how de certeau of me, how bartleby of me

[lapsedmodernist]

This may be small, this may be petty, but I want to tell you:

In the last 8 years, not once, not a single time did I refer to that monstrosity in the White House as "President Bush." This is including conference papers, teaching, and professional correspondence which consisted of me requesting various archival footage of media appearances of him. For the first year I bitterly said "Governor Bush" (and President Gore), from then on I used "Bush, Jr." when I had to signify him specifically. People thought it was weird, and childish, even my friends who fucking hate George Bush as much as I do made fun of me.

not. a. single. time. Not even in my dreams/nightmares.

And small as that is, I am proud of it and it makes me happy. It's like on the level of language (and oh, how powerful language is) I never let myself be hailed (in the Althusserian sense of the word) into this HEGEMONY, because this is what the last 8 years was. And the hegemony, like any good hegemony, even encompassed the dissent--"I think Bush is a terrible president" or "I don't agree with President Bush on foreign policy"--but that's legitimation, too, it's using language prescribed by winners hijackers of History or thiefs of Presidential elections. I don't know--for me it was so important to always maintain some kind of resistance, if only discursive, to the hegemony of the BushMatrix reality. If my semiotics were all I had, at least I had that, the whole time.


He was never my president. He wasn't yours, either.

Comments

[nunofthat.livejournal.com]

I believe it matters, and am impressed with your tenacity, and grateful for all the ways we resist.

He was never my president. He wasn't yours, either.

Amen.

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

I supposed it would depend on how one identifies with the nation-state. The reality of it was that the government did come under his control as chief executive, and that had material consequences.

It's almost like calling a recognized King who has the military support of the nobles' feudal armies, a pretender to the throne.

Bush, and the hegemony he represented, did have the political power. The large protests against his worst excesses appeared to be impotent.

You can disavow, as an individual, that you in anyway support his hegemony. You can claim that he has no right to command you. You can make the argument this you do not recognize his authority.

That doesn't make him "not president". It means that you have decided for whatever reason, that you do not concede that he is (or should be) chief executive of the state; when the state does recognize it. In effect, you must deny the authority of the state, because you deny it's acknowledge chief executive. Your position is sedition.

I agree with the sentiment.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Is my position sedition, or is it uber-orthodoxy? The way he was installed in the White House violated the very tenets of electoral process, separation of branches, etc. etc. The whole thing made the term "president elect" a retronym, in a sense.

semantics of sedition

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

It's sedition, regardless of the argument you use.

It can be sedition for a restoration of how the legitimate (by your definition) holder of the chief executive; but it's still sedition.

If you refuse to acknowledge the authority of a chief executive who comes to power through a coup, it's still sedition.

The process that the individual came to control the state doesn't matter, as long as they control the state. Bush did. If you defy that authority, then it's sedition.

Though, we are talking about the United States here, which has spent the majority of it's existence disenfranchising the majority of populace.

The idea that the United States is some bastion of democracy is laughable. Maybe less so tomorrow, than it was yesterday... but constitutionally it is not a popular democracy so much as a oligarchic republic.

You can claim that Bush came to power was an affront to the Constitution, but the Supreme Court disagrees, and Constitutionally... they are the ones who get to decide that; not you.

You can't both claim to support the United States government as an institution, while ignoring how the United States government is actually organized.

Refusing to acknowledge the authority of the United States government recognized President over you, is sedition. Particularly when you express that position in public.

I agree with you on it, I just think you shouldn't shy away from calling it what it is. It is a very weak government that fears a few people expressing seditious thoughts.

Re: semantics of sedition

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I have no problem with sedition, but rhetorically something else is more important to me--making a case that the Bush rule was not legitimate even by the norm of what was electoral politics before Bush. The Supreme Court by its intervention invalidated its function in terms of checks and balances. As flimsy as the two-party democracy was pre-2000, there was a distinct rupture in 2000, not just an amplification of preexisting tendencies towards oligarchy.

[yourfaults.livejournal.com]

Neither have I. Never.

I said in 2000 that I would never get over the election and I would never acknowledge Bush as the president. And I never have. He is not the President of the United States.

I've always said that he would be the worst president in American history if I acknowledged that he had any claim to the title. But he doesn't. You become president by winning an election, not staging a coup d'état.

I'm glad to know you were with me.

[londontheory.livejournal.com]

LOVES IT.

