Driving Votes: Brandon's Blog

Joy is a form of Protest

"What are you doing sitting on your ass. Your very future is threatened and all you want to do is party and bullshit." I have scolded myself with such thoughts during this political season. "The most important election in a generation" is testing our "resolve." If you are over 25 it begs you to prove that you are truly an adult. In a serious time, adults respond with full attention, long deliberation and decisive action. Right?

There is no doubt that this is as serious a time. You no the litany: jails in place of schools; unjust wars are waged for profit; poverty - who did not go anywhere- is back in our faces after being ecplipesd by the irrational exuberance of the 90's; the civil liberties gods - that demanded the tribute of the lives and limbs of a generation- are again hungry. Money is being taken right out of worker's pockets in the form of tax cuts by a coterie of corporate sponsored politicians who rather lace school lunches with benzine and prozac than give up their box seats at the Texas Ranger's game; gay people are being witch hunted; women are being put back in their place; aids is now sponsered by Phizer et al; section 8 is gone today; social security gone tomorrow; fundamentalists of all stripes have hijacked religious discourse for power, profit, and self-delusion proclaiming that all this violence is being perpetrated at the behest of God who-if you ask your average American evangelical- looks like Ronald Reagan.

So maybe partying isn't so bad after all. Relative to the cynical objectives of the starch-collared marauders who we call our governors, the aims of the partygoer are noble: joy, shared experience, and novelty. With a mixture of music and camaraderie, parties dilute pretension and fear - the rocket fuel for war and terror. The party challenges the very notion of self-hood by submitting its participants to communal forces of dance and laughter. Security is not a contrivance of the party, but a direct effect of the communion. Party preservation-the urge to sustain the vibe-replaces self-preservation.

Parties are among our most subversive political tools. A party requires the presence of many who share a peaceful, even joyful, consciousness. As an act of peace, parties are the means and the end, the sign and signified, the thing and its expression. A party is proof positive of the very human possibilities that conservatives must deny in order to maintain their twisted Darwinian ideologies of winner take all. Partygoers eschew schedules in exchange for spontaneity. They forego individual accolades in exchange for group identity. But, if its a good party, they retain their ability to opt out whenever they feel compelled. It is this sense of chosen-ness, of the un-prescribed desire to participate that makes a great party.

Ironically, partys are perhaps the greatest obstacle to the viability of progressive politics in the United States. The dominance of party politics in America makes corporate patronage a requirement for political leadership. The needs of corporations are therefore disproportionately figured into the decisions of American political leaders. I think it is time for the word party to be used more liberally in relation to politics. The word, party, used to mean a social gathering could come to challenge the established use of the word party in the political sense. A political party would therefore be spontaneous and organic. Unlike a political machine, this sort of party must be fundamentally rooted in the needs and desires of its constituents. Let the parties begin. Let there be new parties every week to absorb our changing alliances. Let joy be our chosen form of protest.

check out this party we're thrownin'

REPRESENT Saturday September 25th Philidelphia, PA

Are you against the War: The War on poor people, brown
people, women, gay people, love, dignity, and decency?

Direct action against the war this weekend: check out
www.represent04.org

Two-sidedness

"Its either rape or its not rape." Those were the words of the defense lawyer for Marcus Dixon, a Georgia teenager who was recently released from jail after serving one year of a ten year mandatory sentence for 'aggravated child molestation." In Dixon's initial trial in, then 18 years old, he defended himself against rape charges from a 15 year old white girl with whom he claimed to have had consensual sex. A ten year sentence for teenage sex is obviously Draconian. But, the tone of Dixon's lawyer is problematic. Only the two teenagers know what really occured between them. Certainly, a young man can harm a young women in a sexual encounter in a variety of ways that fall short of the definition of rape. The lawyers insistence that sex is either consensual or not, is proped up on a faulty world view in which ethics is always a matter of choosing the right side of a two-sided issues.

The two-sided world view concieves of a world of right and wrong. In the case of Iraq war, the two-sided world view motivated President Bush to declare that "You are either for us or against us." The two-sided world creates an ethical trap in which the ends justify almost any means because, "well, hell, we're right."

