The sight of innumerable late-night rallies full of self-satisfied fist-pumping, face-painting college students and other nationalist celebrants, all luxuriating in the assassination of a semi-coherent man with kidney failure clearly not masterminding the insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan; this sight, together with the smugly solemn pronouncements by our-president-who-used-to-know-about-the-long history-of US-imperialism that "this started on 9/11" and "America can do whatever we set our mind to," inspired me to return from my yearlong blogging hiatus (taking a break from post-dissertation novel-reading, specifically from The Pale King, which is so good* that my envy is unabated--actually, given the current state of things, a little intensified-- by the fact that the author committed suicide from depression).
The footage of the weeping, flag-waving young people confused me: why exactly were they celebrating? Did they believe, despite assertions to the contrary by our smug-yet-resolute commander in chief, that the troops would come home and the drone attacks would stop, that the citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya would have peace? That cheap oil would flow forever and the good life would be suddenly attainable? If they thought these things, could we produce a yippie-style War is Over celebration, handing out flowers in the streets? Would anyone care? Or was their jubilation of a different, more vicious ilk, akin to that of the high-school boy I witnessed gleefully, incoherently punching the head of the kid in front of him during the opening-night showing of the Vin Diesel vehicle Fast 5? ** Was metaphorically, collectively possessing a terrorist's head on a stick enough to make Americans feel powerful, even as the water levels rise, we sink into greater and greater debt, and our rights are stripped away?
Adding to my bewilderment was that this happened on May 1, a day when the thoughts of those of us who still fancy ourselves leftists generally turn, however whimsically, to fighting the capitalist powers that be. Events leading up to this May Day seemed particularly inauspicious: in a bipartisan late night vote, the Massachusetts state legislature joined the other states pledging to solve the budget crisis not by taxing rich people or corporations but rather by limiting the bargaining power of public workers; in a similarly under-the-radar move, the U.S. supreme court pretty much eliminated class action suits; and in Madison, which looked like the last bastion of U.S.-based worker struggle despite their strange adherence to electoral channels, the democratic victory in the state supreme court turned into a defeat as "lost" votes suddenly appeared.
Recent weeks have seen US and corporate outrages on other fronts, that the euphoria of capturing Bin Laden has somehow erased: tornadoes made drastically worse by global climate change destroyed hundreds of lives and communities in the US South; wikileaks revealed that hundreds of Guantanamo torture-victims were actually known to be innocent; and the US continues its imperialist wars in at least three countries; Indiana cut Planned Parenthood funding, leaving tens of thousands of women without basic services.
Life, in short, is not good for anyone who is not super-rich. And it's going to get worse.
But it looks like we are going to let ourselves be lulled into a nationalist stupor like so many of us were 10 years ago. In the words of the clever sidewalk chalkers around my house in Somerville, GO US!
*One of my favorite sentences so far: "Our mutual contract here is based on the presumptions of a) my veracity, and b) your understanding that any features or semions that might appear to undercut that veracity are in fact protective legal devices, not unlike the boilerplate that accompanies sweepstakes and civil contracts, and thus are not meant to be decoded or 'read' so much as merely acquiesced to as part of the cost of our doing business together, so to speak, in today's commercial climate."
** This movie, which I swear I attended only because of my sister's 18th birthday, contained a fairly pleasing heist plot, though not pleasing enough to overcome the over-the-top violence; imperialist message; and action sequences that defied the most basic laws of physics, the longest and most irritating of which featured racecars dragging a multi-ton metal safe along highways at 100+ miles per hour. As for the audience violence, we did not just sit by: one of our party informed a ticket-taker that "there was an issue" in our theater (her vague description perhaps owing to the suddenness and strangeness of the punch, perhaps to her desire to preserve her standing in the community), upon which the ticket-taker did nothing.
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