Friday, January 16, 2009

Farewell, President Bush

As many prepare their final thoughts, quips and drinks (scotch on the rocks, please -- hold the rocks and glass, heavy on the flask in a paper bag) to celebrate or bemoan what was and what is the end of the Bush presidency, I've decided to jump the gun and do a little something to recognize the event. I could have written something, but it would only be a dissipating shadow of an obelisk of mute hatred; words cannot describe it.

So, instead of writing about Bush, I thought I'd collect an interesting assortment of things that might demonstrate, or show, rather than tell what I have to "say" about the Bush presidency. It's really not that thought out nor some particularly deep artistic statement. But these things just sort of click for me in expressing the anger I have toward the man and the state he represents. Unlike many others, democracy is not a solace for me, and Obama's election did not exorcise my demons. I still hold Bush and his cronies accountable, and the artificialities of democratic symbols, the pomp and display, fail to induce the civil niceties in me that go on to silence mass anger in others. The reality of death, of war, of power outside the words themselves and their uses for politicians and news media, sewn up in the skull's pieces of Iraqi civilians, are asked to be made untrue, to be abstract, for us to hold no one accountable, by the symbols of democratic progress. Maybe these things will show something, and hopefully tell you nothing.

Final News Conference


Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft - Der Sheriff


Excerpt from Gilles Deleuze's Treatise On Nomadology:
It will be noted that war is not contained within [the State's]apparatus. Either the State has as its disposal a violence that is not channeled through war -- either it uses police officers and jailers in place of warriors, has no arms and no need of them, operates by immediate, magical capture, "seizes" and "binds," preventing all combat -- or, the State acquires an army, but in a way that presupposes a juridical integration of war and the organization of military function. As for the war machine in itself, it seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, to be outside its sovereignty and prior to its law; it comes from elsewhere... rather, he is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis. He unties the bond just as he betrays the pact. He brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus. He bears witness to another kind of justice, one of incomprehensible cruelty at times, but at others of unequaled pity as well (because he unties bonds...). He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between "states": a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities of terms as well as correspondences between relations. In every respect, the war machine is of another species, another nature, another origin than the State apparatus.

And on a more light-hearted note, what kind of leftist would I be without some weird, confused comparison of my enemies to Hitler. For the absurdity of it all, I'll give you some Laibach - geburt einer nation. A cover of Queens's "One Vision."
More people need to see this shit.

1 comment:

Patrick said...

Hey you have a really interesting blog here, keep on writing... and good bye king george