1. Politics is not morals.
2. Politics arises from the recognition that the people with whom we share the world are ineradicably different from one another, and that we can co-operate or not to resolve shared problems including problems arising from co-operation.
3. Morals arises from the recognition that the people with whom we identify in the world share similarities that seem to us worth the real costs of maintaining them.
4. Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them.
5. Progressive democratization is the struggle to enable ever more people ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
6. Democracy values equity and diversity above all, but since the absolute aspiration to equity can so threaten diversity and the absolute aspiration to diversity can so threaten equity the democratic struggle to implement and express equity-in-diversity is finally interminable.
7. Democratic politics as an arena of self-expression can be an end-in-itself but progressive politics succeeds as such only when it is actually democratizing, that is to say when it is enabling ever more people ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.
8. There is no democracy without a legible scene of consent, a scene that is more legible as such the more it is rendered ever more informed and ever more nonduressed through the work of institutional organizations.
9. There is no democracy without the maintenance of alternative institutional organizations for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes including disputes as to what properly constitutes violence.
10. Progressive politics is always organized, and even if networked organizations are different in important ways from the professional and authoritarian organizations of industrial modernity none of these differences are of a kind that would annul the prior recognition that progressive politics is always organized.
11. Progressive democratization is always substantially a matter of education, agitation, organization to resist anti-democratization, and education, agitation, organization to implement democratization, that is to say, equity-in-diversity, peer to peer.
12. The desire to smash the state is always ultimately anti-democratic, since democratization is always the democratization of the state.
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Contextualizing the Think-Tankification of the Academy
St Petersburg Times:
Permit me a few scattered comments, most of which could be fully-fledged on their own if I felt an inclination to elaborate them, but which taken together in this more fragmentary state actually better reflect my reaction to this news item:
First, and I suppose most obviously: In the aftermath of the New Deal big business interests overcame their antipathy to and ineptitude at organized political activity (the priorities of profit-driven enterprise tend to be more parochial, proximate, opportunistic, competitive rather than co-operative) and began funding an archipelago of foundations and think-tanks spewing useful propaganda to counter the inconvenient results emerging out of universities. Now, in the present epoch of the pernicious corporatization and for-profit precarization and dumbing-down of the academy, Koch's purchase and control over university hiring and content begins (really, amplifies the long ongoing) re-writing of the academy itself in the image of the think-tanks that originated to combat the academy itself.
Second: Despite their incessant whining to the contrary, of course, it was never the left-wing bias in intellectuals they were combating in creating these alternate institutions (these intellectuals, after all, tend to come from privileged backgrounds or are engaging through their education in a process of upwardly-mobile professionalization, all of which tends to be forcefully prejudicial in the lives of even well-intentioned and progressive-identified people in countless ways, subtle and gross), but what has come jocularly to be known as Reality's "left-wing bias." And so these think-tanks busy themselves with the discounting of consensus scientific results whenever these support the case for regulations in the public interest that diminish profits, peddle faux-populist plutocratic "free-market" nonsense directly to lobbyists, elected representatives, and through mass-media outlets, engage in relentless marketing and promotional discourse selling or at any rate reconciling majorities to policies that benefit incumbent-elites, mobilizing and canalizing deep American currents of white-racism, sex-panic, anti-intellectualism, social distress in the service of voter disenfranchisement, mass-media distraction and disinformation, the maintenance of the plutocratic central economic planning and welfare for the rich programs misleadingly denominated "defense spending," and so on.
Third: That factual reality would have a left-wing bias, all joking aside, derives in a general sort of way from the converging tendencies of contingent universalization that happen to characterize both the publication and testing processes through which consensus science arrives at warranted beliefs as well as the democratization and consensualization processes through which ever more people arrive at ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them through the provision of an ever more informed and nonduressed scene of consent coupled to ever more equitable access to ever better legitimated alternatives for the nonviolent resolution of disputes.
