(no subject)
Nov. 5th, 2004 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernistI need to stop talking/writing about the election for a little while, but it's like vomit or diarrhea, I just can't. I was just writing a response to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saintpeg about how the Republican voters, regardless of whether they were in the majority or not (see previous post), proved themselves incapable of voting "their interest," instead opting to turn the elections into a referendum on Morality. This really made me understand that I was wrong, that it's not about fear of terrorism, or blind patriotism; those things are just axis around which bigotry and Christian Zealotry are invited to orbit.
I kept thinking, with my commitment to education and independent meida, that it's only a matter of time, that the people on Bush's side haven't seen the light YET. I was wrong. There will be no fiat lux moment, that is the power of totalizing systems. The incompetence of the Bush administration is not the issue, and their supporters aren't stumbling in from the dark. The fuckups or mistakes or even blatant lies (in the old definition of lying, when assertions contradict reality) do not matter. Morality matters, and that will determine politics for the foreseeable future, whether the electoral process is honest or corrupt. That does not matter, because once they win, fairly or unfairly, they have the fundamentalist Tautology on their side: they are chosen by God. The Democrats can babble on about policy crises, about the economy, even about the civilian deaths and moral bancrupcy of the war in Iraq and the result is kind of like when the Yankee tried to explain inflation to a medieval farmer in Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. Reality is irrelevant compared to rhetoric, and it's no longer metaphor or a hyperbole, not since Suskind brought us the new era of identity politics in Without A Doubt. I guess you can only fight fire with fire. The next campaign won by the Democrats can only be dirty, and only if Democrats essentially become Republicans, in the transformative abyss way. There are already echoes of that (albeit defensive) with people accusing Gavin Newson of contributing to Kerry's loss, like why did he have to open the jar of gay marriage worms during the campaign season. The US will only be saved by the Republican Party splitting into two, and by the Democracts shifting so far right that they will make the "mainstream liberal" party affiliation as meaningless as the neocons made the traditional Republican platform. Sounds perverted, right? But that was another big epiphany of this week for me. America perverts everything. Everything that results in positive agendas or at least ideologies in the rest of the world--a tradition of immigration, ethical basis for legislature, high standard of living--is perverted into something monstrous in America. Perhaps that is what happens when you live within Reification, it's like falling down the rabbit hole or stepping through the looking glass.
'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on` And how do you know that you're mad?'
`To begin with,' said the Cat, `a dog's not mad. You grant that?'
`I suppose so,' said Alice.
`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'
Moving on.
When I said I was taking off the other day, I meant to go to the coast, to lie in the Esmeraldas sun for a few days. Sun, like vodka, makes me stupid, and very occasionally I seek it out. But I fell sick. I don't know if I am somehow psychosomatically embodying the shock of the Stolen Election, or if the mountain bike trip is to blame, but I was so out of sorts on Wednesday that it wasn't until late in the evening, when I looked out of my bathroom window, saw a giant, neon, glowing Rubic's Cube against the horizon, and couldn't tell whether it was real (apparently it is) that I realized I was running a fever. Probably due to my Soviet education, which taught me to think dialectically about folk proverbs like "a healthy body houses a healthy spirit," I have a Nietzschean/Puritan/Thomas Mann gestalt approach to what ails me. Burning up despite the descent of the freezing mountain night, I decided that a six-hour hike through the subterranean rainforest (home of the twotoedsloth, nota benetwotoedsloth) the next day would simply do *wonders* for me. At six in the morning I was awake, and at 8 in the morning I was in the rainforest. For the first hour or so I thought I was going to die, and then some evolutionary survival mechanism kicked it, and I felt awesome. I also had an epiphany that I would probably make a pretty terrible psychiatrist, because I would cure hiccups with gunshots and depression with insulin shock therapy. By the time I got back to Quito, muttering "I was right, rest only encourages illness," my fever was back. Superstructure-zero, Base-one.
So, um, yeah, today I feel like crap. Excitingly, I also have symptoms of both cold and flu (I checked the Diagnose Yourself worksheet on the interweb), and I had a good time at the phramacy explaining to the man behind the counter that I wasn't sure whether I have El Cotarro or La Influenza, but since I was pronouncing all "n"s as "d"s he kept shoving a decongestant at me.
I suppose the moral of the story, should you want one, is, when you have a fever, don't go on a jungle hike, especially when your judgement is extra-clouded because you are mad with grief.
I took some cool pictures, though.
A colibri bird (hummingbird)
flowers especially adapted for the colibri beaks
bug on a leaf
Dragon's blood tree; the trunk is carved up with a machete to get the red liquid the tree produces when cut; the liquid has healing properties
When a dragon blood leaf falls, it looks like this
purple-stemmed berries
when a fern leaf disintegrates, it starts looking like gauze
Fibonacci Spiral in Action 1
Fibonacci Spiral in Action 2
I tried to take a picture through the binoculars of a toucan in the trees, but only this came out. It's kind of cool, though, like an eclipse in reverse
blah blah me
saintpeg about how the Republican voters, regardless of whether they were in the majority or not (see previous post), proved themselves incapable of voting "their interest," instead opting to turn the elections into a referendum on Morality. This really made me understand that I was wrong, that it's not about fear of terrorism, or blind patriotism; those things are just axis around which bigotry and Christian Zealotry are invited to orbit. I kept thinking, with my commitment to education and independent meida, that it's only a matter of time, that the people on Bush's side haven't seen the light YET. I was wrong. There will be no fiat lux moment, that is the power of totalizing systems. The incompetence of the Bush administration is not the issue, and their supporters aren't stumbling in from the dark. The fuckups or mistakes or even blatant lies (in the old definition of lying, when assertions contradict reality) do not matter. Morality matters, and that will determine politics for the foreseeable future, whether the electoral process is honest or corrupt. That does not matter, because once they win, fairly or unfairly, they have the fundamentalist Tautology on their side: they are chosen by God. The Democrats can babble on about policy crises, about the economy, even about the civilian deaths and moral bancrupcy of the war in Iraq and the result is kind of like when the Yankee tried to explain inflation to a medieval farmer in Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. Reality is irrelevant compared to rhetoric, and it's no longer metaphor or a hyperbole, not since Suskind brought us the new era of identity politics in Without A Doubt. I guess you can only fight fire with fire. The next campaign won by the Democrats can only be dirty, and only if Democrats essentially become Republicans, in the transformative abyss way. There are already echoes of that (albeit defensive) with people accusing Gavin Newson of contributing to Kerry's loss, like why did he have to open the jar of gay marriage worms during the campaign season. The US will only be saved by the Republican Party splitting into two, and by the Democracts shifting so far right that they will make the "mainstream liberal" party affiliation as meaningless as the neocons made the traditional Republican platform. Sounds perverted, right? But that was another big epiphany of this week for me. America perverts everything. Everything that results in positive agendas or at least ideologies in the rest of the world--a tradition of immigration, ethical basis for legislature, high standard of living--is perverted into something monstrous in America. Perhaps that is what happens when you live within Reification, it's like falling down the rabbit hole or stepping through the looking glass.
'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
`Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
`How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
`You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on` And how do you know that you're mad?'
`To begin with,' said the Cat, `a dog's not mad. You grant that?'
`I suppose so,' said Alice.
`Well, then,' the Cat went on, `you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'
Moving on.
When I said I was taking off the other day, I meant to go to the coast, to lie in the Esmeraldas sun for a few days. Sun, like vodka, makes me stupid, and very occasionally I seek it out. But I fell sick. I don't know if I am somehow psychosomatically embodying the shock of the Stolen Election, or if the mountain bike trip is to blame, but I was so out of sorts on Wednesday that it wasn't until late in the evening, when I looked out of my bathroom window, saw a giant, neon, glowing Rubic's Cube against the horizon, and couldn't tell whether it was real (apparently it is) that I realized I was running a fever. Probably due to my Soviet education, which taught me to think dialectically about folk proverbs like "a healthy body houses a healthy spirit," I have a Nietzschean/Puritan/Thomas Mann gestalt approach to what ails me. Burning up despite the descent of the freezing mountain night, I decided that a six-hour hike through the subterranean rainforest (home of the twotoedsloth, nota bene
twotoedsloth) the next day would simply do *wonders* for me. At six in the morning I was awake, and at 8 in the morning I was in the rainforest. For the first hour or so I thought I was going to die, and then some evolutionary survival mechanism kicked it, and I felt awesome. I also had an epiphany that I would probably make a pretty terrible psychiatrist, because I would cure hiccups with gunshots and depression with insulin shock therapy. By the time I got back to Quito, muttering "I was right, rest only encourages illness," my fever was back. Superstructure-zero, Base-one.So, um, yeah, today I feel like crap. Excitingly, I also have symptoms of both cold and flu (I checked the Diagnose Yourself worksheet on the interweb), and I had a good time at the phramacy explaining to the man behind the counter that I wasn't sure whether I have El Cotarro or La Influenza, but since I was pronouncing all "n"s as "d"s he kept shoving a decongestant at me.
