roachboy

style note: probably the most irritating legacy of the o.j. simpson trial is the popularization of that meaningless construction:

"to play the x card..."

end style note. the post:

in samcol's post above, this tedious, empty phrase functions as if it use alone constitutes an understanding and containment of a particular critique. so it is that the idea behind the post is essentially to disable recourse to a category--xenophobia--which in the case of posters like samcol is a prefectly legitimate way of characterizing such logic as there is behind trying to get explanatory mileage out of cho's resident alien status as if that would in some bizarre-o world make him more inclined to snap and go around shooting people. the claim is idiotic.

again, all this is about trying to find some peculiar "not one of us" status for this guy--an operation that has nothing at all to do with understanding anything, nothing to do with questions of what, if anything, would constitute a rational response to the vt murder/suicide, nothing to do with anything except insofar as if feeds into some pathetic ideological illusion that there is an amurica of "normal righteous folk" who would never snap, would never indulge acts of arbitrary violence, and then there are those Others, those Fucked Up People who explain any and all disturbances to the otherwise perfect harmonious world of "real amuricans".

this is a really problematic way of seeing this fiction of the "us" or "amurica" or the nation--what it functions to do is establish the conditions of possibility for efforts to cleanse the body amurican of disordered folk---because there is no "us" there is no coherent boundary to be defended--but the illusion that there is one is enough to set up consent for attempts to maintain it in its "order" in its "virtue" in its "purity"--and so you get to see the same retro-nationalism that we all know and love so bloody much turning up again here, in debates around a situation that has fuck all to do with it.



the only reason that there is any objection to the category of xenophobia here is as an attempt to block the laying out of the logic behind such moves in this (or any) context because once you lay out the logic, its idiocy is transparent.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite