Nothing personal

I got a work email earlier this week exhorting us to celebrate the good news that my employer just received its largest ever capital fund donation. Meanwhile the colleague in the office right next to mine is being laid off due to a supposed budget shortfall. The other day I overheard a student, one I had in class this term, a real gem in all the ways students can be so, telling this colleague with excited sincerity how inspiring they found the colleague’s class.

No love for Biden, far from it, but his remark is on point here, for both its insights and its limits: “don't tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.” I think part of the point of budgeting, and of a great deal else in this hellworld, is to help the powerful to avoid admitting to themselves what their values are, or to help them continue to be people who don't notice that they don't have values at all. As Oscar Wilde put it, "a cynic is someone knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing." Another colleague calls it spreadsheet ontology - nothing exists to the cynics and philistines except what can be calculated in Microsoft Excel, no values except the budget.

Sometimes I wonder if we're under threat of drowning in our disgust, and sometimes I think that'd be okay, especially if the torrent of disgust were to take some of the hellscape out with it. 

What Follows?

 I

I think it will be a day to mourn, 

When we’ll have to smoothen and free from contradiction’s

Friction this cartographed ice rink. 

It will be a day to mourn, I think,

When we’ll have to flatten to one tone

The manifold wavelets of the sea.

It will, I think, a day to mourn be,

When only charred zip-ties remain to link

Then’s us to today’s wanderers forlorn.

II

CLAUDE ULLMANN, DIT “LE MASQUE”

EUT LE TEMPS D’AVALER SA PILULE

DE CYANURE, LE 8 NOVEMBRE 1943 . . .

III

Vernichtung.

Wayward scarves, mumbling but unmistakably 

Palestinian,

Torn away and bundled; paraphernalia of 

apparat eroding.

We, as students of a certain economic and

social standing–

Sentence you to the stake and to

insomnia. 

There is a growing rumbling within 

earshot,

And if you aren’t careful it’ll sting

and you won’t know how.

IV

GUILLAUME VERMERSCH, 

DIT “LE BISON” FUT DÉCAPITÉ 

À LA HACHE DANS UNE PRISON

ALLEMANDE LE 16 DÉCEMBRE 

1943 . . .

V

There is no guarantee that it will happen. 

No guarantee that the waters will obey the

leader of the Petroleum Division, no 

guarantee that impersonally consigned

murder will stop dusting the aged corners

of a blood-lusty shape, no guarantee

that any separation within one life 

is possible, no guarantee that the

world as we know it will one day be as 

we don’t.

VI

LUC JARDIE MOURUT

SOUS LA TORTURE

LE 22 JANVIER 1944,

APRÈS AVOIR LIVRÉ

UN NOM: LE SIEN . . .

VII

Somewhere one must make the choice 

and make not like reality, 

unreliably relayed by deft tellers daft 

about congruence, but like figures from a play.

Make like Melville’s shadows, know that

even breaths are inscribed in the tapestry 

of life’s endless reweighting 

and breathe, without guarantees,

against the deafening exhales 

of a pessimism rooted in collective fear. 

VIII

ET LE 13 FÉVRIER 1944,

PHILIPPE GERBIER DÉCIDA, 

CETTE FOIS·LÀ, DE NE PAS 

COURIR . . .

IX

in the summer, you can’t see your breath leave your mouth

neither is the December cold cold enough in some places

you don’t refuse to breathe do you

aurora

 the northern lights were seen in the skies tonight

 i saw the pictures online

the colors seemed unreal beside 

images of slaughter

i had no words to describe

the aching feeling inside

tremble and falter

am told it takes a century

to find humanity's groove

but how come it still has not been found

after all the trying?

ljubljana eviction dispatch

 Three of my friends were evicted this year. It was almost four, but cruelty and her accomplice the market seemed to agree that three was enough. The evictions were the quiet kind. Legal and common. The rent went up. Arguments were had and lost. Suitcases rolled across pavement. Furniture was vivisected and distributed in backseat trips. Cash was handed off under the table to whoever would rent at four years ago's prices. 

Cut to me and two of my friends in a little white sedan, borrowed, heading West from Ptuj after Easter, pulling into Ljubljana, evading the exit-sign trickery of the ring road. The main boulevard of Šiška, Celovška cesta, is a clever bit of socialist-era propaganda concealing a deeper truth of tightly-packed houses on nonsensical streets. After three left turns, only my friend who lived there knew where we were. We pulled up to two houses. One was brightly painted yellow, with new windows. 