[rivertumbled.livejournal.com]

yes.

[downward--dog.livejournal.com]

Same here, even in published articles and papers.

BTW, your Palast article is depressing the hell out of me. I don't even want to imagine what will happen if the Republicans steal this election too. I'm just praying for a landslide big enough to counteract the fraud and disenfranchisement.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

I understand and largely agree with you. But there is a problem - which is that despite the fact that those of us on the left fringe of American politics are "right", and those at the rightist fringe are *far* past wrong, that they have the same belief about our people. They will not endorse nor even believe an Obama presidency. Conspiracy theorists will continue to produce "evidence" that he wasn't really born here, or that a fairly minor organization (ACORN) managed to steal a nationwide election. Essentially, insofar as you have this sort of belief, you are the sort of people who Obama has to pretend he doesn't know when he's running a national election. And McCain has an ugly counterpart of radical rightists who have beliefs we'd find alien and insane.

This is the reason I cling to the mainstream so tenaciously while retaining fairly radical opinions. I honestly feel it's important to be able to occasionally say "John McCain is not an evil son of a bitch", not just to convince the "THEM" that might be watching, but because I think there's a catharsis in recognizing that there are virtues in people that might actually buy this crap about "real America" - and might think it's important to own a gun or remove the estate tax. I don't instinctively agree with them, but neither do I believe that most of the people that follow the Republicans are a) evil or b) borderline retarded.

I'm not saying you do. But the fact that it's taken the Democratic party - far to the right of most country's *conservative* parties - so long to establish a modicum of sanity in our political dialogue - well, I don't think it's entirely the fault of the American people's foolishness, and I don't think it's entirely the fault of a corporate-dominated media. We have a complex country here, and the reason the bad guys win so often is because they have tapped into sentiments that matter to people (in between mastering media doublespeak).

I guess what I'm saying is that just because I argue with you and sound like some sort of grumpy centrist, doesn't mean that there's not a substantial part of me that feels as you do about this. But I feel like there's also a value in accepting legal reality as reality - after all, despite whatever interpretation one might have about the Bush elections, he was the reigning chief executive of our nation, and that status will not be officially revoked later. Historians a hundred years from now may debate whether he was our worst president, but they will not debate whether he was our president.

you missed my point

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Historians a hundred years from now may debate whether he was our worst president, but they will not debate whether he was our president.

yes, and that is the whole thing about hegemony, history being written by "winners" etc. I am not interested in legitimating hegemony, which is what your entire argument is predicated on. Hegemony is always acommodating, "reasonable" and "naturalizing"--by definition.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

I guess I see what you're saying. I guess I'm just saying that there's a value (to me) in accommodating the center, when what they want doesn't seem unreasonable to me. I think I can guess what you think of that - heh. I'm just more interested in struggling to move the center than in keeping my ideological purity, if that makes sense to you.

At any rate we can certainly both agree that we're happy that we will be done with that smirking scumbag in a few months.

BTW, your thoughts are always interesting; always smart. Glad to have the chance to read them. I don't remember what inspired us to friend each other, but I am glad of it, and hope you don't often consider ditching me...

[flintultrasparc.livejournal.com]

This government was founded by a combination of religious fanatics and slavers.

In terms of history, I suppose we've come pretty far.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

True, but some of those religious fanatics were also fanatic abolitionists (as well as my ancestors). And some of those slavers were also brilliant statesmen. Doesn't excuse them being nutballs and assholes, but it's hard to deny that they managed to create a country which, regardless of its faults, has mostly given people (at least, the culturally accepted class defined as "people") the right to free speech and the right to assemble - and has passed on a semblance of democratic rule for over two hundred years. I could stand on a street corner with a sign saying "The President Is Evil", and not get arrested. If we didn't have something precious to lose, we wouldn't be so mad at people like Bush who try to take it away.

And good lord, look at what we just did. Is there some other country out there doing this? You see England electing Pakis PM? France electing Algerians? I think after decades of self-criticism, even American leftists can have a moment to be proud. And even, say, criticize the Dutch or the Germans for their intolerance of Muslims.

Not saying America is an unstained banner of gleaming silver. But it isn't simply a tattered bloody rag, either.

