Middle Class

I would like to see some of these ass holes live on my salary: $20,000 per year. I love that they're cutting off the political banter at $250,000. It would take me 12 1/2 years to make that! 

Fuck those fucking "middle class" rescue plans. Rescue me!

Supermensch

When I first read the word Supermensch, I thought Freud was, once again, venerating males; he was. But that's okay: nearly everyone before (like) 1960 or so did. It doesn't phase me anymore: people are sheep, for the most part. But in German, man is herr or herren in the plural. Mensch is more like human being; give it a go on Babelfish, which translates the entire phrase Supermensch as "superhuman being." The compound noun (adjective, and adverb) superhuman and the noun (or verb) being. I like the concept.

I've always wanted to be a Supermensch, and considering that to be "human" requires very little -- all those fucktards swinging around the isles at Wal-Mart at 70 mph are humans; the gorillas whose bumper stickers read "Marriage = Man + Woman" (which I thought equaled transgendered), they're human -- I'm pretty sure I'm already one. All hail the Supermensch.

We got the Logo channel added to our cable package, and let me comment positively: seeing those Queers on TV all day everyday has made my whole life happier. A commercial starring Rosie. A Gay comedy sketch hour (think Saturday Night Live, only all queer, no rules). Documentaries about Gay stuff. I may just turn into a Queer philosopher. It's all fucking fascinating. I'm so proud of the Gays.

Next week, they're doing a special on Ginsberg... who I can no longer think of without intertextually aligning him to Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan, and Jack Kerouac. Maybe this new guy, Charles Berstein, will be added to that list. I certainly hope so. If Walt were here now... O America.

And then that ape-faced Bush -- whose mere visage makes my stomach lurch into acidic, acerbic rage -- who is so obtuse, he calls our economic condition a slow down (when perhaps what he's really seeing slow down is America's flow of currency in the global marketplace). He makes me want to fucking vomit. And he turns what good there is in America -- and there is much -- into his playthings, America into his own LOST island, and himself into a Widmore who is willing to break the rules to further his own agenda. Widmore, though, looks more like Cheney. :)

Ah, purging.

Then She Found Me

Just now, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed Colin Firth about his new movie Then She Found Me, opening this week in theaters. The conversation quickly dwindled into talk about Firth's penis; I tuned in to the conversation as Firth was talking about his penis, and how some aforementioned film or other performance allowed him to expose it -- larger than life -- in renowned cities worldwide. He even stacked it up against the Eiffel Tower, but then decided against that bold a gesture, a British one at that. Jon Stewart, of course, quickly deconstructed the phallic thread of the writer's remarks, remaking them into the classic "limp penis" joke, told in the voice of a 12-year-old boy for emasculating emphasis. The writer tried to defend himself by asserting his own penis as the empirical, world-renowned phallus, but Stewart again derailed the conversation into a comedic parody of the phallus, which, when uncrowned, is merely a wobbly dong or a wet noodle. The phallus, as Susan Bordo would have it, is only the phallus when we're in awe of it, and we're not in awe of most real penises (only those that resemble the phallus in size); we're in awe of the the manly man, the cock, the strong and always ready mythical man that most men never live up to. His penis -- not Everyman's -- is the phallus.

In essence, when the writer asserted his phallic power, Stewart deflated it with comedy, the fastest, most effective way to convert the authoritative, dominate phallus into a tiny wee-wee, weak, flaccid, and completely unusable except to produce waste. What started as a friendly conversation between the two powerful men became a power struggle.

Notice, though, in all of this that Stewart never claims the phallus that he strips from the writer. Why? My guess is, Stewart aspires to claim a different phallus because he's pitted against different competitors in another arena. Stewart's currency is comedy. And he who has the most of that fits Comedy Central's ideal masculinity (or femininity, in other cases). Stewart is, after all, so rich in the masculine currency of comedy that Comedy Central recognized their eggs were all in one basket and turned local currency into global currency: because comedy equals success, Stewart's show produced a spin-off, which is, in this arena, basically like Stewart's brilliance springing from it's own intellect a brain-child (Stephen Colbert's The Colbert Report). In Stewart's particular microcosm, he's earned enough in that one funny, phallus-shattering comment to continue competing for his own phallus at Comedy Central, a name that begs to be interpreted as a euphemism for comedy's marketplace.

I'm sounding like a broken Marxist record.

Someone should notify the local State apparatus... apparatus... apparatus...