I suppose the moral of the story, should you want one, is, when you have a fever, don't go on a jungle hike, especially when your judgement is extra-clouded because you are mad with grief.
I took some cool pictures, though.
A colibri bird (hummingbird)
flowers especially adapted for the colibri beaks
bug on a leaf
Dragon's blood tree; the trunk is carved up with a machete to get the red liquid the tree produces when cut; the liquid has healing properties
When a dragon blood leaf falls, it looks like this
purple-stemmed berries
when a fern leaf disintegrates, it starts looking like gauze
Fibonacci Spiral in Action 1
Fibonacci Spiral in Action 2
I tried to take a picture through the binoculars of a toucan in the trees, but only this came out. It's kind of cool, though, like an eclipse in reverse
blah blah me
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 12:47 pm (UTC)There's a fairly interesting discussion of the problem of appeals to moral v. material interests in winning elections over at
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 01:03 pm (UTC)It was Bush's use of the word "crusade" that set off the red flag for me. Scary stuff.
I hope you feel better. Sorry for the drama. Oh, and very cool pics!
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 02:49 pm (UTC)I appreciate A.'s protectiveness and love her dearly for it (and it was probably partially prompted by the fact that she and I are friends in real life), and I don't think it was directed against you in particular.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 03:14 pm (UTC)I was afraid the NYT article wouldn't have the article, but I guess they keep the magazine articles online longer.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 02:32 pm (UTC)campaign: pomo*
election: pre-mo
i am so sad/devestated/scared. there are so many issues out there to take up in the next four years (judges, war, voter reform, lies and the lying liars who tell them, polarization, third parties, etc.) i don't know where to start.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 02:47 pm (UTC)I don't know where to start either, and yet my logorrhea on the subject does not seem to subside. George Bush will make you feel insane like that.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 02:51 pm (UTC)*depends on who you're asking. i'm putting it down as pomo in general because it was clear to me that there were so many different perspectives on what the truth what, so many critiques of everything. this is distinct form the which party is rooted in modernist thought, which in pomo thought.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 02:40 pm (UTC)anyway, if you come back, you might find it a very different place. i know i'm probably just externalizing my own feelings, but things seem very off. i mean, even though the erection results were wrong, the numbers were still way too close. too many people voted for him. and too many people seem to have just "accepted" the results afterwards. i can feel the change in the wind. "stepford right up, folks! baptism line starts right here!"
i say "if" you come back because i'd hardly be surprised if the new "no-fly" list includes liberals and anyone else who's spoken out against this administration. "heh heh. don't let 'em back in!!" although at the same time, this confuses me. there's a waiting period over a year long, as well as, like, a $500 application fee and all to emigrate to canada (citizenship through marriage not included, i believe). why? why not let everyone who wants out, out? i mean, less people to question authority. lesser chances of having the truth exposed. more land for the sheep.
i want some of what lewis carroll was taking...
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 02:46 pm (UTC)Dammit, don't even joke like that. Whatever I decide to do in the future (stay or immigrate) I just had a vision of being stuck in the Quito airport. They will probably just fingerprint me, is all. I may look Ambiguously Ethnic (TM) but not, like, Brown.
there's a waiting period over a year long, as well as, like, a $500 application fee and all to emigrate to canada
I am assuming that's from the Canadian side of things. They probably don't want a tsunami of refugees feeling the shallow end of the genetic pool.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 02:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 06:07 pm (UTC)More than anything the language of his speeches is what really appeals to me.