Fourth: Koch's move isn't unprecedented, actually, but reminds us of the reaction of the Robber Barons to the radical populism of massively best-selling author Henry George and the popular movements his writing inspired (in the company of the extraordinary early influence of Marx and organizing labor, as well as "free men, free labor, free land" Republicanism in post-Civil War America), that is to say, their creation and endowment of formal economics departments in universities across the United States, devoted to the creation and dissemination of laissez-faire sophisms as an official discourse. Of course, this backfired when in the context of the academy this orthodoxy was overturned by the Keynesian Revolution. Hayek and Friedman then began the long slog to re-impose that discredited still-nonsensical laissez-faire orthodoxy, a painful story summarized by the word "neoliberalism" (actually, that is a no less painful oversimplification of the story, but, after all, so was the use of the phrase "Keynesian Revolution" to summarize the no less complex convulsive narrative that preceded it). Anyway, Koch's infiltration is not only the latest episode of the tragic story of neoliberal re-imposition of laissez-faire orthodoxy as plutocratic official discourse but an episode that re-stages the inaugural scene through which that official discourse was first installed as such.
Fifth: When I speak of the dissemination of a phony congenial right-wing alternative reality through the hijacking of the academy, through the combating of the academy by way of the phony scholarship of the bought-and-paid-for pseudo-academy of the think-tank archipelago, and through the opportunistic mass-mediation of right-wing spin, denialism, know-nothingism, social discontent and cultural violence, it should be noted that this critique is not the same thing as nor even properly subsumed under the critique of the Culture Industry by Adorno and the critical theorists or of the Spectacle by Debord and the Situationists (or of Barthean Mythology before them). No, were the academy to regain its autonomy from the parochialism and corruption of profit-making and competitive-military imperatives, were media monopolies broken up and media co-operatives set up to reflect the diversity of experience and expression of communities as well as shared problems and general interests, still the tendencies to reconcile majorities to exploitation, to naturalize the bourgeois status quo, to distract people with pseudo-needs critiques by Adorno, Barthes, Debord and others would remain in force. Right-wing think-tanks, Fox News and right-wing hate-radio, and Movement Republican efforts to privatize, marginalize, commandeer University departments have far more specific historical contexts and effects, they are playing out at a level of concrete specificity which is not the level at which critiques of the fetishized commodity form, the Culture Industry, Benjaminian "Aura," the Situationist Spectacle, and other comparable key Marxist/post-marxist critiques are pitched and it is crucial to grasp and respond to these developments in their actual specificity. (This is not to deny the continued vitality of these more fundamental critiques in their proper precincts, of course.)
Sixth: Like the return corporate-militarists get for campaign contributions to elected officials (sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in such investments yield billions upon billions in subsidies and profitable deregulation at taxpayer expense), it really is flabbergasting to see how cheap it really can be for incumbent-elites to buy what amounts to a University Department in today's precarized academy with which to indoctrinate a generation of paid shills to champion feudalism in the midst of notional democracy.
Seventh: The organized futurology with which I tend to be preoccupied in this blog should be viewed as of a piece with the right-wing think-tank archipelago. Of course, the really bonkers extremities of superlative futurology that I tend to deride as a Robot Cult archipelago often have more in common with the organizations and subcultures associated with Scientology or Randian Objecitivsm, but sometimes even these extremes have their comparatively well-heeled well-funded facets (Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute is an example of what I mean by comparatively well-heeled superlative futurology, Singularity University is an example of what I mean by comparatively well-funded superlative futurology). Of course, the still techno-fetishistic but more prevalent futurological corporate-militarist foundations and think-tanks peddling neoliberal "development" schemes, liberal eugenic "bioethics," "geo-engineering" diversions, network and robotic "security" measures and so on are the truly dangerous, truly anti-democratizing point of intersection between my anti-futurological arguments and my concerns with the Movement Republican anti-academic institutionalization of a phony congenial right-wing alternative reality.
A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise." Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom. Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control.
Permit me a few scattered comments, most of which could be fully-fledged on their own if I felt an inclination to elaborate them, but which taken together in this more fragmentary state actually better reflect my reaction to this news item:
First, and I suppose most obviously: In the aftermath of the New Deal big business interests overcame their antipathy to and ineptitude at organized political activity (the priorities of profit-driven enterprise tend to be more parochial, proximate, opportunistic, competitive rather than co-operative) and began funding an archipelago of foundations and think-tanks spewing useful propaganda to counter the inconvenient results emerging out of universities. Now, in the present epoch of the pernicious corporatization and for-profit precarization and dumbing-down of the academy, Koch's purchase and control over university hiring and content begins (really, amplifies the long ongoing) re-writing of the academy itself in the image of the think-tanks that originated to combat the academy itself.