"The yellow one?" asked my other friend, who was driving. 

"No, the other one," my friend replied, deadpan. The other house could be described as brown and careworn. A woman stood outside keeping watch with the true mien of a busybody.

"The landlady," my friend noted, half into his jacket. "She lives downstairs." He left us then. From my view in the passenger seat, he stood up and became only his trench coat.

A few weeks prior, he moved there. He used to live in one of the Yugoslav-era apartment buildings in the city center, a square, concrete tower, nicely articulated with orange accents under the balconies. It shared a courtyard with Sigmund Freud University, a psychology school whose bona fides always remained unclear to us despite the grandiose name, and therefore became the butt of a long-running joke. That his rent held out as long as it did is in itself a miracle. The building is visible from the market squares and main riverside corridors rendered insufferably postcard-like by the tourist board. The nearby anarchist squat in the old Rog Bicycle Factory was illegally evicted by police during the pandemic so the complex could be turned into a product-oriented makerspace with an expensive tapas bar on the far end. Leftist friends from out of town asked me to meet them there once, none the wiser. The transformation was that complete. Even the International Whisper Network of Problematic and Cancelled Places had faltered. The spatial juxtapositions of the New Ljubljana are often violent and jarring in this way, not unlike listening to news on the radio, where traffic updates and advertisements for lipstick are rattled off after a sober five-minute report on the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and now here's Evenflow by Pearl Jam...

I identified the building with my friend. His bike, once made in that same bicycle factory, used to be parked outside by the stairs, chained to the railing. Once he told me the bathroom sink had come detached from the wall and a new one had to be installed, was sealed with a horrifically pungent and perhaps dangerous sealant. I remember a picture of him and his roommate with a suspiciously sourced washing machine on a dolly sent via WhatsApp at three in the morning. I remember the IKEA table in the galley kitchen in front of the huge window that overlooked the sycamores or whatever they call them over there. Plane trees, parched from the now-annual summer drought. I remember the cobwebs and the little switches that didn't work right. How it got hot as shit in there during the summer. The shoes piled in the entryway. It was impossible to think that he could be detached from that building. The building had become every bit a part of him as his glasses or the trendy shoes I had shipped from America, or his conspiratorial, knowing smile, his fabulous timing in conversation, his sometimes irritating penchant for being very, very mysterious. 

Right before he moved, we stood at one in the morning in the courtyard, damp from one of Ljubljana's famous yet increasingly rare fogs. I was crying thinking about this very situation. He said to me, with the dispassion of someone bereft of a choice: Everything ends. This too. That night was the last moment of the city as I knew it, the city I'd first experienced all those years ago and made a home out of. Everything that came after that moment took place in a city just like every other in the world in which everyone is tired of fighting against the inevitability of their disappearance or the disappearance of their friends, a city in which one feels the hostility of neoliberalism in the listless stares of their own reflections as seen from the curtain walls of the new and expensive, where the bars and venues dry up and the protests get sanitized. Where design launders displacement and tourism strangles every street to the point where, from the months of May through September one cannot even ride a bike in Prešeren Square.

My friends think of moving away so as to abstain from all this, their apartments finally leased to higher value tenants. They hang on the seductive notion that, somewhere off in the distance, one can spend less than the 51% of their income that on average goes towards rent in Ljubljana. My friends talk about moving to Gorizia, to Maribor, to Berlin which is even worse than Ljubljana, even to America, which to my trained eye is somehow milder when it comes to housing crises. But life keeps us tethered where we are regardless if whether we are convenient for our landlords, and so, fantasies aside, my friends instead move outward into the vague periphery, adrift on a strong tide. Rudnik, deep non-boulevard Šiška, the inter-zone between Moste and Fužine.

My other friend who got evicted moved into the same building as his parents. The landlord from his childhood, now a senior citizen, makes him pays four times as much as them. The third friend who got evicted, from a tower not that far from that of my first friend, went to go live in Kranj with his girlfriend. He commutes by train now, leaves every party by nine. He and his girlfriend didn't want to live together so soon but he needed to be out of his old flat by the end of the month. His landlady was renovating it into an AirBnB. He thinks so little of his new situation that he hasn't committed to fully unpacking his boxes. Two of the three apartments my friends were evicted from remain empty. The third is, of course, under construction. My friends' buildings are less architecture than they are ghosts, haunting the landscape, form without a soul. When I walk around corners, there they are, absent of an old comfort, reminding me.

