Coming Columbus Day Indigenous People’s Day, October 12, 2004…. I’m not at all sure what or if it meant, the fortuitous discovery of that quarter deck of card-sized Chantelle photos in Derrida’s Of Spirit shortly after his death; less, what I might or might not have intended in sequestering them there almost a decade ago;…
Jacques Derrida 1930-2004
Was there ever any doubt that L. Paul Bremner III yet remained a true-blue, die-on-the-sword believer, sold on the grand old neo-con cause? I think not, despite his strenuous defense of self and President in his New York Times Op-Ed piece What I Really Said About Iraq. Nor do I think anyone’s especially now excited…
As we begin our final election-year descent into the maelstrom of American cultural dysfunction, before we founder beneath the coming wave upon wave upon wave of proud, flag-flying, viciously oafish “Who’s Preventing Me From Being A Millionaire?” mass imbecility that is the American populace “making up its mind,” before we discover ourselves too much exhausted to speak in the face of all that is so unspeakable about the American people and the American media, we would do well to pause at this summit of the loftiest crag to consider the vertiginous achievement of our peculiar institutions.
Last week I got out of bed and into my car to shop for a vacuum cleaner in a semi-robotic, automatic, beam-me-up kind of way. Without first forming a central system for comparison, or reading any review, rating, records or consumer report to gauge the best machines, whether commercial, industrial, bagless, cordless, hepa, wet-dry, or for simplicity of repair, I chose a Bissell vacuum cleaner off the back of a truck from among a pool of Dirt Devil, Dyson, Electrolux, Eureka, Fantom, Hoover, Kenmore, Kirby, Miele, Oreck, Panasonic, Rainbow, Roomba, Royal, Shark, Sharp, and Tristar titles and packaging.
Stranger things have happened. I didn’t know what to make of the vacuum guy’s cover. He was parked, motor running, on a leaf-strewn lawn by an above ground swimming pool and had some robot-like female pumping pond stuff through hose and tube into a variety of canister, chamber, and storage bags. The whole contraption, topped by a rotary vane, he claimed was some kind of Gast pump coating machine, a sealer and sweeper for the pool-side tile. But of his assistant coater who wore only a bra, he said nothing.
The little words cavorting noticed one day that they were being herded into an ever-narrower column in the middle of the page. To the left and the right appeared flickering changing shapes. One day, a group of words noticed that the shapes seemed to shadow them hunter-chameleons changing, echoing, reaching. “George Christian Bush!” a group…
On May 6, 2002, the Bush administration announced the withdrawal of the United States from the International Criminal Court Treaty and claimed exemption from the jurisdiction of the permanent war crimes tribunal that the International Criminal Court Treaty established on July 1, 2002. At the time, little was made of this decision outside human rights circles. But as we now know, the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the International Criminal Court Treaty in May 2002 was only the tip of an iceberg, the only then visible piece of an extensive internal, on-going effort to reinterpret in secret the Geneva Conventions, U.S. law, Presidential authority, and even the meaning of the word “torture” itself.
“Think Pacific Heights meets Burning Man meets the Castro. Imagine dancing in a 25,000 square foot warehouse space decked out in opera sets and props, and seeing a professional opera diva appear in the distance to belt out house remixed aria by Gavin Hardkiss followed by the operetta from The Fifth Element. The Forgotten was an incredible resurgence of the bohemian scene in San Francisco on a huge scale.”
— From Ggreg Taylor’s Forgotten Opera
Younger and thinner then, older and lazier now, I’ve told this story before, but set in Baja, San Quintin.
If you don’t know where it’s set this time, I won’t tell you. We don’t need to see more people here.
Today, at the conclusion of the G-8 summit conference at Sea Island, Georgia, the world witnessed the morally disheartening spectacle of a President of The United States of America, George W. Bush, himself a professed born-again Christian, unable or unwilling to bring himself to condemn the use of torture as an interrogation technique.
Three times he was asked, each time in a distinct and different way in case he misunderstood, each time with a different opportunity to frame an answer, simple or complex, for the American people.
There can be no doubt he understood. Three times he denied the moral weight of the issue.
Have not especially President Bush’s many born-again Christian supporters the moral obligation, the Christian duty before God, to seek genuine and full clarification of his views and feelings on this issue?