Second: Despite their incessant whining to the contrary, of course, it was never the left-wing bias in intellectuals they were combating in creating these alternate institutions (these intellectuals, after all, tend to come from privileged backgrounds or are engaging through their education in a process of upwardly-mobile professionalization, all of which tends to be forcefully prejudicial in the lives of even well-intentioned and progressive-identified people in countless ways, subtle and gross), but what has come jocularly to be known as Reality's "left-wing bias." And so these think-tanks busy themselves with the discounting of consensus scientific results whenever these support the case for regulations in the public interest that diminish profits, peddle faux-populist plutocratic "free-market" nonsense directly to lobbyists, elected representatives, and through mass-media outlets, engage in relentless marketing and promotional discourse selling or at any rate reconciling majorities to policies that benefit incumbent-elites, mobilizing and canalizing deep American currents of white-racism, sex-panic, anti-intellectualism, social distress in the service of voter disenfranchisement, mass-media distraction and disinformation, the maintenance of the plutocratic central economic planning and welfare for the rich programs misleadingly denominated "defense spending," and so on.
Third: That factual reality would have a left-wing bias, all joking aside, derives in a general sort of way from the converging tendencies of contingent universalization that happen to characterize both the publication and testing processes through which consensus science arrives at warranted beliefs as well as the democratization and consensualization processes through which ever more people arrive at ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them through the provision of an ever more informed and nonduressed scene of consent coupled to ever more equitable access to ever better legitimated alternatives for the nonviolent resolution of disputes.
Fourth: Koch's move isn't unprecedented, actually, but reminds us of the reaction of the Robber Barons to the radical populism of massively best-selling author Henry George and the popular movements his writing inspired (in the company of the extraordinary early influence of Marx and organizing labor, as well as "free men, free labor, free land" Republicanism in post-Civil War America), that is to say, their creation and endowment of formal economics departments in universities across the United States, devoted to the creation and dissemination of laissez-faire sophisms as an official discourse. Of course, this backfired when in the context of the academy this orthodoxy was overturned by the Keynesian Revolution. Hayek and Friedman then began the long slog to re-impose that discredited still-nonsensical laissez-faire orthodoxy, a painful story summarized by the word "neoliberalism" (actually, that is a no less painful oversimplification of the story, but, after all, so was the use of the phrase "Keynesian Revolution" to summarize the no less complex convulsive narrative that preceded it). Anyway, Koch's infiltration is not only the latest episode of the tragic story of neoliberal re-imposition of laissez-faire orthodoxy as plutocratic official discourse but an episode that re-stages the inaugural scene through which that official discourse was first installed as such.
Fifth: When I speak of the dissemination of a phony congenial right-wing alternative reality through the hijacking of the academy, through the combating of the academy by way of the phony scholarship of the bought-and-paid-for pseudo-academy of the think-tank archipelago, and through the opportunistic mass-mediation of right-wing spin, denialism, know-nothingism, social discontent and cultural violence, it should be noted that this critique is not the same thing as nor even properly subsumed under the critique of the Culture Industry by Adorno and the critical theorists or of the Spectacle by Debord and the Situationists (or of Barthean Mythology before them). No, were the academy to regain its autonomy from the parochialism and corruption of profit-making and competitive-military imperatives, were media monopolies broken up and media co-operatives set up to reflect the diversity of experience and expression of communities as well as shared problems and general interests, still the tendencies to reconcile majorities to exploitation, to naturalize the bourgeois status quo, to distract people with pseudo-needs critiques by Adorno, Barthes, Debord and others would remain in force. Right-wing think-tanks, Fox News and right-wing hate-radio, and Movement Republican efforts to privatize, marginalize, commandeer University departments have far more specific historical contexts and effects, they are playing out at a level of concrete specificity which is not the level at which critiques of the fetishized commodity form, the Culture Industry, Benjaminian "Aura," the Situationist Spectacle, and other comparable key Marxist/post-marxist critiques are pitched and it is crucial to grasp and respond to these developments in their actual specificity. (This is not to deny the continued vitality of these more fundamental critiques in their proper precincts, of course.)
Sixth: Like the return corporate-militarists get for campaign contributions to elected officials (sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in such investments yield billions upon billions in subsidies and profitable deregulation at taxpayer expense), it really is flabbergasting to see how cheap it really can be for incumbent-elites to buy what amounts to a University Department in today's precarized academy with which to indoctrinate a generation of paid shills to champion feudalism in the midst of notional democracy.
