommate asked him why, if his objective was to mount an offensive against the Cuban government, was he not there but in Mexico.  "An excellent question," Fidel responded, "and one deserving of a thorough reply."  Reportedly, Fidel then launched into an unbroken monologue that lasted for four hours.  Word has it that he kept his companions spellbound throughout.  Aside from what this story may reveal about Fidel's tendency toward pomposity and bombast, it also tells us a great deal about his personal charisma and his ability to inspire those around him. 

Reading about the Cuban revolution, as I have been of late, it begins to seem like an absolutely miraculous affair.  Here was this authoritarian strongman, whose regime routinely carried out murder, abductions, and torture; a leader whose soldiers would destroy the land of peasants simply in order to discourage them from providing any help at all to subversives--and in the end, he was bested.  Pre-revolutionary Cuba was the proverbial den of iniquity.  The island depended for its principle sources of revenue on the few luxurious hotels maintained by the gambling and prostitution industries, which were kept at the beck and call of American gangsters (did you see Godfather Part II?  It's pretty accurate).  Indeed, Batista's Cuba was often referred to by her neighbors as "the whorehouse of the Caribbean."  The locals all detested Batista.  So much so that, when he applied for membership to one of Cuba's exclusive "whites only" country clubs, the Cuban aristocracy (incensed at the way he had defiled Cuba's reputation) turned him down. 

What is miraculous about it all is that Castro managed to topple Batista even though he only began with 82 soldiers.  To be sure, he had had hints that others would flock to his support once the revolution picked up steam, but one never really knows about these things.  Imagine touching down on the shores of another country with less than one hundred people and expecting to overthrow the government.  If someone told me that was their plan, I would strongly suspect they were insane.  Anyway, very long story short, they managed to oust Batista, largely thanks to an armored train loaded with ammunition that Che and his soldiers were able to derail on its way to Santa Clara.  One little thing like that can mean quite a bit in the right circumstances. 

All of that said, it is genuinely unfortunate that Castro's government elected to crack down on freedom of the press and free assembly and that they have not abolished the death penalty.  It makes no sense at all to decry these abuses in the United States and elsewhere and then to look the other way when they are carried out in Cuba.  That would be sheer hypocrisy of the worst kind (The US government, as a case in point, makes not a peep when these and substantially worse violations of the principles of human rights occur in Saudi Arabia or the Israeli occupied territories.)  My only qualification is that we ought to look at what Castro has done right as well as where his regime has gone astray.  For instance, Cuba towers above other Latin American nations when it comes to health care, education, and distribution of wealth.  His revolution remains a monument to the potential of what a few dirty guerrillas can do against an "invincible" empire.  Without Castro, we would not have the modern-day Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and Bolivia.  You certainly wouldn't have the Sandinistas, whom Che helped to train himself.  In fact the Cubans have actually inspired countless oppressed people in places as far off as Zaire and Algeria.  Because of them, imperial authority suddenly did not appear quite so invulnerable. 

In summation, Castro essentially has two bodies: his mortal body, which is vulnerable to intestinal ailments (where is Dr. Guevara and his call for "socialistic medicine" when you need him?  Oh...right.), but in his symbolic body, his existence as an exemplar of an uncompromising revolutionary posture, he is untouchable. The symbolic value of Castro's Cuba has been enormous, while its literal incarnation has been occasionally regrettable.  As an English major, however, I have no trouble severing linguistic-symbolic reality from practical reality.  If only the shapers of American foreign policy could be so enlightened.  In a way, I suppose, they have, in fact, taken this insight to heart because it has become manifestly apparent to every neutral observer (including the United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch) that our 50-year-long economic embargo has made absolutely no practical, material progress whatsoever.  The only justification for maintaining it concerns not so much what Cuba is as what it represents: a living testament to America's impotence, to the ultimate inability of all of its political and economic machinery to overcome the will of one obstinate old man and the loyalists among his constituents.  For this reason, I confess that I admire Fidel, even if I may have other reasons to be displeased with him. 

Hold the fort as long as you can, Raul!  Don't let the bastards grind you down!

