be the change you want to see in the world

If the rumors are true, and Britain was engaged in false flag operations in Basra and got caught, to what end would they be doing so? It just may be that the Occupiers now see that only Saddam had the capability of holding Iraq together, and inciting Shia populations in Basra and elsewhere through false flag ops will harden the calls for an autonomous region in the south. But this kind of thing never happens, does it? Nobody wants Iraq to break up, do they? To whose advantage would that be?

Yesterday I returned to academics after a thirteen year hiatus. I have been granted the privilege of auditing a graduate-level seminar lead by Dr. Arthur Kroker. Dr. Kroker is a widely acknowledged Canadian theorist, and, with his wife Mariloise, is editor of the venerable and now entirely on-line journal ctheory.

Six years ago a film took the pop culture world by storm. It was called The Matrix. Everyone thought this film was about the Internet and our virtual future. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Matrix was about the Body. The most important moment in the Matrix is the one that confused people the most. It is the moment when Morpheus and his followers locate Neo’s pod on the great biochemical power grid that supports the machine world.

Sitting in the room with the mirror, Morpheus offers Neo the choice of a red or blue pill. The pills are little trojan horse software programs. One would fix Neo so he can live a quiet life on the Matrix and not be bothered by the things that keep him up at night. The other will help him to “see how far the rabbit hole really goes.” In other words, it will free him from the Matrix and help him see the world as it really is. In the words of Morpheus, “The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

This was the key theoretical insight that drove much of cultural and political theoretical praxis in the nineties. The Matrix was the Foucauldian paradigm of power - not the power of violence and death at the hands of the King, but the power of dominant disourses and disciplines to achieve confomative compliance. As with the Matrix, deviance is dealt with as a programming problem. Read more

In pro wrestling the bad guy usually gets down on his knees at some point, begging the good guy to stop beating on him. The good guy, being good, usually relents, only to be sandbagged by the bad guy as soon as he lets down his guard.

Politics is like that as well. When one politician is saying “don’t play politics” with an issue or event, it usually means that politician is vulnerable and hasn’t come up with a strategy.

The strategy only works when political commentary can be rightly construed as gaming. The Katrina situation is no game, and Bush cannot escape criticism for real and devastating decisions taken by his administration that directly impacted the outcome of Katrina’s landfall.

The Newhouse News Service article published Tuesday night observed, “The Louisiana congressional delegation urged Congress earlier this year to dedicate a stream of federal money to Louisiana’s coast, only to be opposed by the White House. … In its budget, the Bush administration proposed a significant reduction in funding for southeast Louisiana’s chief hurricane protection project. Bush proposed $10.4 million, a sixth of what local officials say they need.”

This is a very complex story of betrayal. Betrayal of half a million Americans living in direct threat of a hurricane-related catastrophe that has now been realized. The tax cuts and Iraq-related budgetary redirections have now come home to roost.

So it is not “playing” politics to insist that Bush be immediately and relentlessly held to account for his direct failings with regard to the Katrina disaster. It is simply good politics. Politics in the interest of America. Politics that aims to right wrongs and prevent further neglect and catastrophe.

It is “playing” politics to simply lie to the American people about what engineers had been telling the whitehouse for years. Bush said on Monday:

“I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees. They did appreciate a serious storm but these levees got breached and as a result much of New Orleans is flooded and now we’re having to deal with it and will,” he said.

Holy shit. This is just about as good as Clinton’s “what the meaning of the word is is”. Bush will say he was talking about breaching (i.e. breaking) the levees, not topping them. Now that’s playing politics. And that’s disgraceful.

Hurricane Katrina

There must be a way for Americans to have a discussion about political issues. Right now they don’t speak to each other. Right now there are two camps, light years apart, speaking to their own supporters. Unfortunately, the people who want to know why the US went to war in Iraq are losing the framing battle.

A great example of this is the headline on the top progressive news website in the US, Raw Story. At the time of this writing, the headline on the site reads “War backer: ‘If we pull out, every death would be in vain’.” This is a perfect and really sad instance of letting your opponent frame the debate.

Bush is taking time from his vacation to speak to friendlies and deliver the message that to cut and run would be a big mistake. It would. He’s right. The Iraq occupation is underway and it needs an endgame that doesn’t see the country slide into chaos. The US does not have that endgame in hand, nor is it likely they will achieve it on their own. Nor should this horrid and violent nation-building project ever be considered a moral success, regardless of the long-term outcome.

At the same time Bush is characterising opposition to the Iraq war as a willingness to give in to “terra” and to allow the war to come to American soil. Iraq has nothing to do with that. Never did. And the best the born again Iraq war booster Christopher Hitchens could do last night on The Daily Show in support of that thesis was to point out that al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war started. So what? al Zarqawi did not threaten to come to America prior to the war, though his name has been linked to practically every major terrorist event in the Middle East of late. Hitchens should know better. Or, maybe not.

The great tragedy in all this is that progressives let Bush and his camp frame the debate by literally publishing their opponents’ talking points in bold headlines. Bush hands them a loaded gun and they point it at their own foot and pull the trigger. Wake up people. At least take control of your own side of the non-debate.

And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. - Bono, prophetically referring to the thousands of songs on my iPod.

Social networking technologies inherent in many of the more popular Internet services like Google, Amazon, Flikr, Delicious, Technorati and others are beginning to form the infrastructure for the emergence of a new form of flash religion.

Religious texts are typically a compilation of wisdoms, prejudices and other dictums designed to simulate a comprehensive whole that guides us. They tell us how to Be. Nothing new there. Modernity replaces the religious text with scientific papers, opinion pieces and political rhetoric. Post-modernity replaces those with consumer narratives: operationalise your life with a spectrum of semiotically linked purchases that identify, adorn and enable participation in the ritual of Being.

In all previous forms, the religious text was rooted in authority. The scientist. The editor. The commentator, critic or analyst. These priests occupied privileged posts on the econet (the communications grid that enables the dissemination of the knowledge of “how to be”). The mass deferred to the few, and largely governed themselves accordingly. The irruption of Individual dissent was generated off-line and, once popularized, absorbed through a process of operationalised and marketed deviance. In other words, it was brought into the mainstream as a gutted and re-valued commodity.

Now we live in a time where communications technologies are allowing us all to speak with each other simultaneously. Clearly this din is incomprehensible without some form of filtering. We began with buddy lists and favourites. We collected things in folders and drives. We hoarded our markers and bits of wisdom on our PC and hoped we were getting “the best” of it. Read more