Philosapho of Me

If we imagine the individual human as the locus of all meaning and authority, then from hir springs agency, and from within that agency s/he asserts itself. One organizing method or mechanism of this agency is, of course, temporality, but also gender, which s/he, from birth, is urged to associate to h/is genitals: if the agent displays a penis, he is masculine; if the agent displays no penis, she is female, and can, in light of the appearance of the male’s genitals, assume hers has been castrated, and she therefore lacks. Equipped, therefore, with agency and a penis, the male who is acculturated into Western ideology will become a man. A female who is acculturated into Western ideology will believe herself less than man: woman. She will see the phallic male and, according to the rules of Western ideology, she will know that the only way to truly gain the phallus is to become the mother of a son, whose penis she can acculturate to Western ideology and thereby gain the phallus to amend the lack (she never had). This complex game of “gain the phallus” works, of course, to man’s favor, because he can enjoy sexual intercourse with women (and men), but the added bonus of fucking a woman is that the women sometimes produces offspring that carry man’s impeccable (if he does say so himself) genes and, likely, his way of thinking about life. The female aspires to mother a boy child, and so she entertains whatever he does in order to have one, but she also receives pleasure from fucking, which is an instantly gratifying way to gain the phallus, if only temporarily. Persons choosing to step outside of the game of Western Ideology will no longer wish to gain the phallus, because the phallus exists only in simulacrum, an engorged, always-throbbing penis, superhuman (supermensch) in its performance strength and endurance and capable of producing offspring. Those persons outside of Western ideology participate in life by an entirely different set of rules, rules which sometimes overlap those of the Western world but often do not. Part of being in the “queer” zone outside of Western ideology is enjoying the freedom to express agency outside of gender. This expression can take the (per)form(ance) of anything the agent wishes or it can choose no(t to per)form.

Meditation on the Artist as Traumatized

The best and most creative artists, then, will need to have already undertaken the process of symbolically representing their most painful memories and of recording those symbolic representations in text, on canvas, in costume – however they choose or do not choose to reenact their preoccupation with death. The traumatized artist produces death-driven work, but the healed survivor, to use the cliché terms, produces life-driven, unfinalized art that necessarily comes from repeatedly accepting loss. The artist who has not always already accepted death, she who does not live her life in conscious, vigilant acceptance of death and therefore renewal from it, will not accept loss, and therefore cannot transcend that process to move on to accepting life. If Derrida tells us we must collapse the binary, then deconstruction is nihilistic only as long as the deconstructor stands in the suburb to his ruined city. But if the deconstructor, who is the trauma victim, sees his dis-construction and yet chooses to build from the ruins a new city, a city bracketed around the will of the individual, then can the individual at once stand both inside and out of the structure – insert your institution, establishment, or religion here – and be a master and a slave unto himself, even if at times to his split selves, in a cohesive way? Is there a way to congeal those multiple subjectivities into an unfinalizable, always already changed, and changing entity that both accepts and refuses a single structure and both accepts and refuses the multiplicity of structures? Is this utopia?

Lama Sabachthani

"Good Lord; the thing's finally done," she said, closing the laptop lid with three finger pads and lowering the sleek, black machine to the floor.

A black-brown kitten, nearly a cat, purred gracefully by, her head slightly smaller than her growing body demanded. Her brother, King Solomon, reached his curved mittens toward the edge of the sunlit desk he’d just cleared of all contents; they lay scattered on the carpet, along with a half-dozen, half-chewed dog toys, this week’s shoes, an overturned cat condo, and a laptop.

She snatched back the laptop, its fan whirring in protest, and opened the cover, it’s wide mouth revealing her link to the outside world. She got out; sure, everyone gets out. It was the week before midterm, which was the week before Spring Break, and she was six-weeks’ weary and ready to close her eyes for a while. Two years of graduate school brought it’s share of eye strain, but if you ask her, she’ll claim she “has vision loss” in her right eye, which is true, but so little loss had occurred; it didn’t warrant the drama.

Still, she bought all the eyeglasses paraphernalia: the tiny, tiny screwdriver that you lose if you lay down and can’t find without your glasses, which are dirty, so you clean them sixteen times a day, with a special cloth and spray that looks and smells like water but bubbles, so you pay $2.50 for a tiny, tiny bottle of it, warned each visit by the eye doctor that rubbing them dry will cause scratches. It’s ridiculous, but one pays a high price for vision; and she paid $100 for frames that made her look and feel like a hot schoolteacher.

Undergraduate Freedom

It's been only recently that I have understood the term "being present" in oneself. I never thought about it until probably last year, so I was 26 years old when I guess, you could say, I first realized that I wasn't fully present to myself. And as I age (and live), I see so much of me I've yet to question and carry toward salvation (by a God who lives in me and is me). Nihilism? Nietzsche, Whitman, Dylan, and me, I guess. According to some, it's possible, through religion, to find freedom amid these circumstances; it is to one's knees she should go to transcend the dialectic. I can't help but remember, since it's in my history and all, that I've tried going to my knees--in all possible senses of that phrase--and found myself perpetually shafted. Pardon me while I stand up.

