Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 00:01:30 -0500
Reply-To: UB Poetics discussion group <POETICS@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU>
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From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@PANIX.COM>
Subject: Notes on the election -
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Notes on the election -
0. The Republican win was predicted and predictable. Now the infinity of analysis begins, an infinity that has already missed the point.
1. There is nothing the Democrats might have done 'better.' The country voted its conscience.
2. Its conscience is founded on a morality-based worldview, which is rural in origin, and relatively rigid.
3. 9/ll played a critical role, not only in revealing the extreme vulnerability of the country, but also in the production of an Islamic- fundamentalist alterity that could not be dismissed.
4. With the religious right, fundamental ontology replaces the episteme.
5. Bush appeared, alive and life-like at the World Trade Center ruins almost immediately after, conjoining his image with the intensity of destruction.
6. The left continuously focused on the negative aspects of the Republican party, over-determining, at least in print, the violence of a world-view at odds with the rest of the planet.
7. Absolute morality is not concerned whatsoever with opinion.
8. The right has been organizing, in the US, for at least a century and a half; this election and the last have been in preparation for decades. With the elimination of the 'fairness doctrine' under Reagan, and with monopoly ownership of local broadcasting, the right has been able to dominate the 'heartland' without opposition. The corporate and Christian merge, to the benefit of both.
9. In the 60s, which for many of us appears to be a history of the left, the right quietly embraced both technology and structural compromises that increased and solidified its power base, in rural and impoverished areas of the country.
10. A fundamental flaw is the assumption that so-called minority votes are liberal and leftist; in fact, the opposite is increasingly the case.
11. The 'American dream' is both part of class distinctions, and a force in their elimination. Don't underrate its influence; no matter how hard we try, there is no revolutionary class, but only power, desire, economic status, and diffused and focused oppression.
12. Corporate America is far more diverse and problematic than the left assumes; it also presents a very real world of almost infinite choice and identifications. Its collusions and corruptions are our collusions and corruptions, and have absolutely nothing to do with God and God's State.
13. Cultural capital in the US is far more important than economic capital, and its boundaries cut across the latter in terms of class. We are all white trash and we are all intellectuals and theorists.
14. Far too many judgments are made 'for' rural and so-called back- water areas, which are almost never heard themselves. The information discourse networks and religious institutions of the majority of American voters are concretely effaced by abstraction. The water of baptism is not H2O.
15. Morality and fear are interwoven; it is the abject stereotyped image of gays fucking that appears to corrode the 'clean and pure' body politic. Your marriage wrecks my marriage. It is a failure of the left not to deal with this; dismissing the violent imaginary out of hand ensures its force within the political arena.
16. In conservative America, the negation of negation is not dialectical, but also a return to a rapturous positivity.
17. If one's religion insists that abortion, for example, is murder, then any means, including murder as literal self-preservation, may be used in return as a defensive and pre-emptive action. It is not ever a question of one side listening to another; it is a question of war to an infinite degree.
18. The church in rural and disenfranchised America is a communal and cohesive force, one of the few institutions capable of lived-community and defense against the rest of the world. But more than this, the church is also the locus for community activity and identity. To dismiss it, even in its intolerant and sometimes evangelical varieties, is to miss the point of its existence. For the individual, the church is salvation, explaining and preserving morality, even forgiving and abetting the temptations of sin.
19. The church overdetermines the rest of the world; rural and other- wise isolated communities have a surprisingly low degree of information flux. The church provides stability in a late-late-capitalist world of postmodernity, where selves, ideologies, and languages are contested. Within testament and testimony, there is no contestation; the church, in other words, 'puts a hedge around the Torah' (Pirke Avot).
20. In my opinion, the image of Kerry hunting (and killing) was not only hypocritical and distasteful, but also a premature sign of defeat. However, this had no affect on the election per se, which was already determined, way back in the late 60s and early 70s, when Billy Graham created the first automated post-office in the US - a religious embrace of technology that forecast the future of the country. Perhaps the left 'created' - i.e. the hacking manifesto - but the religious right utilized, entrenched, constructed a primary embrace of individual and instrumental reason that guaranteed the supple application of power when and where needed. The only real question here is why it took so long.
21. The left has been hampered by split ideologies and critique; the right, which permits no critique, has worked constantly with umbrella ideologies.
22. What has been exposed and contested in the US is often business as usual in the rest of the world. We are witnessing a movement from republic to empire, from the primacy of voting, to the primacy of dominant interests.
23. On a personal level - I have lived in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the Bushlands of Texas and Florida. What happened was no surprise. I voted early yesterday, and felt a sense of relief at the minor _punctum_ I experienced. But I had no doubt that Bush would win, that my voice was primarily personal therapeutic. Instead of despair late last night/this morning, I've felt that our work, that of an opposition, has only just begun - that it could only just begin. We have to recognize, above all, that the US has done the will of the majority; the more we overlook this, excuse this, theorize this, wonder 'what went wrong,' the more we are weakened. Perhaps this is a positive sign - in the sense that the enemy, if it is an enemy, is clear, and no longer can be dismissed as an aberration.
24. The 'cultural war' is war.
25. Terror is an instrument of war.
26. Religion sublimates terror.
27. I live, you die. Vote or die holds no truck with the faithful.
28. Language is not action. Belief is action. Belief is not language.
29. The explication of fact in Michael Moore is replaced by the internalization of sin and the body in Mel Gibson. Old Testament, New Testament.
30 What the right knows: There is always already closure.