naming the other's face

that we choose to call them terrorists, that terror is the dominant face, mode, mood. if we say it saddens us, depresses us, rather than terrifies, how may 'we' differently act; or, even, what might it take to just acknowledge the simple panicked, feeling (& yet also the need & finding of refuge) of the desire for pure animal's flight-

a mood does not belong to parcellable time-- hence the condemnation of the holocaust-denier, but no equivalent condemnation of the imperialism/colonialism-denier; or the fact that slavery was unfortunate history (& hence & thus fortunately passed), but no term exists for the perpetualism of the racism-denier, for (s)he who denies that race pervades us still

2. a key political question for the next half century & beyond is if the united states (& to a lesser extent the eurostate) will accept to peacefully & non invasively, non abrasively decline-peace depends on all countries' maturity on this-& india, china, etc would do well to accept that we are going to be very largely very poor for much longer, for centuries perhaps, a longer period than anyone's decline

no more human

no more names only digital bacterial colonies of spam, unable to unite all our pseudonyms or remember our passwords or credits, a new cyberfolk accelerating expanding discontinuous nervous system, the i of the creator-publisher not cremated but whose ash is the giving food to that spam that bacteria this is our rigid immortality in the fossil's ice wombcave from & through whose tunnelling we set out to hunt & gather & pin down our/the future

visualizing militia-rizations

1. what would the french revolution have been without the photographeable quality of the guillotine, the dramatic rolling heads (for those with silk who would have cake), arguably the most famous image even if it was primarily a linguistic one, & so contrastive to the non-image of lenin's visage of that other revolutions( even with the later compensatory construction worker's abdomen)-& gandhi's immobile mug shot, how do you photograph a fasting, but monks do erupt in spheres of fire

2. india is going to be like pakistan- a permanent state of civil war, what difference does it make, swat valley or jharkand, taliban or naxals?-so we are the schiz'ed brothers yet. this developing world- guerillas in forests vs paramilitary etc, is different from militia-(r: am bracketing to make visual the sandhi )ized parts of LA, only in that in the latter there are no trees. as a political space they are the same, the same relation of state-power, cops, army, mafias, state & local financings, visual & imaginary spaces they occupy to the aliens (ie us the outsiders, journalists, social workers, adhd romantics..)

3. the leverage of the political is the ability to read, up-equilibrate crime as a political statement

4. india is going to america america this first half of the 21c just as america america'd europe from the post war period-to uncork this fact would be the fundamental challenge of reading this 1/2 of the century. (& then also play it against china, arab-turk worlds, muslim s asia, etc-)

5. politics is the exo skeleton our flesh can't quite grow into

democracy

at worst is the downward spiral of competitive darwinian minority-isms. there has to be another way of negotiating than finding the aggrieved minority you're from, (or being defensive against such aggrievement if you're locked in the position of "majority")- this can't be satisfying, making enemies where you don't always regard them so-

2. in india, the public, the anywhere is a prospective space for mayhem. for in the military democracy we live in, any "event"- be it even ever so trivial as a professor's lecture,being "public" is full of security, redundant as india is with labor, even of the security kind. but the street outside, or this side of the metal detector, is available for violence, and will be considered as condemnable, but not strictly speaking a security breach.