Why fight the power?

If there were only clearchannel, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have heard about Murat Kurnaz (as is the story has been pretty well buried since Sunday's Post. Maybe because of the big newsflash that Bush lied. Ok, either lied or was incompetent. Honestly, though, which is better? In either case, what is the sound of 48% of the electorate all saying "no duh" at once? But I digress...)

Murat's story is astonishing not because it happened under the military tribunal system, but that people involved continued to defend the tribunals for so long after Murat's hearing. Basically, he's been held at Guantanamo for three years even though the evidence is overwhelmingly in his favor. This did not become an issue for anybody until the materials were declassified. The implication of the story, then, is that, far from being capable of policing itself, the military-security apparatus is out of control. It's not that current policy could be abused or that innocent people could fall through the cracks. It is and they are. Read David Cole to throw more wood on this fire.

Murat's case shows that you don't have to be involved in anything terroristical to be legally treated as a terrorist. The situation of Dora Maria Tellez shows that you don't even have to have a Turkish or Arabic-sounding name. Being a revolutionary is all it takes for the state to step in and declare you persona non grata. If I were Harvard, and the state were telling me I couldn't invite Tellez to campus, I would be pretty worried about my lofty self-concept as a utopia of freely exchanged ideas. It sounds like even a bigger crisis than having an idiot president. So, when do we start deporting old contras, or stop hosting Haitian death-squad types on state visits?

All of this is putting me in a Bastille-storming mood. It's time, let's go! But first I have to prepare for my 11 oclock class. Meet you there.

Fight the power

Thank goodness for Rob Vining.

Clear Channel Sucks!

Stinky lives

Extrapolating on the robot story, in which undocumented Mexican high school kids out-engineer MIT experts:

I stumbled on the robot contest story right at the same time as I was reading a student's observations on the documentary Spellbound. Both of these stories are about contests that in some ways are quintessentially American (by being contests, for one thing, but also by being so American-dreamy), and it's telling that immigrants did so well. Lots of confirmation of Sara Mahler's point that cultural constructions of "america" and "immigrant" continue to be intricately and contradictorily (word?) bound up with each other.

The David-and-Goliath engineering angle on Stinky also reminds me of Secrets of Silicon Valley. Dealing with labor and the digital divide in high-tech world, this doc shows how insane this annual soap-box derby race gets when venture capitalists start sponsoring cars. The robot-building kids who beat MIT at their own game echoes how some kids from the "wrong" side of Palo Alto get into designing a car, but the robot story is even more Cool Runnings (who gets to be John Candy?)-- except they won!

The heartbreaker is at the end of the Wired story, when it becomes clear that being undocumented is going to stop these kids' education at high school. The author points out that for undocumented students, higher ed means no federal aid and out-of-state tuition no matter where you go, so at least $50,000 cash for a state school. It may seem like a stretch, but to me this leads directly back to the rumblings about an impending draft. The Stinky story is evidence that we already do have de facto conscription into the volunteer military.

Not that Stinky's builders mention this at all, but enlisting seems to me to be an obvious response to this kind of situation, and the only evident way for talented kids to pursue their passion for building and ideas. It's pretty clear that the need to replenish the military with warm bodies is a vulnerability of empire. Holding out carrots like the possibility of accelerated naturalization or legal residency and free or at least attainable education is what keeps recruiters in business. Anyone who would oppose a draft out of self-interest ought to be profoundly concerned about the plight of folks like Team Stinky.

sometimes life is just so hollywood

except the happy ending:

un corrido de stinky the robot

What does the empire require of us?

A successful demonstration in the provinces this weekend... Ok, call it a speak-out, followed by a vigil (one organized by anarchists and the other by "the faith community," so they had to be separated), whatever, it was at least a little version of what they call in Spanish a manifestacion. We had a couple of hundred folks out on the courthouse steps for a good couple hours. We heard from a WWII vet, a Muslim poet, those ubiquitous drumming kids who sew patches on the seams of their pants, bunches of others. I went home feeling cold but good, did my part, participated in the historical marking of 2 yrs since Gulf War II began (one day to be remembered as the second act, after Afghanistan, of the permanent war).

I think those of us manifesting out there felt good, even though some creep came and stole a bunch of brownies in order, as I heard him suggest to a friend later on, to teach the socialists a lesson. Were we heard? Maybe by folks driving by in the traffic circle around the square. Maybe not. Maybe as blips on a global picture of what our prez calls "focus groups" that met to protest and resist the war on that day. It's hard to be hopeful about the effects of a demonstration, though. Let alone a speak-out/vigil.

