Subject

Please read Arthur's latest, and not only because he quotes little old me. Click through to read the full Chris Floyd article as well.

First noting that we're now past any Liberty-or-Death moments for the salvation of the Republic, and further noting that violent revolutions, even where possible, aren't generally advisable or supportable, the question naturally arises: what now? The answer is not much. In large part the more pertinent question is simply how do we as individuals comport ourselves to post-citizen lives? Where do we make accommodations and accessions, and where do we offer our small resistances. What does will it mean to be a subject in the era after consensual government? What power, if any, will we have to mitigate the evils of empire abroad? Since the institutions of democracy will remain superficially central to the United States (Rome retained a Senate), to what degree is it useful or valid to participate in the preserved processes of actual democracy? Is it now meaningful to take sides in the factional disputes that will continue in the immediate future as our governors sort out their tribal affiliations and solidify a neater process of succession? What are the ethical and moral obligations of the subject, as opposed to the citizen, for the actions of his nation? If we are to some degree absolved of responsibility and culpability for something like the coming bombing of Iran, does that also abrogate our calling to speak out against it? To what extent does it remain valid to cite the extant catechisms of Republican government--the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the ideals of the Framers--and to what extent is that citation merely willful complicity in a charade?

As a wise man once said, How the fuck should I know? I frankly suspect that every one of those questions is invested with vast overages of vanity and self-regard. It is one thing to learn to recognize tyranny, but quite another, once it arrives, to sit around lost in moral casuistry and solipsism. A friend of mine keeps no bank accounts, has no credit cards, uses only pay phones, lives without a lease, and fancies himself therefore "off the grid." Were that it was so. In the end, of course, the one bombmaker in the wooded cabin arises more suspicion and lives under more odious surveillance than the man who learns to make his outward life ordinary in every affect. Keeps some money in the bank. But not too much. Pays his bills. Usually, but not always on time. Keeps his voter registration in order even if he doesn't actually vote. Registers his car every year. The panoptical capacities of the government are largely overrated in part because we're all so ga-ga over technology. The truth is that no computer can sift through the private thoughts and desires of 300 million people. They can't even keep track of our parking tickets. The best hiding place, as the saying goes, is often in plain sight.

To the extent that we continue to bear political responsibility, I'll argue that it has mostly to do with calling things by their true names and seeing them truly. That is what I try to do, but not for the sake of posterity (I hardly expect, in a few hundred years, to be IOZ, the great dissident writer of the early American empire), nor do I make the effort out of anything resembling revolutionary sentiment. People speak of today's concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, but what's far more significant, though not unrelated, is the concentration of force. I have no desire to get myself killed, or to get anyone else killed, or to get anyone I know spirited off to a secret prison, simply to spite the drab, vicious autocracy that I despise. If there is a reason to keep talking about these things, it is to remain sane, and if we keep talking to each other, it's to maintain what modest bonds of friendship, community, and gallows humor remain to us. Some people console themselves with the idea that humor and friendship are themselves revolutionary acts. These people are called toweringly masturbatory egotists. I maintain only that the Soviet Union, for one, showed the tenuousness of the modern imperial project, and I plan to keep smirking so that if the whole rotten tree bows and cracks in a stiff wind sometime in the next half-century or so, I'll be well-prepared to break into a smile.