READING NOTES #10
Another round-up. For Ariel and Barrett.
What does it matter what you say about people?—Marlene Dietrich, A Touch of Evil
A few more notes under the shelter of Dietrich’s wisdom.
First of all, the mystical love of Trump is an alloverdose jouissance of its own momentum and discrete from all the labels we continue to apply to it, from ‘Hillbilly Isis’ to ‘Ya’ll Qaeda’. Trump-love remains *our* psychic problem.
An interesting echo of what I described in my post on bills of attainder is found in the Conservative legal scholar Jonathan Turley’s comments on the second impeachment. Allegory of kicking the dead when they are down:
With the second impeachment of President Donald Trump, the Congress is set for one of the most bizarre moments in constitutional history: the removal of someone who has already left office. The retroactive removal would be a testament to the timeliness of rage. While it is not without precedent, it is without logic.
That rage is omnitemporal (doesn’t Turley mean timelessness as well?) makes sense. It would be one reason why Trump must have become an iterative function. Aren’t the media and us relieved that a now strangely invisible T. will at least be immediately called up as a hyper-temporal rage leitmotif in belated TV law and order episodes? So much was inevitable. Turley continues:
The planned impeachment trial of Donald Trump after he leaves office would be our own version of the Cadaver Synod. In 897, Pope Stephen VI and his supporters continued to seethe over the action of Pope Formosus, who not only died in 896 but was followed by another pope, Boniface VI. After the brief rule of Boniface VI, Pope Stephen set about to even some scores. He pulled Formosus out of his tomb, propped him up in court, and convicted him of variety of violations of canon law. Formosus was then taken out, three fingers cut off, and eventually thrown in a Tiber River.
As I noted with regard to its Cromwellian sources, the seriality of impeachment as posthumous is in fact original. Pope Stephen, two terms after the fact, settles scores by propping up a dead Formosus to be frozen out again, like Darth Vader admiring Han Solo iced in carbonite. ‘I love you’, says 70 million Americans. ‘I know’, says T., as he is thrown into the Potomac with his memories cryogenically pwned.
Do I laugh or cry when it comes to the hacking off of T.’s ‘three fingers’, his digits, his very digitality now gone? Ariel Pink appeared on Tucker after being cancelled by his label for wanting to hear his President speak and then falling asleep in a hotel room, and seemed at one point on the edge of tears.
Pink’s invisible tears were at the very least a sign of symbolic Presidential mourning. He had wanted to protest cancellation itself, not sign up to any principle of T. as such. Unless we let T. be the function of being averse to worldwide Freezing Out, which it is.
To live life under present conditions is to live transcrygelotically, caught in a kind of double freeze of tears and laughter. I extinct with and by lmao and tears, frosted in giggling tears (gelo- means to laugh, but also comes from the Latin gelu, meaning frost or chill). The end of the world repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as freeze.
Picture me gone. ‘I didn’t vote for Trump as much as I voted against this cancel culture.’ Here.
Turley goes on:
My objection to this second impeachment was that it proceeded without any deliberation of the traditional impeachment process. It was a snap impeachment, which is to the Constitution what Snapchat is to conversations. It reduces the process to a raw, brief and partisan vote.
Through T. as function the denial of due process now runs world-deep, pushing in all directions. It is worth remembering this Bernard Stiegler sentence: ‘What more than anything is evil is OUR renunciation of thought in favour of the denunciation of evil.’ The immense hatred we pretend for Trump is after all an immense hatred.
More Turley:
After leaving office, an ex-president would not only pay for his own defense, but he will lose the ability to make privilege determinations. Indeed, many such assertions would be subject to the review of his successor, Joe Biden. It would be like Pope Stephen making determinations on critical evidence of Pope Formosus after pulling him out of the crypt.
The best takedown of Joe Biden has been the absence so far of a Vincent Gallo t-shirt. Where every other goon has received what they had coming, Biden as the true Pope Stephen remains far below Gallo’s contempt.
Here is what Scott Ritter said about Joe Biden in 30 July 2002:
Given Sen. Biden’s open embrace of regime removal in Baghdad, there is a real risk that any such hearings may devolve into a political cover for the passing of a congressional resolution authorizing the Bush administration to wage war on Iraq. Such hearings would represent a travesty for the American people.
Here is another commentator on Joe Biden:
The simple truth is that Biden voted to give Bush broad power to go to war with Iraq. He did so as a top-ranking Democrat in the Senate: the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And he did so at a time when the majority of Americans did not support taking immediate military action.
He elevated the administration’s concerns about Hussein in the press. And in the months leading up to the vote authorizing war, he organized a series of Senate hearings, in close coordination with the White House, during which he echoed the administration’s talking points about weapons of mass destruction.
And another:
A review of the historical record shows Biden didn’t just vote for the war—he was a leading Democratic voice in its favor, and played an important role in persuading the public of its necessity and, more broadly, laying the groundwork for Bush’s invasion.
The White House installed a special secure phone line to Biden’s home, and he and three other members of Congress met privately with Bush in October 2001 to come up with a positive public relations message for the war in Afghanistan.
If impeachment is posthumous by principle, would it ever be right to stop asking the question of why it would not be retro-applied to those who have done far worse than Trump in the past? Do I even hear the words, infinitely worse? Is it possible—to accelerate a judgement that has no real support other than frozen stupefaction—that Joe Biden, more than any other human being in the world, incited a war in which some estimates say more than a million Iraqis have died?
But what does it matter what you say about people?
Take Anthony Blinken for example, Biden’s proposed Secretary of State. Not only did he also vote for the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, but he was the staff director for the self-same Senate Foreign Relations Committee that under Biden’s leadership made the final decision to go into Iraq. But again, what does it matter what you say about people?
Perhaps the strange thing isn’t that Meghan McCain would say that we should send the ‘insurrectionists’ to Gitmo, but that Benjamin Bratton would in principle agree with her:
‘Ya’ll Qaeda’ is not Bratton’s coinage, to be sure, as his reply guys mistook it admiringly. The problem here isn’t exactly that Bratton would believe the Trump election fraud protestors—let’s not forget that in the most broad terms, that is what they were—are comparable to a kind of Hillbilly Isis brigade, or that University of California Professors just sound dumb when punching down on Americans blinded by feelings of democratic extinction, but that the idea that this was a ‘fascist insurrection’ maps straight onto what the Biden administration believes, or onto what the Chinese state believed about self-immolators in the post-2008 protests in Tibet, say. Those self-immolators, among the purest protestors on earth, were also bracketed out as another sort of ‘Ya’ll Qaeda’.
We may also keep noting, if we wish, that the issue has been not that Trump won or lost but that for the first time the loser to an EVS system that has always been fraudulent on both sides, as people like Mark Crispin Miller demonstrated years ago, refused to concede:
Over the 16 years that followed the 2004 election, candidates have won and conceded; presidents have been inaugurated.
This article by Joanna Weis continues:
And many of them [people who believe 2004 was fraudulent] still believe that. Their continued commitment to the idea even today reveals that, once sown, doubt in the democratic process is difficult to dispel. Rather than recede with age, in many cases these 2004 skeptics’ concerns only deepened. And today, many of these 2004 figures have found a new cause in the 2020 election, embracing Trump’s claims about the results even if they are on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum.
That Bratton and many other credentialed intellectuals on something like the Left continue to portray a group of people who happen to understand that there is no democratic integrity at all in the United States as LARPing yokels who by implication should be put into their own private Gitmos is perhaps worth underlining, no matter what Dietrich says at the very end of the film.
Thought, after all, is more important than the denunciation of Bratton and Co’s touch of evil.
<3 - barrett
Just brilliant