Rarely can I manage even a cursory visit to this, our lovely digital klatch, and whenever I do dip in, I'm reminded of how much I miss by my absence. Which is to say, we are awash of late; wet with beauty. Which is to say: You would be exceptionally well served by a visit to angiereedgarner, whose recent watercolor series is, to rather wildly court understatement, vibrant and arresting.

For those of you more verbally inclined than visual - or you ontological hedonists who thrive on both - wicked_sassy brought National Poetry Month to pellucid life with an artfully-chosen assemblage of linguistic portraiture.

Because this is a lay space (and we therefore do not share common epistemological grounds), a caveat to ward off the inevitable messages from passerby that I'm 'advocating suicide' or somesuch: I am, of course, not. This is a very specific kind of discussion of a very specific kind of suicide - those that are public gestures of political protest - and it is one I neither condemn nor encourage.

Sinthomic bodies

Grace Brown photographs sexual assault survivors holding posters on which they have written the words spoken to them by their rapists. Images generally abet us to consume them. These ask us to do something quite different from that. Something simple, perhaps, but simple does not necessarily mean easy.


( Be still. Be present. Sit with the image. And try to do what it is asking you to do. )

The enduring possibility of justice inheres chiefly in one site, one habitus, the very body - if we dare so term it - of the political qua political: Freundschaft.



( Good-bye, my friend. Our friend. )

As you may know, Brandon McInerney's case ended today in mistrial.

As you may know, the jury split on the charge, with 7 insisting on "voluntary manslaughter" and only 5 holding out for murder.


As you may know, the juridical definition of voluntary manslaughter is the unlawful taking of a human life in which the offender has no prior intent to kill and acts during the heat of passion or under extreme provocation.

As you may know, on 12 February, 2008 Brandon walked up to his openly queer 15 year old classmate Lawrence Fobes, who was typing an English paper, put a .22 caliber handgun to his head, and pulled the trigger. After Larry dropped to the floor, Brandon stood over him and shot him again.

As you may know, procurement of a firearm is intent.

As you may know, placing it against the soft hair of a child's head and pulling the trigger is intent to kill.

As you may know, merely being Queer cannot possibly meet the definition of "extreme provocation" under the law.


Except, apparently, that it can.


As you may know, a judiciary that allows homophobia to be a legal defense is a weapon as deadly as a gun.

The movements and thinkers grouped together under the general rubric "poststructuralism" are more diverse and, often, more at odds, than that lazy taxonomy would suggest, but what they all have in common in some way is the awareness that the fundamental gesture of hegemony is deceit.

I am going to keep this very straightforward and simply say that the truth regimes that are constantly in play to aggressively suture over the reality behind those narratives - which are born from and perpetually reify the power, and thereby, presumptive "rightness" of, the dominant class or culture - are present everywhere and at every moment. In every word, every breath, every gesture. Here, in four minutes and twenty four seconds, you will see them painfully clearly.

Whatever the particular location or geopolitical specifics of 'emergences' in the social fabric, the response of the status quo is invariably the same: To disavow, to decouple, to portray this category of event as anomalous and, above all, in no way related to prevailing conditions. Anyone who is angry must simply be a mad dog; unrest must be portrayed as irrational, and as arising out of a vacuum - nothing to do with ceaseless oppression, racism, colonization, &tc.

Darcus Howe begins to deliver important truths, and that truth triggers the reflexive response of white, bourgeois England, embodied here in the news anchor. After she fails in her really rather shockingly overt and clumsy attempt to demonize Howe by trying to equate his having said that he was not surprised by the events (since he has been aware of growing unrest) with "condoning" the riots, her efforts to domesticate his truth only grow increasingly embarrassing.

By the end, her antics, which culminate in a ham-fisted attempt to portray him as a rioter himself, prompt a simple response from Howe that is a perfectly serviceable summation of what oppressed peoples and critical theory have been saying to the grand narrative of hegemony for decades:











Video thanks to gordonzola

And because I am strongly disinclined to deny him anything, and because we've all been on a train in the deep night, and we've all been tired, felt ineffectual in the face of everything, have forgotten, for a moment, the actual power of love, and what it would mean for all of us to be in it together. Moving this from vest pocket to billboard meant redacting the names of some living friends, which snagged me for a moment until Ben reminded me of what is unaffected by that initialing: "One way to characterize such a life [une vie re|politique] is as the speaking not of one's own name, but of the names of one's beloveds." Thank you, Ben.



( Things we think about when we glance out of a foggy train window on the other side of which is night and shadowy rolling fields and beyond them, billions of precarious human lives on a tiny pebble floating in infinity  )



Things we think about when we glance into a foggy train window on the other side of which is dimmed running lights and shadowy rolling ribcages breathing and beneath them, billions of precarious cells inside a tiny infinity floating on a pebble

 






Sins have consequences. They have



( fallout. )
 

"We don’t think it’s in the interest, not only of the Smithsonian but of other federally supported cultural organizations, to pick fights."




Someone asked me this morning why I haven't remarked this week on Martin Sullivan's act of profound cowardice and incomprehensible dereliction of duty.  I haven't remarked on it, not here, not there, because-- what, really, would you have me say?


That there is nothing, nothing, that degrades and destroys us more - both as individuals and as a species - than the censoring of art?

                     

That "obscenity" is not defined by statute, that it relies for its definition and disposition on “hypothetical reasonable persons," and that clearly such persons remain, as ever, quite entirely hypothetical if your collective decision is that ants on a crucifix are obscene and the removal of artwork from public view at the behest of a religious zealot is not?


              


That in the tangled tresses of obscenus' etymology and usage, we find a time when it meant "boding ill"?   When it meant


Ominous.




Call me when you want to do something other than ruefully shake your head about it.