Me and my friend, the first one I mentioned, went to McDonald's shortly after he moved. I'd bought him a housewarming gift, a woodcut of Ljubljana houses in an expressionist style, which I found at an antique shop and framed courtesy of IKEA. On the back I wrote, may both of us never have to move again. He took it from me, read the inscription, only to then inform me that his landlady was already trying to raise his rent and that he planned to move again as soon as possible. In the apartment, there was poor heat, no internet (or even the infrastructure for internet), no oven, and no room for his desk by the window in the cramped, awkwardly shaped room. He looked down at the picture, his eyes scanning the houses depicted, solid and stark on the page. I probably should have gotten him a different gift.  

prairie sky 4

LOOK AT THAT CLOUD... its like a being. 

Prairie sky 3

Find the cat

Performance (A Dissection)

 It would be pedantic of me(I'm not a linguist) to reach for every definition or root of the word, which is why we will just be sticking with a contrast of two forms of it; Performance and Performative.

The two work against one another, since the former seeks to be positive i.e. this athlete performs well under stress v.s. that politician uses performative language to appeal to their base. We often slip between these two modes throughout our day. We even slip into them without knowing as we "log on" or "log off." Alternatively, when we enter a room or exit one. Entering my daughter's school puts me into the niche of a polite, unassuming parent, while on the street I'd greet you with a smile and offer a "Good morning."

I'm currently reading a book about performances and how our insight into them can lead to something being revealed about ourselves. It's an interesting concept, even if I'm not entirely convinced yet. That itself might be the Performative part of me, the part that wants to be contrarian or a skeptic. But, wouldn't that also be its own performance? The role I'm choosing to play in any interaction could be a performance of some kind, even writing this piece out is its own performance. Taken this way, it might lead to social solipsism, which I'm not willing to entertain, even if we otherwise cede that ground to the Honor Levys of the world. 

Coming back to the first word, Performance, which taken at brass tax, means (to me), "doing something with excellence." So, if I'm writing, am I doing so with excellence? Or am I being an imposter, which would be its own brand of performative action? 

Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash

the famous writer

 draws a line 

between

those that can speak

and those deemed to be

always unheard

the famous writer

tells the unheard

to refuse telling their justified rage

bc their oppression

will be 

endless

its not worth the effort,

the famous writer says,

as they sit in their well-appointed house

sipping tea -

the tea that bears colonialism's signature

its best to do nothing,

the famous writer says,

look at me,

i have made my living

telling stories

abt post-colonialism,

and nothing has changed

the unheard regard

the famous writer

with a scepticism born of history

and slowly

turn away

The Hater Manifesto

1. I can only write in manifesto form right now because I feel like I hate everything. Or rather, that amongst my emotions, the dominant one is hatred.

2. Hatred is implicitly also a form of love. This is classically Adornian, this dialectic. I hate the repressive structures of the world in which I see so much death and inadequacy because I intrinsically care about that world.

3. Adorno infamously hated jazz. I very much do not hate jazz. My favorite jazz record is Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which features Take Five, my favorite single track. 

4. Take Five can be read two ways. The first is that it is the fifth take, or recording, of the track. Or that you should “take five”—as in take five minutes off of whatever, take a break.

5. How do you take a break when the world is burning? 

6. Dave Brubeck probably knows but I don’t.

7. One way in which the structures of power of the world try to further implant themselves in you is in forbidding certain hatreds. As in, “you cannot hate the genocide committed by the State of Israel because you are a Jew.” Or “you cannot any hate writing by other women because you are a woman, and if you do you are a) a bitter hag or b) not a feminist, or even c) both.”

8. Actually, I can hate anything I fucking want. This is the power of the Hater. No one can really stop you from hating anything. We write constantly about love as a force in human society but hate—and in particular the hate signified by dislike or distaste—is equally interesting and forceful.

9. I hate that Adorno opposed student protests in his own Institute at the end of a life devoted to theoretically endorsing such thing. 

10. Take five: the women protesting Adorno were topless. Take ten: he died in a shoe store in the Swiss Alps of a heart condition. Refrain: bitterness.

11. Adornian bitterness is always a little of Sappho’s bitterness, glukupikron, sweetbitter, in the sense that there is a sweet world in which things could have been otherwise that simply does not, and will not likely ever, exist. The bitterness of a broken heart. Maybe Adorno died bitter.