This has been a mulling point for a long time with me. I came to the conclusion once, after watching a documentary on nonviolent resistance to apartheid, that demos have value in sustaining those of us who would constitute a resistance. In the SA film, the point was that boycotts and other such actions that come off "successfully," but don't tangibly advance the larger cause nonetheless are important for creating a mobilized body politic. So maybe demos are mainly for the demonstrators, so we can feel like we're not alone, that there's some response to the war machine that has run amok.

But for what are we being sustained? To cope with disagreeing with out government? To be able to sleep while the world burns, because we've sterilized ourselves from Bushism by registering our protest? Where does the resistance go when the manifestation is over? That to me is the unanswered, persistent question facing us.

The traditional answers are all there: organize. Write. Call. March. But is anyone listening? Moreover, if they do (let's say, we get a letter read by a member of congress), are they in a position to do anything?

One thing that's so unsettling about these questions is the disconnect between conventional means of political action and the view of the world which I've acquired from social and cultural theory. Whether you read it in Marx, Gramsci, Foucault, or some other foreigner, the persistent theme is that society works on a much less individualist/voluntarist basis than we think. That we collectively "make our own history" (not under "conditions of our own choosing"), rather than being lead into it by the members of the state.

So my question, as I walk home and warm up from the sustaining demo, is what is it that we do on a daily basis that creates the possibility of empire? What micro-level actions, speech acts, gestures, and habits are required of us for empire to continue? The only hope I can find in a moment like now, in which the state seems immune from the will of the governed, is that the regime depends on some level of complicity from its subjects, and that the form this complicity takes has not been fully uncloaked.

What does the empire require of us? What do we do that constitutes us as imperial subjects? What subversive discrepancies are possible, beyond turning out to stand in public and voice opposition?

That's the question

Here's the opening salvo of an interview with Zizek I just surfed onto:

The contemporary political discourse, changed by events such as the altering of communist regular patterns, should be giving new meaning to the actual signifiers. What speech act is involved in this context?

ummm, could you repeat the question?

Lunchtime activity

Dear Editor:
I must disagree strongly with the editorial page’s celebration of Antonin Scalia. Far from being an ideal candidate for Chief Justice, Scalia periodically espouses views that are profoundly anti-American. A telling example is his reference to the gospel of Paul when writing on the death penalty in the journal First Things. Discussing the morality of government policies, Scalia suggests that government “derives its moral authority from God.”

This is in stark contrast to the founding ideas of our republic. The Declaration of Independence asserts that all people are endowed with rights by our “Creator,” which establishes them as “unalienable” human rights. Rights, however, are not government. Government is a human invention (“instituted among men”) used to secure rights. The authority to do so derives from the “consent of the governed,” an idea that is fundamental to Enlightenment democracy. To attribute government’s power to God is place it at a moral level above and beyond human beings. Scalia’s distortion places the moral authority of government above that of the governed, which is a position better suited to totalitarianism than democracy.

The Declaration is even clearer about the non-divinity of government in the next, rightly famous phrase: “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.” If government derived its authority from God, then this would be a call to abolish the authority of God. He can’t have it both ways-- either Scalia is misapplying the scripture or the Declaration is a blasphemy to Christians.

It is scandalous to hear someone discrediting the Declaration of Independence from the most powerful bench we have. If his views were to be enshrined and affirmed in a chief justiceship, it would be a disaster for the republic.

Sincerely,

Ben Chappell
Harrisonburg

back and grimmer than ever

A long hiatus-- call it a new semester, a quick spring break, overwhelm on all sides. I finally got a look at a recent New Yorker, and Hertzberg, in his brilliance, got me in the mood again to spout.

What my imaginary friend HH , the man who is 1/2 of 25% Calvin's namesake, has to say supports a running theme in this log: things are looking bleak for the republic.

Consider his breakdown of the Senate:

55 Republicans
44 Democrats

Take each senator to represent 1/2 of his/her state. That means the parties represent:

Republican: 131 million people
Democrats: 161 million people

More specifically, consider that the last 3 elections since 2000 put them there. How many voted for each party in senate races?

Republican: 97.3 million
Democrat: 99.7 million

As Hendrik puts it, "unless acres trump people," this is not democracy.

The piece is a discussion on the filibuster and judicial appointments. In another sobering shot, content of which of course we all knew, but HH draws our attention to it just right, he reminds us that Scalia, Bush's choice for exemplary supreme ct judgemental, takes it as fact that gov't derives its power from God. I prescribe mandatory viewing of the constitutional peasant scene in The Holy Grail ("supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses..."), preferably a la A Clockwork Orange reprogramming scene.

This is the necessary salt with which to take all Repub. references to the "elite" who have coopted the nation, not to mention silly talk of "political capital," etc.