Aside: Potpourri

Was in Boston the other day visiting Kate's sister, tooling around Cambridge. If you're into folkitude, keep your eye out for Rachael Davis. Good heavens, what a voice. Cuts like a knife, but it feels so right. She did an a capella version of (that previously loathsome song) Somewhere Over the Rainbow that made me question everything. This was at Club Passim, the grooviest joint in that jewel of a city.

Today Kate and I will eat at the only Ethiopian buffet in N. America, as far as I know.

Kate bought me an Udu clay "drum." I have been having a ball with it. It is a spherical terra cotta shell with a hole in the side that you hit. No membrane. It makes a beautiful watery resonant thooooo ( and a wu wup if you do it fast). The tone bends depending on the way you cover the hole. It just makes you think that you are swimming in a freshwater cave under the desert.

I'm reading a collection called Short Studies from Lingua Franca regarding various titillating episodes in public intellectual life - mostly from the 90's. A few essays on the politics of obscurantist language (Sokal hoax, Judith Butler, blah blah), murdered professors, sexual harrassment, what it's like to be Zizek-the-dazzler, etc. Also reading some Peter Mathieson and Mircea Eliade. Picked up the Eliade with a Richard Cavendish book about the history of the Tarot. They read quite nicely together.

Here's a new idea. Let's grant that the lifeworld is being colonized by technology - especially the managerial professional sector of the world economy, i.e. the West. There is no on-the-clock/off-the-clock. Everyone is on call with their cell phones and laptops. Let's also grant that this colonization is advancing and won't stop until we are working all the time. The question is this: What are the human limits of this progression? I think two things: the human needs of intoxication and of sleep. Regarding the first, I think we can take a model from drunk driving, which we designate as a preventable phenomenon that takes more lives than almost any other single thing. But it's not alcohol that is interfering with driving. Historically, one would have to say that it's driving interfering with alcohol- the car and its demands encroaching on the human phenomenon of intoxication. Sleep is similar in that it is almost as mysterious of a foe. Certain sectors of society already have sleep laws, but it is difficult, minus some real breakthroughs in sleep research, to see how it could go beyond this rudimentary discipline. Computers don't need sleep, but the mind still mysteriously does. In any case, sleep and intoxication seem to be the main barriers to a fully trans or post-human body politic. How will intoxication be tranhumanized? (Potential Answer: tranhumanization is an intoxication.) How will sleep be transhumanized? (Dunno.)

In other news, the Valerie Plame/Rove case is going mainstream, picked up by the AP, Reuters, LA Times, Guardian, and others you want to read about it. The congressional democrats are pressing the national security buttons. The only thing I can't figure out is why someone as intelligent as David Corn of The Nation is asking that Rove be "fired" from Bush's cabinet. What is going on here?!! I cannot think of a better cop-out strategy for the Bush administration. What we ought to be asking for is prison time and a thorough independent investigation that not only strikes at the Plame Naming but also at all of the fabrication of documents and other impeachable offenses.

On Having Nothing to Say

I'm not claiming any scientific survey size, but I noticed that folks - various cultural critics - opted out of any commentary on the London Bombing of the 7th. The news struck me with similar pangs. Douglas Rushkoff, for example, writes: "I'm supposed to have something intelligent to say about this morning's blasts in London. It's become one of those obligatory blog things - so much so, that people are emailing me today asking why I haven't said anything about it." Ken Rufo and the folks at Progressive Commons write: "For those wondering why it is we haven't commented on the terrorist attacks on London, it's because we, or at least I, have nothing profound to say."

This got me thinking about the politics of withdrawal. We have clearly entered a period of popular calls for full or partial withdrawal from Iraq. On its heels is a strategy of resistance to the neo-con rhetoric of the War on Terror that is a certain withdrawal of communication. The very profitable WOT paradoxically needs a continual feed of explosions to survive. Moreover, the explosions need a complicit media - and vice versa. The entire thing is, as scholars of terrorism have long maintained, a macabre ratcheting assemblage of the two. At one point we might have said tongue in cheek that car accidents need gawkers. The WOT intensifies this marriage, feeding the gawkers back into the steam and twisted metal of the accident - as if every accident calls for its future perfection, and we are caught out-imagining one another. The London Bombings perhaps occur at a moment of realization, not just burnout and acceptance of a certain kind of fate of the industrialized West. The realization is one of tactics: we understand what terrorism is now, and we don't want to be a part of it.

In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut constructs an island on which everyone practices a forbidden religion called Bokonon. (I always wondered if this was a reference to Bakunin...). Those who are caught by the governor of practicing the black art of Bokonon, recognizable by the practice of two people putting the soles of their feet together, would be ceremonially punished by public hanging on "the hook." What's more, the government was on the constant hunt for the hirsute underground spiritual leader of the Bokonon movement, who always managed to escape by the skin of his teeth. He could do this because he had a secret agreement with the government to do so. That is, he was purposefully designed by the government to be uncatchable. The drama of the practice, the punishments, and the spectacle of the heroic, uncatchable leader kept the people from revolting. A beautiful circular drama.

A pretty good allegory, except that it's hard to argue that everyone secretly wishes to be part of an terrorist cell and is rooting for Bin Laden. But perhaps it's easier than we think. Jean Baudrillard claims that terrorism works because we secretly wanted the towers to fall - and the evidence for this is in film, where we imagined the destruction, a la Independence Day, of all our monuments to modernity. The Onion cleverly exploited this theme with a headline entitled "Where's Bin Laden? There's a little Bin Laden in each of us, FBI concludes." We might alter this slightly to say that there is a little War on Terror in each of us.

