Recording Surface

In what’s become a springtime ritual, the Austin Police Department last month shot and killed a black man in East Austin, this time an eighteen-year-old who was sleeping in his car at the time. (more…)

I watched the Clinton-Obama debate last night, the first one I’ve tuned in for. It’s pretty funny to see the two of them trying to convice people that there are actual differences between them when clearly there aren’t: both are DLC-beholden, centrist Bill Clinton-oids. Which is to say, ideal CEOs of the neoliberal state. The candidates themselves think that their positions on health care are, as Obama said last night, “substantively different.” Indeed. Clinton’s plan makes people who are unemployed or don’t receive insurance from their employers buy government insurance that they can’t afford so that they can pay copays they can’t afford so that they can maybe eventually receive care from a doctor. Obama wouldn’t make people buy government insurance and take on the burden of premiums and copays, but if they don’t and they show up at an emergency room to receive treatment, they will be fined, severely, as he made clear last night. These are the politics that are inspiring such great passion among Democrats this year.

(As an aside, it’s hilarious to hear Clinton rail against medical profiteering, since the lone accomplishment of her health-care reforms of the early 90s was to set in motion the process by which HMOs and drug companies, those mind-bogglingly profitable administrators of life and death in the United States, came to rule the delivery of health care.)

Some people think it’s significant that the two finalists for the Democratic nomination are a woman and a black man. Apparently the candidates don’t, as race and sex seem to be off-limits topics for them. That is, unless you count Obama’s passing references to his growing up without a father (read: I’m just like every other black person) or Clinton’s intimations about her essentially nurturing nature (read: I’m just like every other woman) as vigorous discussions of race and sex. Obviously, I do think race and sex are significant, but the discursive terrain on which this discussion is taking place is so debased and idiotic — Clinton’s voters and supporters are racists, and Obama’s voters and supporters are sexists — that it’s hard to find any purchase that doesn’t entail buying into the banality. The debate about the intersections of race and sex inspired by Clinton-Obama, a debate that should be about difference and dissenion, has already, in its singular way, erased difference and dissension. It’s now about who is the better American.

The Thomas Frank inside of me wants to get worked up about the awfulness of the Democrats. But that would be insincere. They are, after all, just doing their job. It would be like getting angry at leopards because they have spots.

Famous Names edition: (more…)

Is Lisa Nowak the exact inverse of Laci Peterson, the social imaginary’s uppity yang to latter’s natural yin? If Peterson was virginal–her pregnancy seemed very much by immaculate conception–and passive, the almost blank, nonresistant surface on which deviant (understanding the abnormality is essential) male desire was written, Nowak is the career woman who went too far, who could not manage the modulation of her manlike discipline and accomplishments between the public and the private. This is the substance of her psychosis.

For the past few years, I haven’t been scouring The New York Times on a daily basis like I used to; mostly now I just skim if I read it all. (Noam Chomsky is surely disappointed in me.) (more…)

I take it as a sign of deep consternation in elite circles that in the year of Katrina, Cronulla, riots in the banlieus, London bombings, man-worsened natural disasters in southeast and central Asia, floundering primitive-accumulation projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a rejected EU constitution, to name just a few of the crises, Time magazine has with its Person of the Year designation assured us that the wealthy and powerful–in the form of the world’s richest man, his wife, and the world’s most important pop star (whose politics may now be even more insufferable than his music)–do indeed care about the well-being of the sick and poor. Ugh. They must be desperate.

There’s another front-page article today in The New York Times about how the American working class is made up of a bunch of racist assholes. As usual, the evidence for such a thesis is sketchy, but that doesn’t stop it from being advanced with great conviction. (more…)