[msmsgirl.livejournal.com]

Just the other day I was feeling a similar kind of pride about this, too! I called him "Bush" or "Bush 2," "George W. Bush" when being especially precise, and "Dubya" or worse in causal contexts. I don't see having this feeling as a problematic denial of the material realities of his disastrous presidency, actually - for me they coexist; in fact, my pride at my discursive resistance to legitimizing his regime is based in the fact that so much of what he did in office was and is patently illegal, according to the Constitution, for the President to do. The presidency of the U.S. is not, ideally, supposed to be hegemonic - calling the president of the U.S. "President ____" is not supposed to imply assent to a matrix-reality of crime, atrocity, and lies. I think I actually make a tinier distinction linguistically than you - I will say in conversation that Bush has been the president, but I have never, ever, not once, called him "President Bush" (I can barely type it!). To me, he has ruled the country for 8 years as its head of state, but that doesn't mean I think he should be referenced with the honorific of that office, which AS Althusserian discursive apparatus serves the SOLE function of hailing citizens into the state apparatus OF that office, which SHOULD NOT BE what it has been under him.

I was having these thoughts the other day, actually, because I was thinking in terms of how weird it potentially might be (GOD WILLING!!) to start feeling respect, admiration, and civic investment in the office of the presidency again, for the things it can do to set a national discourse and a national agenda. I was imagining how the ISA that is the American presidency could be inhabited in such a Constitutionally sound and valid way that I would let myself be hailed into it, by using terms like "President __," "Mr. President," and "the President"... I was thinking, if this happens I will be very out of practice.

But actually, relatedly, I have also recently had a brief moment of shock and shame at myself, because in some probably-unavoidable way, as a result of all my thinking all these hopeful thoughts about the presidency and how the discourse of it could change, I have caught myself slipping -- albeit only in my speed-of-thought, barely-verbal private thoughts, and only for ever-so-brief instances -- in my refusal to be hailed into acknowledging Bush as the president! I have caught myself having these thoughts like "a President Obama would be so much better in terms of Y than the current president," or would do X so much better than the current president, etc. etc. (of course they were more specific than this, but along this vein of comparing Presidencies). And I have been so taken aback with what I just 'heard' flashing through my own head, as having thoughts like that about the presidency anywhere NEAR the vicinity of thoughts about Bush has been UNHEARD OF in my head for the past 8 years! I feel a flash of shame and involuntary revulsion at myself every time it happens!

More of these sorts of mindfucks to come, hopefully! I'm in NEVADA, getting up at 5 to flier precincts! :)

the illegitimate tory party

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

This may be small, this may be petty,

actually, it is American of you. we have chosen to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. the people are the majority. when a minority seizes power, they are illegitimate, un-Constitutional, and un-American.


the minority does not want the majority to rule the country: (http://firedoglake.com/2008/10/12/republican-operative-i-dont-want-everyone-to-vote/)


Paul Weyrich, one of the acknowledged architects of the right wing ascendancy, said bluntly (in the video above), "I don't want everybody to vote...our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."


the modern repub party has no connection to the parties of lincoln or theodore roosevelt. properly labeled, it should be called the Tory Party -- the party of the privileged, class-based minority.

Re: the illegitimate tory party

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

It *is* telling that generally Republicans are disappointed when the voting population goes up - and that they've stymied efforts to properly count the population because they feel that would hurt their party.

Re: the illegitimate tory party

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

and yet the repub propagandists went out after the election to claim that the u.s. population is "center-right" in its viewpoints.

so, they play this game (jedi mind trick) where they say "you agree with us repubs" to attempt to influence the weak minded, and, because they know that what they are saying is false (that they are the majority), they then do whatever they can (voter suppression, hacking into vote tabulators) to ensure that they obtain and keep power.

[orpheusinhades.livejournal.com]

Well, it IS sort of center-right, if you take the standards of Europe. But if you take the standards actually applied in America, they are out to lunch. What they do is take the actual "center-right"ness and imply that it means the Republican party is at the center of American politics - which it just ISn't.

[mjmj.livejournal.com]

agreed, relative to europe.

however, there have been numerous polling results on various questions over the past few years that could make the case that the country is more liberal than right-wing (the term "conservative" has been completely debased). of course, this reality is anathema to the corporate media, who are definitively "center-right".

on the other hand, the politicians in office are still more right-wing ("center-right") than the population. and obama is among that "center-right" group. some say that he was a stealth candidate who hid his DLC nature through vagueness; others say that it was clear if you took his statements literally instead of as code or political speak that he used to get elected.

sorry for the late reply.