roachboy

i would like to echo the last sentence in mantus's post above--i think it really important:

judging by reports i have heard so far and by reading through today's guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

it is most interesting to hear of london commuters simply taking back the transit system symbolically from the implications of yesterday's action.

hysteria and paranoia are not the only possible responses to this kind of event.

hysteria and paranoia are only reasonable if you think of the possibilities offered the public for thinking about itself, the world and the relations between the two through the lens provided by the bush administration's particular discourse of "terror"

taking back the transit system from the implications of yesterday's attack is, if you think about it, a far more reasonable approach than "batten down the hatches everyone--stay indoors and watch tv--look out for suspicious people and report them--but try to modulate the racist correlate of the category "terrorist" by not doing anything too obvious to your muslim neighbors--- mostly wait for draconian security measures, invasive domestic legislation and an irrational militarization of social relations coupled with an arbitrary but manly foriegn policy--
WE WILL TAKE CARE OF IT.


the category "terrorist" is an empty signifier...it does not permit of analysis--it is not about analysis, it is about its opposite---it is about fear and passivity and a logic of handing control to the people your tv tells you Know what is Going On. They know. You do not have to.

the category "terrorist" is not about understanding anything: it is about isolation.
it is not about the process of collective response (taking back the transit system is a collective response--it did not require tv to co-ordinate) but rather about its opposite.

if the category terrorist is not descriptive, does that mean that it is meaningless?
no....
the discourse of terror is about--and coherently about--only one thing: the preferred mode of power for this administration.
isolated, shut up indoors, watching television, afraid, unable to parse the situation, absolutely unable to link such attacks to anything about american policy, which like capitalism becomes in this scenario an unqualified good---the discourse of "terror" has become the supporting structure of an authoritarian type of politics, one with the particular quirk of liking to brag about how free it is. hardly an unprecedented combo.
but none of this is necessary.
it is a choice.
it is the choice made by this administration in the days following 9/11/2001.
"terrorism" has been the bush administrations' necessary opposite since.
it has kept them in power.
that is what it is about--not an analysis of the facts of the matter, not an explanation for why such actions might be mounted, not the basis for a coherent response to such attacks. it is about fear. it is about routing fear into a consent for an authoritarian politics. it is about maintaining that consent.

it leans on particular features of american social life and its organization:
for example, the isolated house and the isolated nuclear family, the bizarre and central role played by tv in producing a sense of community and a sense of interaction with a wider context.

i think americans have alot to learn by simply watching londoners respond--not the blair government, but people, who are doing a far better job already in fashioning a rational response which does not preclude a desire to know why this happened and who did it, but at the same time does not translate these desires into an abdication of their own sense of their own city.

what you see in the mirror of these attack in london from the states is just how bizarre the states have become under george w bush and karl rove and the rest of the apparatchiks that pull the strings in the theater of reactionary meat puppets that is bushworld.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite