Intermission.

The Impossibility of Race

We are told it is the era of the post-Race; an era evincing the tying off of another antagonistic thread; a time, moreover, for the Nation to reclaim its ethical destiny, casting the blight of the Bush regime into the same grand burial plot of Richard Nixon and other exceptional imposters of national spirit; an era finally of the return of importance, of the central issues of economic stability and personal wealth, to John Stuart Mill and Horatio Alger, of happiness maximization and the adage that hard work makes us free.

Though convincing as this narrative may seem, the Thersites in many of us is hampered by the slightest sense of intuitive unease. Despite the repetition of Act 1, Scene 1, Race is exploding.

It is exploding Everywhere for some, Nowhere for others.

For the believers of Everywhere, racism is not simply felt. It is a suffocatingly ubiquitous assault on all our senses. For our memory, the countless Obama caricatures, Freudian images recalling the outrageously hateful spirit of 19th Century Punch. For our sense of history, Obama, the NAACP, and a segregated Philadelphia swimming pool. For our entertainment, the endless creation of black criminals on the evening news. For our sense of geography, the mad races of the Sudan and Afghanistan killing each other over abstractions or the chance to rule completely.

For the asserters of Nowhere, there is no sense. The persistence of such things is simply a vestige of a dead past, the death rattle of a historic time made null by the repetition of our very first Act. For them, the real problem lies in the remonstrations of every little Thersites, every agitator, every agonistic madman finding pleasure in archaeology, in the digging up of the dead past, in the disturbance of our suburban tranquility.

It is here where we must return to our scene above. Race, in this sense antagonism, is only found in two places - one, in the direct scenes of violence where our Hero viciously smites his prey and two, in the recurrent shrieks and gasps of the dead and dying.

The direct violence – the slavery and brutality, the transformation of trees with human limbs and strange fruit, sharecropping and the feudal face of early Southern capitalism, economic discrimination - has come and gone from the American stage. For the asserters of Nowhere, this going was reached through agreement like democracy itself. While signed in blood on the floor of some Appomattox replica, the settlement was seemingly an equal agreement between two former foes. For them it is America who is the wisest. During the Civil War, He fought for his soul and the soul of those He devoured. In the middle half of the 20th century, his courts of justice and his president’s acts made the move for desegregation. Now in his final move, his citizens have voted in droves for a man of mixed blood.

But this score has not been settled simply from above. The vanquished too have agreed, choosing America as their adopted Father and heeding his belief in the value of work. For the Nowheremen, there is no need to revisit this scene

It is the Everywheremen that keep persisting. To them, the indirect violence, the shrieks and gasps of the dead and dying still lay un dealt with, like the heart ever pumping in Poe’s rotten walls. It is the chorus who is crazy, deaf, dumb, and blind. At this the believers in Everywhere grow increasingly frustrated. But the more they flail about, the more insane to the chorus they appear. It is they who are treated as the problem, not the problem itself.

It is through this process that Race becomes impossible.

Semblance

To survive, the first step is to transform this peace-loving wolf into a bloodthirsty lamb.

The Belly of the Flock

The Chicken's Egg

Which came first? The caricature or the ad?

My name is Josef K or Reading Badiou on the Way to Work

Britain is a frightening place.

I say this not as a student of those great British thinkers ever fearful of the erosion of beautiful British tradition by the continual explosion and proliferation of terroristic modern violence. I can no more be Lord Acton wary of the despotic tendency of democracy than Martin Amis disgusted at the victory of Islamism over Islam - as if the two independently exist independently.

Nor do I express my fear as a global North American - no, the irony of delusional Islanders posing as global citizens is not at all lost in that statement - appalled at the otherness posing as pure similarity that We (the people) find in most European social democracies. I cite here, as an empiricist, a recent Facebook posting of one of my high school friends giddy at the thought of tackling a British visitor and forcing them to imbibe American sand. Freedom through consumption, how novel!

I speak neither as the Big Other - the opaque émigré hulking malevolently in crates, boxes, and other plague infested vestibules perpetually kneeling to the guards of tolerance who gleefully round them up into virtual Palestines around the globe.

And finally I do not twist my lips in painstaking mimicry of British liberals, independent guardians of rights - namely women’s rights in totalitarian nowheres. I am incapable here of deploring the destruction of the idyllic Tolkeinian countryside – having recently escaped to that last bastion with the aid of Kirstie Allsopp – while simultaneously and masochistically accepting the inevitability of the friendliest of enemies, David Cameron.

I do however speak as someone. Someone endowed with the dual dead values of Enlightenment modernity, impossibility and base ethics. Someone fairly universal in my rote civility, my conception of wider consequence, and my understanding of ends as ends without end.

I speak therefore as a criminal.

Stricken, as I am, with an insidious fear that courses through my veins when the Boss, in whatever form the Boss may take, appears unexpected.

Compelled, as I am, to act without knowledge of the root of my compulsion or the form of my action.

Plagued, as I am, by the absurdity of assimilating into a social order that is neither social nor orderly.

Fearful, as I am, at the growing suspicion that this State that makes its most innocuous residents criminals, is the prototype for the impending state of things.

We have made Britain, we must now make criminals.

And you thought American politicians hated politics

Cynthia McKinney Strikes Again

A-Town Down

Why do Brits love the most random Americans? I mean, prior to their fortuitous meeting with NME, Kings of Leon were regarded as little more than a cringe-worthy Creed cover band. Plus how many of you remember the Hiss? I only do because they went from playing abandoned shows in suburban America to touring with Oasis. Everytime I see Hockey on Jools Holland or Seasick Steve at the FA cup, it gives big in Japan a whole new Atlantic bent. There is one band worthy of such lottery-winning circumstance. Plucked from relative obscurity out of dregsy Atlanta haunt Lennys, the band most likely to pull an R Kelly and piss in your beer, the Black Lips, return to London to serve up a free DJ set at Rough Trade East. Bring a copy of Black Swan and learn the real value of randomness.

Falling Up

Unlike Will-i-am, Mos Def is actually falling up.

Most rappers who disappear into the cold, dark chasm of wackness - Common twice, Large Professor, Q Tip, PE, Snoop, Kweli - only seem capable of falling further. Surprisingly, the man who most lost his way has returned from the hacked-up corpse of fame to produce an album of inspiration.

It doesn't hurt that he and I are into the same shit - Malcolm X's post-Nation internationalism, Baris Manco's Turkish psychedelia, Fela, Potencorvo's Battle of Algiers. It also doesn't hurt that he's rapping again.

Your turn Goodie MOB.