2002-11-05 - 3:21 a.m.
Amazing how leaving a secretarial job will make sitting and typing at a computer possibly the least desirable thing imaginable. So, three weeks later, I'm still fighting the urge to flee from the glowing screen on the hideous cube in front of me. Anyway, I've been spending my unemployed time working on applications for graduate school, thinking about the impending apocolypse, and wondering why I'm doing the former because of the latter. The Mischievous Fruit Brigade, our sweet band of Northwest queerfreak hooligans, is reuniting after our fun fuck-shit-up anti-capitalist, anti-corporate Pride parade infiltration to begin addressing the topics of the end of the world, the quiet rise of the U.S. police state, and the ways that many of our bodies are increasingly becoming (or continuing to become) subject to state control in the ways that they are "wrongly" or incoherently raced, gendered, classed, able, marked, made, understood, cultured, and so on. It's really freaking my shit out, how about you? My friend A. just forwarded me a sordid tale (and of course just one of many) that narrates a Canadian citizen's attempt to travel into the U.S. She was born in Iran. Customs officials attempted to coerce her into being fingerprinted and photographed, at which point she decided not to go through with her trip to the U.S. For which, not so surprisingly, she was met by mounting and intimidating suspicion on the part of officials that she MUST then have something to hide.
I realize that these things happened before 9/11, that bodies marked in a variety of ways are policed in a variety of ways, especially at various kinds of borders. However, the consistency, the transparency of the racism, the predictability of who will encounter trouble seems to have grown exponentially. Perhaps it's only my perception, as a white person with the privilege of mobility, U.S. citizenship, and an able and not-too-strangely-gendered body. But the shift seems marked. And even more disturbing, it seems tolerated and even endorsed, both by the usual suspects and also, terrifyingly, by those who would label Japanese internment camps "fascist" and would consider Nazi Germany the spawn of Satan.
I would conjecture, and I think a number of people I've been talking to lately would agree, that the U.S.'s obsession with safety and danger has provided a fertile ground for state-sanctioned racist policy to take root. I have various feelings about Michael Moore, but I think he does a good job of pointing out multiple and fearfully deep layers upon layers of oppression. I saw "Bowling for Columbine," and even though it inspired some of these apocolyptic moments I've been experiencing lately, I'd recommend it. In his death/doom/destruction made sharper by humor kind of style, he takes on the question of U.S. violence and obsession with safety. It provides an interesting window through which to view the border gatekeeping (for one example) that the U.S. is engaging in in new and increasingly oppressive and militaristic ways.
So... the Fruit Brigade is thinking of doing an end of the world skillshare, in which we learn how to can things, grow things, make pedal-powered washing machines and big bike trailers. Any other ideas? Anyone know any good apocolypse jokes?
On a lighter note, I went to a really fun costume party last week, as post-Judas Priest post-coming out as a homo Rob Halford, with a new job at the circus sucking the balls out of cannons. And in the process, I think I gave myself a new idea for a job... I may pitch it to the circus. Of course, I'll go to my interview flagging light blue, in the left pocket.
Canning pinenuts in the forest,
Boots