The speeches I've read and the snippets I've heard are astonishing: they're based in language that elevates people to the possibilites of nations, rather than appealing to their fears...which is nice. Haven't heard much of that in the last three years.
There's some powerful language in the founding documents of the US (up here we just have sterile memos documenting a polite secession) that stems from philosophical and theological thought, as well as political (not to mention war). Outside of "The West Wing" one rarely hears that style of rhetoric anymore, and I guess it's not seen as politically advantageous in the mouths of the inept (Bush) or the potentially pedantic (Kerry, Gore). But coming from the right mouth it's very inspiring.
...I guess this "race" pretty much allowed him to showboat and strut (I haven't read/heard anything from his debates with Keyes; it'd be interesting to hear how he fares blow-for-blow on specific issues) without fear of losing, so maybe we'll see more concessions or the dumbing down of the rhetoric as his career advances, but for the moment I'm happy to give him the nod for '08.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 11:14 pm (UTC)Heh. Batman vs. the Joker, perhaps.
Washingtonian liberals (er, like those in Seattle, not those in DC -- can't speak for the latter) are indeed fetishizing him and talking wistfully about the possibility of a 2008 run for President.
Marvellous photos
Date: 2004-11-05 04:41 pm (UTC)Re: Marvellous photos
Date: 2004-11-05 04:49 pm (UTC)“Democracy” means that whatever electoral manipulation takes place all politicians will unconditionally respect the results.
This is why I feel like I am living a recurring version of The Onion's Point/Counterpoint with (my)Point being The Election Was Stolen and (your standard progressive's) seizure-causing counterpoint being We need to get over this and figure out how to attract more voters in 2008
How did you find my journal, just out of curiosity?
And is that V.I. on your icon? Oy, that does not help my headache.
Re: Marvellous photos
Date: 2004-11-05 05:10 pm (UTC)I'm also vaguely connected to you through the hidden internationale that is the globalisation movement - I'm involved in my local Indymedia collective.
That is Ulyanov, I'm afraid - I used to use a picure of Trotsky because I rather disturbingly look a bit like him. But I learnt from Žižek that the image of Lenin is a cooler way to epater les bourgeois.
Re: Marvellous photos
Date: 2004-11-06 09:08 am (UTC)Which indymedia are you with? One of the ones that got the servers impounded? Actually you may find a lot of ranting about indymedia from me. I work with them because I have to, but have major problems with the the organization (as it is run, not what it tries to do/does).
The closest I ever came to writing about James Bond was here, I don't know if this was before you started reading my journal
http://www.livejournal.com/users/anthrochica/61896.html
But it's not postcolonial anyway. It's an un-50s critique.
speaking of oy
Date: 2004-11-05 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 07:39 pm (UTC)You didn't get that from Left Behind? Although, the good news is that I've figured out that Bush is, in fact, the anti-Christ. Ask yourself... who's renovating Babylon? Hmmm?
But also, look... on the one hand, a lot of the country falls into that weird paradigm and, the fact is, we have nothing to offer them. Can you offer them moral certainty? Can you offer them immortality? No... but I think the question of why that particular fantasy is thriving now, in particular, is a good one. God knows I won't be the one to do the fieldwork though. Also, as someone pointed out in your last post, um... if the exit polls showing a Kerry win were "wrong," why take the ones on "morality" seriously.
I decided that a six-hour hike through the subterranean rainforest (home of the twotoedsloth,
Aw... home. Didja tell the cousins I said hi?
I think it was the exposure to the dragon's blood that cured you. Waitaminute... is that a ceiba? That's a ceiba, isn't it. Um... ceibas are... let's just say I really really like ceibas, but the scare the hell out of me. But in a good way. That's the cosmic tree of the world, you know. And I am not crazy (although I think I was a little bit when I saw the ceibas.)
Okay, I'll stop being cryptic. I'm moved from depression and rage to temporary numbness and denial.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 07:37 am (UTC)Yes, Bush as Antichrist. I enjoy that interpretation. As I just opened my email I got spam that said "meet Christian singles in your area." Yesterday I got one that said "Settle your debt the Christian Way."
Also I am reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Talents at the moment and a scary Jesus fundie just got elected in 2032...I am scared!
Uh, also I spent a schitzophrenic hour last night trying to figure out what the fuck is Nader doing in NH, and whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. Any ideas?
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 08:15 am (UTC)I have to say, I was a little disappointed with Parable of the Talents. I would avoid rereading A Handsmaid's Tale just now if I were you (unless you're feeling really masochistic... although that does start with a coup rather than an election).I can, however, think of few more frightening phrases than "Settle Your Debts the Christian Way."
So... oh person whose eyes begin to bleed at the sight of Lenin... what DO we do now that all the good utopian visions have been either discredited or appropriated by some other side?
no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 08:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-05 08:13 pm (UTC)I'm re-posting my post, so you can all now riposte
Date: 2004-11-06 04:44 pm (UTC)About pushing for recounts as the next strategic move
I wrote this in response to a discussion in [info]anthrochica's journal about the importance of supporting recount efforts. I decided to post it here because it contains a little too much personal history for me to feel okay about it as a public post.
I think that this is a battle worth fighting, regardless of how it "looks" (immature, sour grapes, etc.) because there are real, concrete reasons to suspect electoral fraud. Even if the investigation led to nothing, it would assert the vital importance of taking voting seriously. And I do prefer voting to the alternative, which is shooting and blowing things up, and usually leads to suffering (as opposed to voting, which only sometimes leads to suffering).
To "let it go" and start organizing for 2008 seems to me a culturally specific and very destructive form of denial.
You know what this reminds me of? The reason I went back to grad school (other than having simply run out of other ideas).
At the time, I was working on the DOH AIDS Hotline, and most of what we did was give people pre-test counseling. Every so often the DOH would give us an in-service training on cross cultural issues in HIV/AIDS counseling. First of all, it kind of bugged me because it was a fantastic exercise in reification. Whatever "culture" we were dealing with (and cultures tended to be attributed to whole continents), cultural difference always boiled down to two features: 1) Unlike Americans, people of culture X are reluctant to discuss their sexual practices with strangers and 2) Unlike Americans, people of culture X value premarital virginity (at least for females). Except, of course, for Latins who had machismo. (And African-Americans, but that was different... mother centric, etc.).
So... culture was generally understood as a variable that functioned as a barrier to HIV/AIDS counseling for people who weren't white Anglos. White anglos, on the other hand, might have psychological barriers. There was never any recognition that white anglos had culture, and therefore cultural barriers.
Okay... well... here's the thing, and this is why it has anything to do with the election. Frequently, when I talked about condom use with women who had Spanish accents or self-identified as Latina, they would tell me that yes, they understood that there was a risk and yes, they understood that their partners might be cheating on them, but it would be difficult to make their partners use condoms if they didn't want to. Self-identified white Anglo women, however, were sure that, if they asked their partners to use condoms, they would. But they weren't going to ask, even though they thought that their partners might be cheating on them. Why? Because if they asked, it would imply that they didn't trust their partners, and it would be insulting to their partners to imply that they didn't trust them even though they didn't. Better to risk death than to offend someone by implying that you don't trust them with your life.
And that is, in my opinion, the cultural logic behind the "let's move on to 2008" discourse. Because we're Americans, dammit. If we admit that we are being cheated, then we will have to face up to the fact of our own powerlessness in the face of this coup. Better to be polite and wait our turn than to admit that we are being put in grave danger by people that we know are unworthy of our trust.
(And I went back to school because the experience got me interested in thinking about culture again, but by the time I started fieldwork I had decided that AIDS was too depressing, and I didn't want to be a burntiout heroic do-gooder. I just don't swing that way)
Re: I'm re-posting my post, so you can all now riposte
Date: 2004-11-08 03:13 am (UTC)Re: I'm re-posting my post, so you can all now riposte
Date: 2004-11-08 02:44 pm (UTC)So where are you?
Re: I'm re-posting my post, so you can all now riposte
Date: 2004-11-09 12:32 am (UTC)Re: I'm re-posting my post, so you can all now riposte
Date: 2004-11-09 07:49 am (UTC)Re: I'm re-posting my post, so you can all now riposte
Date: 2004-11-10 12:10 am (UTC)REASSURANCE!
Date: 2004-11-09 07:19 pm (UTC)Re: REASSURANCE!
Date: 2004-11-10 11:46 am (UTC)