On marriage, I have so little to say, and I guess that's because my marriages were both so short and destructive to my wellbeing that I am a bitter, jaded divorcee whose misery loves company and whose woe, I guess, would be me. In truth, if our present social gaiety could produce but a handful of truly happy marriages -- if they're Christian, that's even better, since they're free and all -- then I might reconsider God's omniscience and get back on my knees where I belong.

Probably not, since now I've totally fucked the whole concept up for myself and all reading. It gives an entirely dueterocanonical connotation to the art of geneflux.

Enough of this dribbling diatribe. I've a tower to shake.

Applicability of Trauma Theory

Barack Obama, in his 2006 New York Times #1 bestseller The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, candidly discusses politics in the United States. We enter his discussion in Chapter 1, "Republicans and Democrats":

And yet publicly it's difficult to find much soul-searching or introspection on either side of the divide, or even the slightest admission of responsibility for the gridlock. What we hear instead, not only in campaigns but on editorial pages, on bookstands, or in the ever-expanding blog universe, are deflections of criticism and assignments of blame. Depending on your tastes, our condition is the natural result of radical conservatism or perverse liberalism, Tom DeLay or Nancy Pelosi, big oil or greedy trial lawyers, religious zealots or gay activists, Fox News or the New York Times. How well these stories are told, the subtlety of the arguments and the quality of the evidence, will vary by author, and I won't deny my preference for the story the Democrats tell, nor my belief that the arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact. In distilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil cabal. Like all good conspiracy theories, both tales contain just enough truth to satisfy those predisposed to believe in them without admitting any contradictions that might shake up those assumptions. Their purpose is not to persuade the other side but to keep their bases agitated and assured of the rightness of their respective causes--and lure just enough new adherents to beat the other side into submission.

Of course, there is another story to be told, by the millions of Americans who are going about their business every day. . . . And because politics seems to speak so little to what they are going through--because they understand that politics today is a business and not a mission, and what passes for debate is little more than spectacle--they turn inward, away from the noise and rage and endless chatter. (24-25)

Despite of all of Obama's rage, he is still just a rat in a cage. Trauma theorists, if they haven't already, will dive into this text one day and find the lucid self-awareness of Douglass with a Clintonesque (Bill, not Hillary) political way with words. They'll also see Obama's description of traumatic dissociation, the "turn inward" he ascribes to the "millions of Americans who are going about their business every day." Postmodern intellectual Mikhail Epstein confronts this disproportion between what the world has to offer and what the individual can accept in his article, "Between Humanity and Human Beings: Information Trauma and the Evolution of the Species":

Two hundred years after Malthus, a new disproportion--no longer demographic but at least as explosive--has become conspicuous. The disproportion presently is between the collective producer of information and its consumer; in other words, between humanity and human beings. (18)

Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 published An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, was a contemporary of Charles Darwin. Malthus' interests were in the food shortage sure to occur with rapid proliferation of the species, but Epstein applies the logic to the world today which is fast-tracking on the information super highway. Epstein believes this hyperinformed way of life is the road to the overspecialization then destruction of our species. E. Ann Kaplan is another postmodernist dabbling in trauma theory in her 2005 book, Trauma Culture. Richard McNally, Dominick LaCapra, and Cathy Caruth, the three leading trauma theorists of our time, make it their livelihood to discuss trauma theory and its relevance to American society.

Obama invokes the major tenants of trauma theory in the short passage above. The certain type of trauma he discusses is betrayal trauma--when a person senses the betrayal of someone or some entity that he so needs to believe in or rely on, as would a child who is being sexually abused by his primary caregiver, that he dissociates from the reality of his mother's abuse and clings to the facade of her protection. Obama witnesses this betrayal trauma in the American populous, betrayed by a government we must also look to for protection and guidance.

Trauma theorists posit a way, though, to work through betrayal trauma and its relative, fear trauma, one that Obama must have stumbled onto as well, and one that America has since 9/11 witnessed exceedingly more of than most other times in history. In fact, the trauma narrative as a healing mechanism and way of acting out/working through dissociated trauma finds its roots in basic Freudian psychoanalysis--although people have been writing their trauma as a means of healing for far longer than that. An apt example of the trauma narrative--and ironic in that it was published simultaneously with Malthus' essay--is Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, or The Transformation, the first American gothic novel and, as deemed by some, the first American novel period.