Romantic infidelities appear to have a kind of dual causality.  On the one hand there is the brute fact of your physical attraction to one person or more who is not your legitimate partner.  This is the purely physical, or if you like, hormonal line of causality that leads to an infidelity.  On the other hand, you have the commonplace insight according to which infidelities do not simply "happen"--that they are symptomal formations brought about by a much deeper underlying problem in the relationship to which you are committed.  As a friend of mine put it recently, "You go on with the facade and then something happens to precipitate the fall of this whole house of cards," or something like that.  Really though, I think this observation is fundamentally off the mark.  The idea that the affair was merely the last proverbial straw, that it only exposed a more fundamental hidden reality, implies that the rift existed fully formed prior to the dalliance in question--that it represented only the outward sign of an inner rift that already existed.  The problem with this account is that it privileges the second line of causality outlined above over the former.  What is much more radical, it seems to me, and more properly Hegelian, is to insist that the two explanations are, in fact, not mutually exclusive--that the sexual attraction to someone other than one's partner is of a piece with the deeper psychological division between the two.  The more complex and "deep-seated" problem with the structure of the relationship did not, in fact, exist as a fully developed and recognizable entity until it manifested itself in the form of a sexual encounter.  In fact, the encounter retroactively creates the fundamental fissure of which it appears to be only a symptom.  In retrospect, of course, it becomes possible to chart the course and development of the problem, to suggest that it had its roots in the even in the earliest stages of the relationship, even in insignificant details, and so on.  However, this should not deter us from advancing the radical thesis that the problem did not, in fact, exist as such until it made itself known empirically, materially.  Hegel gives an account somewhere of an occasion on which he saw Napoleon Bonaparte in person, and he very memorably recorded that, in that moment, it was as if "history was walking" right before his eyes.  The idea, of course, is that, while Napoleon is an individual, what is truly important is his role as an agent of history and other supra-personal forces.  Similarly, heterosexual parents can rightly proclaim, as they witness their offspring going about the most routine affairs, "Oh look, our love is walking!"  "Our love has soiled his pants!", etc.  By this same token, one can imagine one partner in an unhappy couple directing the other's attention to the individual who occasioned his most recent infidelity and uttering something like, "There sit our marital problems!"

It may sound sappy, but watching the news today I was mildly optimistic. It's all too easy these days to take a good look around and conclude that the absolute worst of humanity have control of things and it's likely to stay that way for a good long while. Today, however, there was a minuscule ray of light, a minor victory for emancipatory forces that we all ought to celebrate.

As you well know by now if you've glanced at a TV lately, Israel has intensified their already deadly blockade of Gaza over the past few days, this time cutting off fuel, water, and medical supplies to the already impoverished population. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, 11 people have dies since November simply because Israel would not allow them access to necessary medical treatment. By now Gaza residents are almost entirely dependent upon international humanitarian aid for their food and water, largely because the restrictions on movement imposed by the Israeli government crippled their economy severely.

All of this justified by the firing of a few rockets--not military rockets, mind you, but civilian-made rockets launched into Israel in retaliation for a series of, shall we say, less than surgical executions suspected Hamas members by the Israeli military. Indeed, if we look at the civilian casualties, the analogy would be something like, performing a root canal with a chain saw. Not to mention the fact that all of these executions have been extra-judicial--in other words, more like assassinations.

http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/685.shtml

There have been roughly 150 of these rockets sent into Israel over the past several days, but such is there quality that none of them has been able to cause a single fatality. For this, the Israeli government is willing to endanger the lives of 1.5 million people, most of them non-combatants. Additionally, during the same time period Israel has killed at least 40 Palestinians and injured at least 120 more. Indeed, it really causes one to wonder about the value they place on life over there. This is an absolutely flagrant case of collective punishment, which is absolutely forbidden under international law. Imagine if, in response to an attack by Iraqi insurgents, the US military decided to bomb Iraq's only power plant, cutting off electricity to all Iraqis in response to the crimes of a few? We've done an awful lot of horrific things over there, but we haven't done that (yet). The Israelis don't seem to realize that, when they say that it is permissible to punish all Gazans because they are supporting a regime that practices terrorism, they are exorcising exactly the same logic as a Palestinian who blows himself up along with a busload of civilians: deliberate strikes against non-combatants constitute terrorism regardless of who carries them out.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9246.shtml

One would think Egypt would be their ideal place to turn for help, but the response of its president (dictator) has been less than brotherly. Until very recently, Egypt maintained an armed guard along the enormous wall topped with barbed wire along the border with Gaza despite the crowds of hungry Palestinians pleading to be let inside. Well, if you want something done right...call Hamas. Actually, Hamas leaders said that the demolition of a large section of Egypt's wall today was not really planned, but was simply the natural response one ought to expect when you get that many people in dire straights all penned in in one place: "This was a normal response to the pressure that has been put on the Palestinian people in Gaza. It is an explosion of the people locked inside" said party spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9248.shtml