Seventh: The organized futurology with which I tend to be preoccupied in this blog should be viewed as of a piece with the right-wing think-tank archipelago. Of course, the really bonkers extremities of superlative futurology that I tend to deride as a Robot Cult archipelago often have more in common with the organizations and subcultures associated with Scientology or Randian Objecitivsm, but sometimes even these extremes have their comparatively well-heeled well-funded facets (Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute is an example of what I mean by comparatively well-heeled superlative futurology, Singularity University is an example of what I mean by comparatively well-funded superlative futurology). Of course, the still techno-fetishistic but more prevalent futurological corporate-militarist foundations and think-tanks peddling neoliberal "development" schemes, liberal eugenic "bioethics," "geo-engineering" diversions, network and robotic "security" measures and so on are the truly dangerous, truly anti-democratizing point of intersection between my anti-futurological arguments and my concerns with the Movement Republican anti-academic institutionalization of a phony congenial right-wing alternative reality.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
Reactionary Robot Cultists (Again)
Some folks in the Moot and elsewhere are expressing surprise -- others, who've been around longer, are expressing amusement -- at the drift into conventional reactionary politics in the statements of certain high-profile Robot Cultists who, however silly the futurological moonshine they've been peddling, had at least seemed (or at any rate protested in public places to be) more reasonably progressive in their political viewpoints.
In my view, futurological discourses are best understood as hyperbolic variations on mainstream neoliberal corporate-military "developmentalist" rationalizations and amplified variations of the conventional norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse (in the most extreme superlative variations of futurology I deride as Robot Cultism that amplification of advertising hype actually takes on transcendentalizing and hence quasi-theological tonalities), and it really shouldn't be that surprising to stumble onto structural affinities of such discourse to right-wing rhetoric after all.
As one of my Futurological Brickbats puts the point more brutally: "To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms."
A few years back, I elaborated some of the structural connections between futurology and anti-democracy here, for those who are interested or need reminding.
Of course there are a handful of self-identified radical leftists with a high profile in the Robot Cult archipelago, poor things, but I must say it takes a rather dim bulb (or perhaps an especially desperate person, afraid of death, eager for attention, happy to be in on the scam for once, whatever it may be) to mistake what amounts to an epic-scaled late-nite boner pill ad for a utopian vision of the revolutionary left.
Just to be clear, for the millionth time: Advocating for the "rights" of software doesn't put you on the cutting edge of a civil rights movement, it expresses sociopathic disdain for actually existing, actually exploited and precarious planetary peers -- Pining for a Robot God to End History and solve all our problems for us is straightfoward authoritarian navel gazing -- Dreaming of nanosanta overcoming the impasse of poverty isn't a form socialism but of rank acquiescence to the bloodstained status quo -- And handwaving about your "geo-engineering" wet-dreams is a particularly egregious form of corporate-militarist greenwashing, hardly a more radical and hardboiled realist variation of environmentalism.
To pretend otherwise is at best pathetic, at worst, outright pernicious.
In my view, futurological discourses are best understood as hyperbolic variations on mainstream neoliberal corporate-military "developmentalist" rationalizations and amplified variations of the conventional norms and forms of marketing and promotional discourse (in the most extreme superlative variations of futurology I deride as Robot Cultism that amplification of advertising hype actually takes on transcendentalizing and hence quasi-theological tonalities), and it really shouldn't be that surprising to stumble onto structural affinities of such discourse to right-wing rhetoric after all.
As one of my Futurological Brickbats puts the point more brutally: "To speak of "The Future" is always to indulge in reaction. All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms."
A few years back, I elaborated some of the structural connections between futurology and anti-democracy here, for those who are interested or need reminding.
Of course there are a handful of self-identified radical leftists with a high profile in the Robot Cult archipelago, poor things, but I must say it takes a rather dim bulb (or perhaps an especially desperate person, afraid of death, eager for attention, happy to be in on the scam for once, whatever it may be) to mistake what amounts to an epic-scaled late-nite boner pill ad for a utopian vision of the revolutionary left.