Most of the infantrymen in the armed services come from relatively low-income backgrounds. According to a friend of mine, a tour of duty in Iraq earns about 4,000 per month that is obviously not necessarily spent on out-of-poket expenses. If the soldier has left a job to go fight, they are entitiled to 6 months of paid leave. If that soldier's job earned them $2000 per month, then a one year tour in Iraq would net them $60,000 (please correct me if these numbers are not correct). The result is a great big incentive for people to go fight in a war that they may not believe in. But then, that person cannot claim that anyone made them go to war. You are either a volunteer, or you are not. Its that simple, right?

Nothing is ever that simple. Few decisions are ever made based on a single distinction. Often even mundane decisions encompass an endless string of causation: feelings, desires, fears, and hopes based on past experiences.

Remember Falluja

By Orit Shohat

During the first two weeks of this month, the American army committed war crimes in Falluja on a scale unprecedented for this war. According to the relatively few media reports of what took place there, some 600 Iraqis were killed during these two weeks, among them some 450 elderly people, women and children. (more...)

Do You Hear What I Hear?

So, after truth, it seems that honor is the second casualty of war. War's seem to always conjure up the rhetoric of duty and honor. But, then "how," asked my friend Jeff, "can someone be honorable in a dishonorable situation." The photos of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners of war are stomach churning indeed. But, the sentiment is not new. An internal report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba describes incidents in which "detainees were beaten with a broom handle," "sodomized with a chemical light," and "perhaps a broom stick." A broom stick? Hmm . . . Sound familiar?

The culture of violence cannot hide for long underneath the medals of war. We would be poorly served to treat these incidents as radical lapses of judgment. These incidents are manifestations of a long-standing tradition of villainizing the "enemy" in order to motivate violence in the name of power. We see this pattern manifest in the behavior of American police officers in black neigborhoods. We even see the creation of villains at work in our policy debates about drugs and the death penalty. The logic of villainization dictates that the "enemy" must not be human. For how else could we be provoked to kill them. We fight for what is "right." We are "good." They, our enemy, are "evil." And so, what harm is there in pissing on evil. Or executing evil for that matter. At least that's how the logic goes.

So now what? The American people have been forced to look war in the face and see it for what it is: petty, degrading, and dehumanizing. What shall we do? Well, my suggestion is that anyone interested in firing Bush and the boyz should start emailing these pictures all over the country. We should put them on t-shirts. We should hang them in triptychs right between pictures of Jim Crow era lynchings and pictures of Abner Louima. We should stare at them every night to remember what is at stake in this next election.

Civil Society?

First of all, I want to say hello and thank you to the growing nation of people who are getting off their hands and making a difference.

Secondly, if you have not seen it yet, watch the Black Bush sketch which aired on Chappelle's Show recently. Not only was this an extremely funny performance, it was one of the most succinct and coherent readings of Bush's Iraq campaign. You do not have to accept the accusations as truth-that Bush went to war on the basis of personal vendettas and the interests of crony capitalists. But, you must admit how easy it is to create a coherent story from these suspicions. It is easy because of the growing divide between us-the American people-and our elected commander and chief. We cannot be sure what reasons he had for his war. He has changed the publicly shared reasons at least three times and his advisors admit that the real reasons are too complicated to be shared widely. The trade off is supposed to be safety and prosperity. As if the administration is saying: "We'll run the country. Ya'll don't worry. Just keep going to work and don't ask too many questions." Meanwhile, the minutes of meetings are classified, legislation is passed without being debated, and those who question are called traitors.

But to me, this war is not the most important reason to vote. For me, this war seems to be the ultimate ruse. Behind it lies countless questions about the kind of world we want to create for ourselves. Are we to believe that all vestiges of tyranny were dashed at the flick of a quill pen back in 1776. Is it not more probable that people continue to falter-that power continues to corrupt. Is that not why our form of government was adopted-as a persistent check against an ever-present danger. And it has worked. Voting and other mechanisms of democracy have helped to end slavery, to grant suffrage, and to counter discrimination of many kinds.

That is what this war debate glosses over. Bush would have us believe that terrorist want what we have-freedom and democracy. As if we own freedom and democracy. Democracy is a process, not a condition. We cannot buy it or sell it. We cannot bomb anyone into adopting it. It can only be acted out in the form of personal choice and responsablity. The very personal choices that this administration seeks to limit in the interest of 'national security.' That is what this election is about. It is about so many personal choices and so many people taking responsablity for their world.