let's all do the SNL "code orange" dance!

I was all depressed about Valentine's day this last week. Well, guess what, I am not anymore. In fact, I have never been so unconcerned about Va;entine's day. Usually I get all annoyed at being forced to reflect on why exactly it is that I am "alone" in the V-day sense of the word on February 14th, which leads to all sorts of fun retrospective analysis of my exes, and ruins Leonard Cohen for me for at least two weeks. Valentine's day is always horrible. Not as bad as my birthdays tend to be, but still pretty shitty. But not this year. No, Valentine's Day is not an issue anymore, because Duct Tape is the new Chocolate Heart. Instead of feeling depressed, I feel schizophrenic, watching CNN act out someone's graduate paper "Constructing Fear: A Dialectic of Discourse And Praxis" and simultaneously feeling really close to having a nervous breakdown, and meta-smacking myself for being manipulated even as I realize that I am being manipulated into being afraid and not being a good citizen doing my civic duty of not becoming a mindless moron like the 1 in 2 Americans who, according to a recent poll, believed that Saddam Husein was responsible for 9-11 terrorist attacks. The insidiousness of the exiting discourse is the fact that not only does it foster a split into "rational" and "irrational" reactions, it is impossible to know which one is rational and which one is irrational. It's like the puzzle with the doors in Labyrinth. Except with no logical loophole to find a solution. My mind has never had such fertile material for such maddenning epistemological Ultima Thules. I feel like I am watching a horrible game of connect-the-dots and the only logical conclusion lies in the realm of "conspiracy theory" thought. And yet, my heart freezes any time the subway stops underground. I am jittery and spooked by loud noises. I feel visceral unpleasantness in my stomach when a plane flies too low. Huh, too bad I live near LaGuardia then, right? I have to great freshmen papers before going to be, and I have to fight the urge to write in the margins "Dear Timmy, your paper sucks, but who gives a fuck. Here's two dollars, go to the store and buy yourself some duct tape." why not? If my advisor can say, in the course of our conversation over beers about the state of anthropology today, that the topics of global thought aren't very relevant anymore, and that brand of academia is going bye-bye because it's not important, not compared to whether there's gonna be a bomb dropped on Wall Street, why do I have to explain to Timmy why we don't refer to people as mammals in ethnographic exercises? See? Not only am I becoming a bad citizen, I am becoming a bad academic. And did I mention that if I hear the words "duct tape" one more time I am going to scream? And that if I ever get my fucking degree, I think I should get any job that I want, because I will deserve it, because it has fucking SUCKED going to grad school in NYC for the last two years? I was re-reading "The Nervous System" by Mick Taussig earlier today, and came across this quote that I underlined several years ago when I first read it during my first year living in New York, which I will always be grateful for, for having the experience of living here and being in love with the city before September 11th, when my biggest source of stress was a messy romantic entanglement with a boy who couldn't put his money where his mouth was. Man, one could really mine that colloquialism in a paper on prostitutes. I suppose a more appropriate rephrasing would be "couldn't put his heart where his dick was."
anyway, Taussig talks about "a state of doubleness of social being in which one moves in bursts between somehow accepting the situation as normal, only to be thrown into a panic or shocked into diorientation by an event, a rumor, a sight, something said, or not said--something that even while it requires the normal in order to make its impact, destroys it." I can relate. Furthermore, this last week I kept thinking how we live in a Benjaminian state of emergency, except with the past collapsed into the present and *preemptively* appropriated by the powers in charge. Where is the room for radical discourse "without" if the internal schizophrenia makes its existance "within" an epistemological impossibility?
And by the way, has anybody else noticed that all TV anchors and news analysis presumably in possession of some advanced degrees, or at least Hooked on Phonics certificates of completion say "nucular" now? What is this? Indirect bias transmission? Infectious stupidity? Deferral to the lowest common denominator! Ayn Rand warned us about this.
Dear CNN, governemnt and y'all people who want to kill us. Thank you for alleviating my Valentine's Day angst. I know it must be hard for Bush and Cheney to be apart on this special day (shit, even CNN acknowledges that, they ran a caption about the Shrub and his Vice being separated reading "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do), but we all know that their bond is as strong and resilient as duct-tape, so no worries.