Politicizing Sadness

Colectivo Situaciones

More than five years after the insurrection of that Argentine December
of 2001 we bear witness to the changing interpretations and moods around
that event. For many of us sadness was the feeling that accompanied a
phase of this winding becoming. This text rescues a moment in the
elaboration of "that sadness" in order to go beyond the notions of
"victory and defeat" that belong to that earlier cycle of politicization
which centered on taking state power, and, at the same time, in order to
share a procedure that has allowed us to "make public" an intimate
feeling of people and groups.

Sadness arrived after the event: the political fiesta — of languages,
images, and movements — was followed by a reactive, dispersive dynamic.
And, along with it, there arrived what was later experienced as a
reduction of the capacities of openness and innovation that the event
brought into play. The experience of social invention (which always also
implies the invention of time) was followed by a moment of normalization
and the declaration of "end of the fiesta." According to Spinoza,
sadness consists in being separated from our powers (potencias). Among
us political sadness often took the form of impotence and melancholy in
the face of the growing distance between that social experiment and the
political imagination capable of carrying it out.

J.D. Suss writes:

Underdog Reaction to Attacks on America
Jonathan D. Suss

Underdogs across America, those less enamored of the conventional American dream, must surely have seen the September 11 attacks differently than those tough-talking, flag-waving patriots popularly portrayed in the media. Not that the outrage was any less. But to underdogs the events and reactions since that day have conveyed deeper meanings.

To underdogs, the red, white and blue now symbolize a National Security State. Thus, the patriotic fervor stirred up by the attacks represents a misguided emotionalism built upon myths of American liberty and democracy – myths that are perhaps more telling of an earlier age. For America has long since lost its innocence. And in a complacency born of plenty, the character of the nation has been steadily eroding into self-indulgence. Self-righteous beliefs in our superior way of life, our super-power government, and our supposed role as world guardian of democracy, persist in the face of an irresponsible form of freedom at home, fueled by the trance-like influence of a corporate military-industrial/info-entertainment complex. And so patriotic sloganeering that seeks to resurrect past glories falls on increasingly dubious ears. Most of it sounds to me like ignorance parading in its own delusion. Monied interests now rule here in a bureaucratic government headed up mostly by the same weak-of-character, carbon-copy elitists that can now be found everywhere – in business, the media, the academy, science and the arts.

I am less a citizen of the United States of America than I am an inhabitant of the North American continent Native Americans call Turtle Island. The outrage of the attacks is found in the violence it has done to our sense of this place as our collective home. It upsets the cultural ecology of our belongingness in this space, a space not welcome to yet more invaders. All oppressed people have experienced this invasion displacement. For example, the Native Americans, Palestinians, Zulu, Vietnamese, Jews, Roma – all must have felt this frustrated rage at being deprived of the integrity of place. Americans, just now experiencing this same disabling sense of helplessness, act as if they are the first to ever suffer such an indignity, or they project an overly indignant air that such a calamity should befall a people of such privilege. It sickens one to witness the misplaced, over-inflated pride that feeds public discourse on TV talk shows, the Internet, and in call-in radio programs. One only hopes that having now been bruised, the wakened U.S. giant might start empathizing more with the real world. But, for now, underdogs can only howl.

"All Quiet on the Eastern Front"

Retort

WE HAVE NO WORDS FOR THE HORROR OF THE PRESENT,

for the ghostly bodies showing through the plastic wrap. No words for the faces of despair and elation bubbling
from the TV screen, faces of hatred and madness and dedication to death, faces that have had the truth of
“collateral damage” played out to them over the cell-phone videos even before the sound of the drone has faded.

THE BALANCE OF POWER IN THE IMAGE-WORLD IS CHANGING.

No one who witnessed the moral bankruptcy of the media during the Iraq campaign can be left with the least
illusion about the world the networks show us. But something is shifting in the pattern of image dissemination.
The reality of “statecraft” and “deterrence” is more and more on view. And it is a reality that lies at the heart of
modernity. For more than a century, modernity and state terror from the air – modernity and mass civilian
death – have been mutually constitutive terms. But never before so instantly, so vividly, so ubiquitously.

AND THIS SITUATION – THIS VISIBILITY – PUTS THE FORCES OF ORDER IN A RAGE.

“Our federal government,” says Donald Rumsfeld, “is really only beginning to adapt its operations to the 21st
century. Today we're engaged in the first war in history – unconventional and irregular as it may be – in an era of
e-mails, blogs, cell phones, Blackberrys, Instant Messaging, digital cameras, a global Internet with no inhibitions,
hand-held videocameras, talk radio, 24-hour news broadcasts, satellite television. There's never been a war
fought in this environment before.” (Speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, 17 February 2006)
It is all so unfair, sighs the Torturer-in-Chief. It makes our Terror indistinguishable from theirs.

kolya abramsky writes: "This is a call by Paul Gipe,
a leading expert in community controlled wind energy (see http://www.wind-works.org/ ."

"Impeach, Convict, Arrest, & Imprison George W. Bush"

Paul Gipe

It’s imperative that we, the American people, stop George W. Bush from starting another war. This time he has his sights set on Iran and, as in Iraq, the intelligence is being fixed around the policy. Worse, Bush is threatening use of nuclear weapons. Has he gone mad? Will he plunge us into a worldwide nuclear war?

Our course is clear. The House must impeach George W. Bush, and the Senate must convict him for a long list of criminal acts that fall under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution for “high crimes and misdemeanors”.