Just to be clear, for the millionth time: Advocating for the "rights" of software doesn't put you on the cutting edge of a civil rights movement, it expresses sociopathic disdain for actually existing, actually exploited and precarious planetary peers -- Pining for a Robot God to End History and solve all our problems for us is straightfoward authoritarian navel gazing -- Dreaming of nanosanta overcoming the impasse of poverty isn't a form socialism but of rank acquiescence to the bloodstained status quo -- And handwaving about your "geo-engineering" wet-dreams is a particularly egregious form of corporate-militarist greenwashing, hardly a more radical and hardboiled realist variation of environmentalism.
To pretend otherwise is at best pathetic, at worst, outright pernicious.
Wednesday, May 04, 2011
Queer Manifestations
There are queerer things in heaven and earth, Gay-Ratio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Here I've corralled together many posts I've written over the lifetime of this blog that tend toward queergeekery and genderfuckery (with some additional odds and ends)....
Snowball’s Chance in Hell (Holiday Cackles from the Balcony), December 25, 2004
Conservative Wants to Enslave Women to Make More Gay Babies, February, 2005
The Random Wilde ("The Queen Is Not a Subject" -- Redux Edition), March, 2005
Technoprogressive ARTs, October, 2005
Technology Is Making Queers Of Us All, March, 2006
Keep Your Laws Off My Body, March, 2006
The Real Scandal is that the Scandal is About Sex Rather Than Torture , October, 2006
Cackles from the Balcony: San Francisco Uber Alles Edition, January, 2007
"Post-Gender" or Gender Poets? April, 2008
Honoring Service, Because Freedom Isn't Free, November, 2008
Marriage? No, Thanks! The Right to Marry? You Bet I'll Fight for It! December, 2008
Obama's Gay Pride Parade from Hell, June, 2009
"Same Sex", December, 2009
The Populist Politics of Expressivity, Right and Left, and the Equitable Left Since 1968, January, 2011
Can Queer Radicalisms Be Enabled by Gay Assimilationist Politics? February, 2011
Gay Assimilation, Queer Emancipation, and the Dialectic Demolition of the Closet, March, 2011
Marriage Equality Tide Sets Stage For This Year's Pride, June, 2011
Queer Projector: An Honor (and Dishonor) Roll of Queer Film Recommendations, July, 2011
Every Jock Is A Puke... And Why This Matters, August, 2011
Transhuman Transsex, September, 2011
"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again," May, 2012
Using Queer Strategies to Overcome the Violence and Misinformation of the Anti-Abortion Zealots, July, 2012
Prosthetic Sex/Gender and Healthcare Politics, December, 2012
What Is Patriarchy? December, 2012
Anarcho-Anti-Sexist Robot Cultist Decides Feminism Is Too Hard, Declares Himself A Robot, December, 2012
The Coming Gaybagger Wave, April, 2013
All Patriarchy Is Eugenic, April, 2013
Uploading As Reactionary Anti-Body Politics, January 10, 2015
The Parade Passes By, June 28, 2015
Here I've corralled together many posts I've written over the lifetime of this blog that tend toward queergeekery and genderfuckery (with some additional odds and ends)....
Snowball’s Chance in Hell (Holiday Cackles from the Balcony), December 25, 2004
Conservative Wants to Enslave Women to Make More Gay Babies, February, 2005
The Random Wilde ("The Queen Is Not a Subject" -- Redux Edition), March, 2005
Technoprogressive ARTs, October, 2005
Technology Is Making Queers Of Us All, March, 2006
Keep Your Laws Off My Body, March, 2006
The Real Scandal is that the Scandal is About Sex Rather Than Torture , October, 2006
Cackles from the Balcony: San Francisco Uber Alles Edition, January, 2007
"Post-Gender" or Gender Poets? April, 2008
Honoring Service, Because Freedom Isn't Free, November, 2008
Marriage? No, Thanks! The Right to Marry? You Bet I'll Fight for It! December, 2008
Obama's Gay Pride Parade from Hell, June, 2009
"Same Sex", December, 2009
The Populist Politics of Expressivity, Right and Left, and the Equitable Left Since 1968, January, 2011
Can Queer Radicalisms Be Enabled by Gay Assimilationist Politics? February, 2011
Gay Assimilation, Queer Emancipation, and the Dialectic Demolition of the Closet, March, 2011
Marriage Equality Tide Sets Stage For This Year's Pride, June, 2011
Queer Projector: An Honor (and Dishonor) Roll of Queer Film Recommendations, July, 2011
Every Jock Is A Puke... And Why This Matters, August, 2011
Transhuman Transsex, September, 2011
"Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again," May, 2012
Using Queer Strategies to Overcome the Violence and Misinformation of the Anti-Abortion Zealots, July, 2012
Prosthetic Sex/Gender and Healthcare Politics, December, 2012
What Is Patriarchy? December, 2012
Anarcho-Anti-Sexist Robot Cultist Decides Feminism Is Too Hard, Declares Himself A Robot, December, 2012
The Coming Gaybagger Wave, April, 2013
All Patriarchy Is Eugenic, April, 2013
Uploading As Reactionary Anti-Body Politics, January 10, 2015
The Parade Passes By, June 28, 2015
Sunday, May 01, 2011
I Don't Understand Anything
Mobs of ecstatic weeping cheering flag-waving Americans are appearing spontaneously in front of the White House and at the World Trade Center site and who knows where else.… I am hearing people say that a chapter has ended for the American people, a whole generation is turning a page, that America is united in celebration….
