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On Wed, 26 Nov 2014, Johannes Birringer wrote:
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of the within/without non-issue. The violence of war is within-without;
and Alan, I venture to say, you were "recruited" the last few days by
the cameras and technological instruments of war (as I pointed out in my
paraphrase of Judith Butler yesterday), you were 'constituted' by them.
Hi Johannes,
To respond to this, perhaps a misrecognition that is difficult to explain
- it's not the 24 hours a day cameras-on-Ferguson (which you mentioned to
me personally); it's the deterioration of life here and the increasing
violence in this city (Providence, RI), coupled with the erosion of civil
liberties across the United States. Ferguson was a flash-point, but was
not the recruitment; the recruitment was, for me at least, literally
signing up with a number of conservation organizations, then watching
legislation fall apart, animal and plant extinctions rising horrendously.
Ferguson was all too familiar, and it resonated with the slow burn, the
slow war against Blacks and Latinos and otheres in this country, that's
all. We're not in New York, where one can pretend to a certain immunity of
affect/effect; Providence is not the same sort of liberal bubble, in spite
of Roger Williams' legacy. And what we see here are shootings, knivings,
arson, as a daily occurrence; the homeless increasing and increasingly
desperate; graft at all levels; and the state plundering itself from
decrepit and unreachable power, in spite of the fact that almost all the
offices are held by Democrats. Providence is the ninth-most economically
(read racially as well) divided city in the country - the rest, except for
one in Ohio, are all in the south. So when you mention "contituted by
them" - not only this isn't true, but it's a misreading perhaps of the
U.S. itself; would you say that Romania is constituted by the media? That
pain and intractable poverty elsewhere are? The U.S. is no different in
this regard; large parts of it, Rhode Island included (with the second
worst employment record in the country) is closer to the mythic and
stereotyped "third world country," than it is to the dream of a mythic
U.S. from so long ago. That's what creates a sense of despair, derailing
here, for so many (lots of people leave; this is the state with the
highest percentage of people in the country trying to get out), and what
was so perturbing about Ferguson, is that, like Occupy (as people have
pointed out), there's no real clout in the protests, no political action.
I keep thinking how far this is from the brutality elsewhere, but then I
remember being violently kicked a year and a half ago in NY (ironically on
the way to the doctor's), calling the police - we had witnesses, license
plates, etc. - and the police told me if I tried to prosecute, to have the
perpetrator arrested, I might be arrested myself for disturbing the peace.
Later it came out that the NYC police were ordered to ignore most crimes
of this sort, unless killing or hospitalization was required - the cops
were trying to keep the stats down. So there you are, and the NYC cops are
behaving as badly as ever, under the new mayor, and this country, for all
its military power and swashbuckling and back-room international deals,
operates on the principle of endocolonization, keeping the uppity poor and
disenfranchised under control, making a massacre of the medial system for
them, so they'll quietly die away. _That's_ what has recruited me, not
CNN. -
- Alan
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