Apparently most of the people streaming across the border came back carrying gasoline, which is especially scarce these days in Gaza, and basic staples like soap. Some, though, said they just wandered across with their families just to breathe free. NPR reported today that the wall had been destroyed by "militants." Well, you can call them militants if you like; I'll call them starving people with families to feed. We'd do the same if we had to. This is the way that liberation often begins. Egypt even retroactively declared that it had never restricted Palestinians from crossing the borders at all. Of course, this is only because, once they began to cross the border, it would have been impossible to stop them. This is nothing new, governments taking credit for something that could not be avoided because it was the inexorable will of the people. Let this be a lesson to the Egyptians and the Israelis: walls can topple; it's astonishing how often they seem to be perfectly impenetrable, but really, they're only made of bricks and mortar and lime and, as such, they can be felled. As Rage Against the Machine said,

Hungry people don't stay hungry for long,

They get hope from fire and smoke as the weak grow strong

Mitt Romney gave his long-awaited "Mormon" speech a couple of days ago, and I was less than impressed. I doubt he really won over anyone, considering that he didn't actually address any of the concerns that fundamentalist Christians have about Mormonism. In fact, he used the word "Mormon" only once. Now as best I can tell, the main theological objection that evangelicals have to the Mormon church is its doctrine that the Book of Mormon is an addendum to the bible, or even that it supersedes the bible. I can't say I've made a careful study of Mormonism, but it looks for all the world to me like a religion founded upon absolute fraud (a redundancy, some would say). The founder of the Mormon church was Joseph Smith, who apparently was something of a crackpot inventor. He claimed to have discovered the Book of Mormon, ostensibly a 16th-century document, though what is more likely is that he wrote it himself in the 19th century, doing a rather mediocre job of approximating 16th-century English. The book is an elaborate rewriting of American history which claims, among other things, that Jesus actually preached in what is now the United States. Pretty wacky alright; but hey, who am I to judge? Anything that challenges the evangelical Christian hegemony in America can only be a good thing, right? Well, I suppose, but what about the fact that until 1978, the Mormon church would not ordain any non-white clergy members because it held that all people of color were marked by the devil. Now, I think that it is legitimate to question a political candidate about something like this. Mitt Romney was presumably of sound mind in 1978, yet he apparently had no problem belonging to an openly racist institution. I think it's perfectly fair to say, "What's up with that?" Although, Romney's already flip-flopped on so many other questions that he's established that there is, in fact, no discernible relationship between his past and present self. Every couple of years, he simply becomes a blank slate, an uncarved block, infinitely mutable. Tomorrow he could become a Nazi without batting an eye. Anyway, I wonder sometimes whether it IS legitimate to ask about what a politicians religious beliefs might reveal about their character. I mean, I can imagine some would-be voter saying something like, "Jeez, if you're willing to swallow all that Joseph Smith business, what does that say about you? That you blindly regard tradition as gospel even when it's manifestly absurd?" I'm not sure. I mean, I suppose you could say the same thing about Kennedy or John Kerry believing that wine is capable of transforming into the blood of a 2000-year-old Jewish carpenter.

Speaking of Kennedy, it was he who set the bar for this kind of thing, and I think he set it a little too high for our old friend Mitt. I think it's actually quite significant that Kennedy addressed some of the doctrinal questions head-on. He actually gave his speech before a group of Protestant ministers. It's an interesting speech to watch nowadays. They mostly asked him about the extent to which he'd be submissive to the pope. That's apparently one of the main points of contentions among evangelicals and Catholics, along with the divinity of the Virgin Mary. What is remarkable about Kennedy's speech is that he appealed both to Protestants and to secularists by declaring religion to be a private affair and affirming that "the separation of church and state is absolute." Romney, on the other hand, has apparently been reading a different Constitution from the rest of us. In an attempt to curry favor with the bible-beaters, Romney lamented the fact that the in America today, the doctrine of the separation of church and state had been carried too far, thanks to those whom he called advocates of "the religion of secularism." He then proceeded to scare the bloody hell out of people like me when he declared that "not only does religion require freedom, freedom requires religion!" I'm actually gratified by the fact that so many people in the press and elsewhere have criticized him for taking this tack. The liberal columnist Mark Shields, for instance, said that he found Romney's remarks "offensive" because they implied that it's impossible to be a good citizen if you aren't in the ranks of the faithful. Romney also became the subject of this little satirical video on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ9n7ezO3J4&feature=PlayList&p=FB4CB4DC28616172&index=114

It's really disturbing that, even though he gave his speech almost fifty years earlier, Kennedy looks like a beacon of enlightened progressive-ism next to Romney.