So perhaps we have come to the conclusion that the WOT is a feedback loop that demands our participation to sustain itself. More specifically, it demands attention - our eyeballs - to function. Every word about it nudges the momentum of the big flywheel. We are all complicit, because we all are gawkers in one way or another. The incredible flury of Flickr and cell phone activity around the London Bombings is ringed by the secondary shockwave of television news, then the cottage industries of terrorism scholarship and political opportunism, and then perhaps that final distanct ripple of media critics. But we have figured out the game and how it is rigged. We don't want to play anymore. We look away. We choose instead to mourn the loss like we would an act of nature or a traffic pile-up on a winter day. And we try not to play favorites over suffering elsewhere in the world. We unplug, we depoliticize. Gille Deleuze argued that resistance in the pomo control society resembles a circuit breaker. We used to say "What if they held a war and no one showed up?" Now we say, "What if there was a terrorist attack and no one Flickr-ed?"

Plame Game II

Yesterday Judith Miller was thrown in jail for refusing to divulge her source in the Plame Naming. She won't testify to what everyone practically knows already - that Karl Rove is deep throating it around Washington. Though there is real potential for holding the administration administration accountable, there is an underbelly to the Plame case. We could see some real damage done to the "right" to keep confidential sources - only a conventional right currently, not a legal one. Miller's lost court case will very likely have a profound chilling effect on the practice of using confidential sources, whistleblowers, and the like - a practice that, on balance, serves the interests of investigative journalism much more often than it does the powers that be. Miller is posing now as the sacrificial savior of independent journalism, but if we recall, she was perhaps the loudest voice on the Shock and Awe Cheerleading Squad at the Times. When the Times issued an apology for shoddy reporting regarding WMD claims, Miller's reporting was called out specifically.

Today I was in New York City taking a tour around the UN building (before John Bolton lops off the upper fifteen floors, as folks say.) Among other things, I had the pleasure of seeing both the Syrian and Cuban ambassadors address an academically-minded audience. But the headline speakers could not have been more appropriate. First was Joel Simon, Deputy Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international organization advocating for the safety and rights of journalists. Following him was Gail Collins, the Editorial Page Editor for The New York Times. Of course both were very concerned about the state of investigative journalism after the Miller jailing. It seems that Rove hedged his bets with the Plame Naming by holding hostage one of the critical tools of investigative journalism. We trade our queen for theirs ... that is, if the trial goes live...

Unfortunately (and for the administration, conveniently) the entire case will probably be swallowed up by the London bombings this morning. This was yet another reason why it was strange to be walking Manhattan's sidewalks today. Grand Central Station was buzzing with TV cameras and stumping politicians. Another measured weight seemed to have descended onto the shoulders of the people whisking along. Kate and I spent the rest of the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art looking for some consolation on the Surrealist floors. Andre Breton said that art would be convulsive or it would not be. Well, we finally got our convulsive art form. The coming attractions are splashed all over the newspapers already, and we know that the show will arrive tomorrow or the next or the next. What match are all these silly rights in the face of such an awful spectacle?

The Plame Game

Editor and Publisher has been doing a good job of keeping tabs on the Valerie Plame situation. Perhaps I'm being optimistic, but this case seems to have all the ingredients of a high profile gatey gate gate. That is to say it will make good TV. There appears to be quite a line-up of Pandoras, each with her own spring-loaded box. I'm going to make an out-of-hand prediction that this case will go LIVE. Here's why:

1. Big names. GWB, Cheney, and Rove will be subpoenaed for the grand jury testimony. Certainly reporters from NY Times, Time Magazine, and Robert Novak will be part of the parade. Perhaps Kato Kaelin.

2. The case has an actual legal teeth - Rove's illegal blowing the cover of an acting CIA officer, what could in these times easily be cast as a breach of national security.

3. Very sensitive questions about the existence of an Iraq-Niger yellowcake connection will have to be asked and answered. It is highly likely that there will be an investigation of the forged documents. Until now, everyone had agreed that the documents were forged, but no press entity has had the guts to ask who forged them (the documents apparently fell from heaven like the forged CBS National Guard memo that so conveniently diverted attention away from GBW's military record and toward "uncooperative" reporters like Dan Rather). Forging documents is a very deliberate act of deception - much more damning than a "misstatement." Unfortunately for the neo-cons, Rathergate has already whet the public appetite for forged documents.

4. Plamegate arrives in the midst of general discontent regarding the necessity of the war. Less than 50% of Americans believe "the war is worth it." Yes, the survey question is weird - phrased as though the war is an end in itself - but the trend is real. (If anything, the question ought to be whether "it" was worth a war.)

5. The Downing Street Memo is on the verge of a boil. Toss in a little yellowcake forgery, let soak, sprinkle with a little espicy perjury, and I think the average American will have a satisfying, prime time, red meat meal.

6. If the interrogators are really on their toes, and public opinion being what it is, questions of Halliburton's loss of $9 billion of taxpayer money might become salient. This is further down the laundry list given the order of mainstream American values these days: 1) national security; 2) our soldiers; 3) our money; 4) the trust of our leaders; 5) the rest of it - Iraqi civilians, human rights, international law.

So there you have it - made for TV: international intrigue, a husband-and-wife spy duo, trust betrayed, hard evidence, a wild card president who could say anything on the stand if left to his own devices, a sneaky new puppetmaster character, legal bite. The whole thing has got a "everybody knows but nobody tells" intrigue about it. Much like Jerry Springer, the dramatic skeleton is a simple one. The secret guests wait in the wings, and they will no doubt sass their way onto the stage. The spectacle will be as satisfying as it is predictable. But I could be wrong.