From a colleague at Wayne State

My colleague and friend Nicole Coleman works on human rights and literature, and she just shared a beautiful blog post she wrote post-election.  A good reminder of why it is so important to teach, and to teach humanities, and post-humanities.

https://interculturalit.wordpress.com/2016/11/11/on-being-an-immigrant-a-woman-and-an-academic-after-the-election/

Thank you, Nicole!

Hello everyone, remember Our Own Private Canada?  I now live very close to the Canadian border. I can see Canada from my back yard, almost.  It is looking very pretty.

As I sit here this morning in shock, I thought I might just dream of Canada again, and remember that although this historical moment is no-analogue, I felt despair before. I don't know what that means just yet, but it's a start.

I hadn't actually looked at the blog for a long time, and see the epigraph by George Sand, regarding the "skillful use of words."  That's not really relevant this time around, so much.  Or maybe it is. Sigh, this tired mind has miles to go before she sleeps.

Can We?

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/CGBMy

I think I found it

Detroit = Canada?

conclave

I don't know about everyone else, but I've virtually been in Canada for a while, politically speaking, avoiding much news and certainly avoiding any reflection thereupon. But I just saw this article that so beautifully links papal politics to US politics in a divine conspiracy theory, and I couldn't resist. There's an extended metaphor about the far-right capitalistic conclave bubbling in the back of my head, I must admit. But my favorite part of the article is Ratzinger's suggestion that anyone who votes for a candidate who supports a woman's right to choose would be guilty of a "formal cooperation in evil." How to cooperate "informally" in evil, then? Since when has evil been formalized? Isn't formality antithetical to evil? As usual, I'm derailed by a merely anecdotal concern, though, when there are more important things at stake.

Check this out:

Washington - German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry.

In a June 2004 letter to US bishops enunciating principles of worthiness for communion recipients, Ratzinger specified that strong and open supporters of abortion should be denied the Catholic sacrament, for being guilty of a "grave sin."

He specifically mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws," a reference widely understood to mean Democratic candidate Kerry, a Catholic who has defended abortion rights.

The letter said a priest confronted with such a person seeking communion "must refuse to distribute it."

A footnote to the letter also condemned any Catholic who votes specifically for a candidate because the candidate holds a pro-abortion position. Such a voter "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for holy communion," the letter read.

The letter, which was revealed in the Italian magazine L'Espresso last year, was reportedly only sent to US Catholic bishops, who discussed it in their convocation in Denver, Colorado, in mid-June.

Sharply divided on the issue, the bishops decided to leave the decision on granting or denying communion to the individual priest. Kerry later received communion several times from sympathetic priests.

Nevertheless, in the November election, a majority of Catholic voters, who traditionally supported Democratic Party candidates, shifted their votes to Republican and eventual winner George W. Bush.

Biopolitics: bad

In honor of the news I am about to relate, and in the absence of any actual personal technological capabilities, I ask you to imagine that your screen has now turned to black, alarm bells have begun to sound from the tinny speakers of your computer, and the sky outside has suddenly become gray. If you can get a chill wind to whistle in your ears and imagine, somewhere, a cellar door banging futilely against its frame, better still.

Is the state working its way into our bodies? What if, somehow, our junior high indignation at the futuristic, apocalyptic landscapes of Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, ultimately anesthetized us to our present, making us unable to reconcile the fact that what we once would have recognized as an intolerable future is now practically our past? I begin with old news, but news which is new to me: one year ago, Giorgio Agamben cancelled a class he was scheduled to teach at NYU, citing the bio-political politics of the United States (specifically the fingerprinting of visa-holders arriving in the US after the institution of the Patriot Act) as the reason for his protest:

“There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.
“Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.
“What is at stake here is nothing less than the new ‘normal’ bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.
“These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.
“I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.”

Alarming enough on its own. And yet, a year later, there’s this report from NPR, which when initially I tried to recount out loud, sounded so ridiculous that I didn’t actually believe it could have been a news item:

“The Department of Homeland Security is experimenting with a controversial new method to keep better track of immigrants who are applying to remain in the United States. It is requiring aliens in eight cities to wear electronic monitors 24 hours a day.
“The ankle bracelets are the same monitors that some rapists and other convicted criminals have to wear on parole. But the government's pilot project is putting monitors on aliens who have never been accused of a crime.”

And all of the sudden, in a sort of mid-day hallucination, I remembered my eighth grade reading class and Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” So I ran to the internet to sigh at the wonderful, unforgivable resonance of the story. Coincidence that the beer-drinking protagonist speaking in consolatory terms is named George?:

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying?” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said,
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.“That’s my girl,” said George.

Academy Awards Daydream

Since I’m going to be watching the Oscars from Lancaster, PA, I was daydreaming the other day about the Amish Academy Awards, where host Julian Borntrager would refuse to appear on television, the red carpet would be brown canvas, and the only film nominated every year would be “Witness” (although officially none of the members of the Academy would ever have seen it).

But seriously (okay, not seriously), as I begin to feel that tug in my brain that wants to look forward to the ceremony but knows that I’m pretty much going to resent the whole thing, I consider...

Michael Moore tried to get Fahrenheit 911 into the best film category (and of course failed and is now nominated for nothing at all). But what if he’d succeeded, and we were headed towards a truly postmodern Academy which would recognize all things captured as moving images as cinema (and seriously, with satellites and surveillance cameras, I think we can include pretty much anything we can think of), all people responsible for them as directors, and anything funded by the U.S. as legit in the main catergories? This could get exciting.

Performance by an actor in a leading role: My favorite nominee is Viktor Yuschenko, but I would say there could be some hot competition for this one.

A shoe-in for best actress in a (very) supporting/ive role: Condoleeza Rice in the 9/11 hearings.

Silvia nominates Berlusconi for best actor in a (very) supporting/ive role, although Tony Blair and Chirac are also getting some votes.

Achievement in make-up: Berlusconi, for fantastic, socially responsible plastic surgery

Achievement in editing: Hello, obviously GW.

Achievement in music: Was it Dick Cheney who sang “As the Eagle Soars?” There’s gotta be a better nominee for this one.
Okay, obviously I got going in a political vein and didn’t ever get out of it. Any nominees, guys? Stay tuned…