A New Year

I was surprised to encounter such a Long Sunday silence...a respite for the holidays? A too long Sunday? Or, a kind of reflective repose, contemplating the year that has passed and the year ahead?

Well, I'm ready to disrupt even the thought of contemplation and begin the noisy, pointless, bitching that displaces politics under communicative capitalism. For starters, the world is not better off with the death of Saddam Hussein...or Gerald Ford, for that matter, and the parallels and parallaxes between them are not trivial either. The Iraqi 'government' and 'people' have executed someone for crimes against humanity. In the US, such criminals are pardoned....and later can be lauded as elder statesmen. And, note, the pardon, while constitutional, is a kind of singular, personal act, marking less the exceptional position of the sovereign than the necessary position of the person, the vulnerable human or mark of ideological distance that proves successful interpellation. So, Ford was a man while Saddam was a monster...and a monster created in part through the machinations (machinic production?) of, if not Ford himself, then those around him--Rumsfeld, Cheney.

More important: those around Ford (Rumsfeld, Cheney) resisted the kind of presidency he inhabited and which was being transformed by the post-Watergate Congress, a limited presidency, one more checked (if still unbalanced), one subject to inquiry and investigation. Their rage at such limits inspired the disastrous transformations of the office under George W. Bush, transformations figured by the hanging of Hussein--the spectacle of a former image of evil, inert and lifeless, a meaningless death accompanied by ever more pointless violence and excess mediality.