12. Is bitterness such a bad thing in a wrongly construed world?

13. Yes, yes, bitterness, as in medicine and poison, pharmakon, the arguments of Derrida which kind of misuse Plato for the purposes of Derrida, but which on the terms of Derrida are good for Derrida. The relationship of Derrida, a Sephardic Jew born in Algeria but accepted into the world of French Academe, to the Algerian Revolution, is complicated. 

14. You would like to think your leftist predecessors all had good relationships to the idea of just revolution and protest, but of course the reality, like all realities of history, is more complicated.

15. If the difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose, and différance is both difference and deferring of meaning, maybe sometimes you swallow the mystery capsule without knowing the exact dose and find out the differing meaning later.  Hatred and bitterness both seem to have this capacity; with both you can’t really see meaning, or decide if you’ve poisoned yourself, until well afterwards.

16. Sometimes hating along with Adorno feels like medicine. Sometimes it feels like poison, as in the passages about jazz. We have the luxury of taking five that Adorno didn’t—he wrote when jazz on the radio was a relatively new cultural form, and in the midst of a Culture Industry whose insidious mechanisms he unfolded but could never escape.

17. The Zildjian cymbals you hear in Take Five were originally made by the Armenian Zildjian family starting in the 17thC Ottoman Empire. Never a world otherwise without a genocide.

18. If I am a bitter hag for my hatreds, please let me be a bitter hag in a world with Zildjian cymbals on the percussion line. 

19. If in being up late into the little hours in your hatred of the world as it is allows you to love it as it might be better construed, is that really hating in the most profound send of the verb? Always already meaning the strikethrough of yourself: Jacques Derrida, get out of my head.

20. Pharmakon in theory is a cure for ills. The modern word that comes from pharmakon is pharmacy. I do not know if there are any pharmacies left in Gaza.

21. Neither Adorno nor Derrida claim or believe language or critique can itself serve as a kind of all-purpose pharmakon. But they both wrote their whole lives anyway.

22. What is the point of anything? I hate everything.

23. What is the point of anything in the burning world? I love it too much.

24. Mourn.

25. Take five.

26. Take ten. Take a million. 

 Semi-organized compulsive bookbuying is a great distractor in a large city for a bourgeois NEET (look up whether the term has an age limit. thankfully [?] no, so you still have an identity). Wake up slightly late, make a mental list of all the bookstores  you haven't  visited recently and don't have any debts or personal problems with the owners/employees, and ride public transport there, walk in, lose yourself in shelves. You're not looking for anything in particular, just The Book. The Book will change your life, set you free from the catatonia that you've been stuck in for the last how many years?, will let you look at yourself in the mirror again, will give you something to talk about with those people you still call friends.

The Book is, of course,  never in the first bookstore you visit. No worries, the city has enough neighborhoods with too many bookstores (most of them are terrible and never have anything but you have to go in anyway [except the one that always smells of cat piss]). First, a decision: do you walk away empty handed (too rude), politely say that you don't have any money (a lie most of the time), ask to put them on hold (you can cycle through other stores until the on hold period is over), buy the cheapest reputable book (never worth reading), buy a book that looks interesting enough but that you know that you will never read (you have too many of those at home), buy a book that you actually will read but is too expensive (sadly the most common choice).

Another decision to make: straight to the next bookstore (don't escape your thoughts), have some unhealthy breakfast (euphemism) in a food stand (tacos de canasta? pambazo?), a walk in the park that you hate (okay the park is nice [but the air rarefied by digital nomads and the like throws you off]), sit in a café and pretend to work on something you've pretended to work on for years at this point with nothing to show for it (too embarrassing, you end up  scrolling online for hours on end [hoping for a post that might tell you The Book's title]).

Next bookstore. As for the bookstores (note: only secondhand, you only go to the
new book places when you want something specific that you know they carry) themselves: all the owners know you, most of them like you to some degree (every business loves the client who spends too much money), the shelves don't change much from month to month, but it's in the subtle adjustments of the shelves that you can find The Book or so you've told yourself too many times. There's titles you see in most stores, you know the pricing habits of every owner/employee (nearly a pointless distinction), you
know most of the treasures they have (or what they think treasures are). No sight of The Book.

You could try another one. You do so most of the time. Ritual is over. You go back home, usually with a new lowercase book. You didn't even really read today.  You also didn't have to think about your life or the state of the world. A great distractor.

Alas, the Stench of Cynicism Insinuates Itself into the Mist of The Neoliberals' Post-Peloton Workout Rush

Hind Rajab

The cynicism is what strikes me. The sheer cynicism of the ruling elites and their intellectual representatives. 

 CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and major news media have hosted neoliberal pimps to articulate every conceivable theory for the campus protests—1960's relapse, the economy, privilege, antisemitism, Hamas, drugs, radical textbooks, Tiktok, not enough sex—anything ANYTHING except what protestors say and demand, namely to divest from Israel's genocide. (Yes, I tweeted as much.) 

Is it inconceivable that solidarities are formed from an unremitting desire for justice and an inability to continue "life as usual"? At the very least, even neoliberals must shudder at the psuedo of "life as usual" in US empire. 

Emblematic somehow: "NYU professor Scott Galloway" propounding his theory that "Hamas-loving students need to have more sex." I'm quoting the New York Post, a conservative tabloid that has become a reliable news source for those lifelong Democrats who are shattered to find Palestinians being discussed as humans with legitimate claims to life, hope, dignity, and grievance. 

Tabloids are tabloids, as Siegfried Kracauer wrote, and no one whips the middle classes into a xenophobic frenzy like the petty fascisms circulated by tabloid papers whose standard is not facts or reality. "Fuck the  fact-check," tabloids say, we are held only to the standard of entertainment. The people have spoken. The hunger for "infotainment" is vast. The markets step in to provide the product.  

Let us now praise famous men who are working the career possibilities of this moral panic. 

Let us begin with Professor Galloway, whose sexpertise appears completely unrelated from his area of interest, namely "Clinical Marketing." Like the entrepreneurial prince of pain, Shai Davidai, Galloway teaches for one of NYC's MBA programs. Business is booming; hedge funds are hot; artists are caught between the multiple 'liberating' modalities of self-marketing pyramids. Galloway knows the terrain, and chose the trophy photo to exhibit on the NY Post website.

The "news piece" is short, and perhaps worthy of a close reading. So I quote in full below, with commentary:

NYU professor Scott Galloway said that college campuses were increasingly becoming reminiscent of Nazi Germany — and attributed the reason partly to young people not having enough sex.

“We need to enjoy sex,” Galloway offered to some initial confusion during an appearance on “Real Time” with Bill Maher Friday.

“I think part of the problem is young people aren’t having enough sex so they go on the hunt for fake threats and the most popular threat through history is [antisemitism].” 

Galloway appeared on the show with former CNN host Don Lemon — who later told The Post he was inclined to agree with the observation.

“It would definitely take the edge off,” Lemon chimed in by phone.

Galloway said American society would not survive if its people could not rally behind noble causes — adding that much of what he was seeing reminded him of the early rise of Hitler.

“It’s easy to poke fun at these kids, but history has a way of repeating itself, and this is how it starts. In ’30s Germany, a progressive community, a thriving gay community, excellent academic institutions. And how it started, was it was fashionable to wear a brown shirt and mock students at the University of Vienna,’ Galloway said.

“And quite frankly, I’m really disappointed more Jews aren’t speaking out.”

Galloway repeated his observation which went viral this week that if students at terrorist encampments were chanting slogans calling for the death of black or gays they would be swiftly stamped out.

And that professors who did so would never work again.

Let's break it down. What do we learn from this news article that has been widely referenced? There is an argument offered in language, and there is a sociological reading in the background. 

The first sentence makes a claim, namely: Colleges look more and more like Nazi Germany, and part of the reason for this is that students aren't having enough sex. 

The second sentence pivots away from evidence for this claim in order to note a fact, which is that 

Galloway appeared on Bill Maher's show last Friday and said "we need to enjoy sex." This is true. He did. We can be assured of it by video. 

The third sentence provides an argument for Galloway's claim. He tells us that "part of the problem" (the problem is not defined, but we can assume he is referring to the similarity between US campuses and Nazi Germany) involves this sexually-inactive youth who "go on the hunt for fake threats and the most popular threat through history is [antisemitism]." The wording and syntax make it difficult to establish whether he means that antisemitism is a "fake threat" that is attractive to unsexed youngsters or antisemitism is simply the sort of mentality that develops when unsexed youngsters look for a threat against themselves. Why does this matter? The Post's readership skews more towards Trump than, say, the Washington Post. This means that white Christian supremacists who read this article won't feel attacked for being antisemitic. Antisemitism, here, is downplayed as a sort of lifestyle issue rather than a virulent ideology based on elimination of Jews from public life and citizenship. Perhaps more alarmingly, Hitler's Nazism is tracked to a claim often wielded by incels, namely, "we aren't getting the sex we deserve as men." Hitler could not have cared less about sex. The antisemitism of Nazi Germany was rooted in a strong notion of racial citizenship and an aesthetic of blood and soil that puts following orders above individual conscience. Many Nazis believed that the "foreign influence" of Jews, particularly merchants and intellectuals, contaminated the purity of the German nation. Genocide was the method and the result. Why doesn't Galloway mention this? Should we assume that it might make his readers feel defensive? The third sentence offers no evidence for any of the following: 1) Columbia students are having less sex 2) Nazis were having less sex when they decided to become Nazis 3) having lots of sex prevents people from becoming fascists. And the reader is encouraged to simply assume or believe them.