I have to tell you, I cannot even begin to grasp how people could be declaring, as they are doing, one after another, that the death of bin Laden is the most important moment in the Obama Administration. Even granting the obvious symbolic momentousness of all this, freighting as it does the eighth anniversary of Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" and so on and so forth, I have to say I personally think that there have been at least dozens of legislative victories and defeats that seem to me incomparably more significant, in terms of the effects that will be felt in the lives of millions and millions of people….
Pundits are proposing that it is now possible as it hasn't been before to leave Afghanistan and Iraq in earnest, and if that is true of course that is all to the good. And if long-suffering people can truly begin to heal the wounds opened in and by our recent painful history of terror, war, and occupation, then of course again I am happy that is true.
I am hopeful that the mourning to which Obama referred in his brief speech tonight may begin to do its long-deferred healing work, re-opening Americans in our shared vulnerability as human beings to connection with the fellow-sufferers among Americans of all parties and persuasions and among those denounced for so long as nothing but enemies as well....
But I cannot claim to understand why this is the night for such possibilities, why this is the event that renews this hopefulness, why this is the Presidential announcement that would unlock these possibilities, why this killing, however justified it might be, would unleash these howling ferocious unifying celebratory energies….
There are times when I am proud of the effort I have taken to understand what is happening in the world and the understanding that effort has rewarded me with, but on a night like this I have to admit I don't think I understand anything at all, I don't understand my fellow citizens at all, I don't understand what is going on in people's heads.
9/11 was terrible, but so was America's reaction to it, and I feel it again tonight, whatever the manifold complexities in play, there is something truly terrible in this night, and I for one feel nothing so much as confusion and fear….
I have to tell you, I cannot even begin to grasp how people could be declaring, as they are doing, one after another, that the death of bin Laden is the most important moment in the Obama Administration. Even granting the obvious symbolic momentousness of all this, freighting as it does the eighth anniversary of Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" and so on and so forth, I have to say I personally think that there have been at least dozens of legislative victories and defeats that seem to me incomparably more significant, in terms of the effects that will be felt in the lives of millions and millions of people….
Pundits are proposing that it is now possible as it hasn't been before to leave Afghanistan and Iraq in earnest, and if that is true of course that is all to the good. And if long-suffering people can truly begin to heal the wounds opened in and by our recent painful history of terror, war, and occupation, then of course again I am happy that is true.
I am hopeful that the mourning to which Obama referred in his brief speech tonight may begin to do its long-deferred healing work, re-opening Americans in our shared vulnerability as human beings to connection with the fellow-sufferers among Americans of all parties and persuasions and among those denounced for so long as nothing but enemies as well....
But I cannot claim to understand why this is the night for such possibilities, why this is the event that renews this hopefulness, why this is the Presidential announcement that would unlock these possibilities, why this killing, however justified it might be, would unleash these howling ferocious unifying celebratory energies….
There are times when I am proud of the effort I have taken to understand what is happening in the world and the understanding that effort has rewarded me with, but on a night like this I have to admit I don't think I understand anything at all, I don't understand my fellow citizens at all, I don't understand what is going on in people's heads.
9/11 was terrible, but so was America's reaction to it, and I feel it again tonight, whatever the manifold complexities in play, there is something truly terrible in this night, and I for one feel nothing so much as confusion and fear….
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