The fourth sentence tells us that Galloway also made similar claims on CNN, a centrist liberal news network, when speaking with Don Lemon. We learn that Don Lemon agreed, and went so far as to provide confirmation for this article. The fifth sentence quotes Lemon's agreement that sex "would definitely take the edge off," although it doesn't specify what the edge is, or why Lemon was phoned for this particularly meaningless statement. 

The sixth sentence seems to quote Galloway's conversation with Lemon again. Galloway makes a claim that uses rhetorical language associated with prophecy: US society will "not survive if its people could not rally behind noble causes." He then reaffirms that "much of what he sees" reminds him "of the early rise of Hitler." Rather than noting that Jews, Roma, and communists were targeted by Nazi under the auspice of their presumed "Bolshevik politics," and speaking about how the anti-Bolshevik, anti-Communist platform of the Nazis appealed to German business leaders as well as the middle-classes, Galloway leaps into a meaningless abstraction, saying that the US, itself, is being threatened by a failure to rally "behind noble causes." Genocide and divestment, the two causes for which students are protesting, go unmentioned. Presumably, they are neither noble nor sexy enough for Galloway.

The seventh sentence continues the ominous warning (implying "these kids" are not harmless; these kids are baby Nazis) with Galloway laying a platitude ("history has a way of repeating itself") over the abyss of his non sequiturs in order to stand firmly on the "this is how it starts." The eighth sentence describes what 1930's "Germany" was like: "a progressive community, a thriving gay community, excellent academic institutions." Galloway doesn't mention how gays were considered anathema to the burgher class. He makes it sound as if all Germans were "progressive," and thus elides the international conflict between the army, the universities, the towns, and the cities which characterized this period of history. It's an oversimplification that weaponizes the word "progressive" to signal to readers that Nazis actually came out of progressiveness. 

The ninth sentence sets up the condition for how Nazism started as follows: "it was fashionable to wear a brown shirt and mock students at the University of Vienna." Then, just as one expects elucidation between fashion, mocking, and the University of Vienna (which was located in Austria, not Germany), the tenth sentence gives us an admonishment ("And quite frankly, I’m really disappointed more Jews aren’t speaking out."). 

The eleventh sentence provides summary that invokes Trump and MAGA slogans and dog whistles for the anti-woke crowd: "Galloway repeated his observation which went viral this week that if students at terrorist encampments were chanting slogans calling for the death of black or gays they would be swiftly stamped out."

The final sentence extends Galloway's anti-woke analogy and paraphrases his warning that "professors who did so would never work again." 

Twelve sentences of political marketing. 

The target audience is the political center and the Right. The authority being invoked is one of a man who is attempting to market his own product, namely, business marketing, and flagging the attention of Right-wing politicians who are looking to expand their staff or media consultant crew as they prepare for elections. The medium is a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp (who purchased it for $30.5 million) and which serves as "the ninth-largest circulation newspaper in the U.S. as of 2023." It is constantly sourced by Trumpist politicians in the South. 

The cynicism expressed by so many news anchors and 'thinkers' right now is an effort to erase the deeply ethical commitment of students and faculty who refuse to continue funding an occupation by a political regime that repeatedly commits itself to ethnic cleansing and erasure of Palestinians. The protestors will continue resisting, and their enemy is also this very cynicism that parades itself as pragmatism among the ruling elite. 

No genocide is fated. It is being chosen and supported in this moment, as I type. Evil can be resisted. We tell our children this. We live by its light. And when I think of Hind, whose name was evoked by the protestors who occupied Columbia's Hamilton Hall, I hold the cynicism of neoliberals against a future in which Hind's name will be spoken by freshmen and what was done to students by their own administration will not be forgotten. 

Make it Hind Hall. Do it because this gesture doubles as a permanent occupation of that building. A permanent memorial of Hind. Why, the New York Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. Surely his fusty old name cannot represent the future of what is taught.  

Prairie Sky 2

View from university library