I’m having an interesting time trawling virtual and dusty papers from that fun period of 2002 - 2006 when immigration detention activism was all the rage. Do any readers know of/have any critiques from that time (within loosely ‘anti-detention’ activism/debates) regarding the work of groups like ChilOut and the Circles of Friends?
Just to lower the tone a little now that there is, all going well, only three months left for this blog.
“Roses are red, violets are blue, I forget the rest, but I rooted your Mum”
- graffiti down the road in enormous, beautifully drawn chalk letters*
“Melbournians think they’re so good with their nice art galleries and everything. But we’ve got race war and finance capital”
- my friend Chris
*I am SO jealous that I have never thought of doing this, especially smack bang in the midst of my rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood (which, consequently, bears many signs of race war and finance capital).
Yo denuncio estas injusticias y envio mi apoyo y amor … por los dos compañeros y la lucha que continua …
Subcomandante Marcos confesses: “It was all a performance art piece.”
Oh, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, you’ve already been writing my thesis for years, and so much more beautifully.
“You can look at a war as a massing of arms and matériel and troops, but you can also see it as something else - as a delicate web of interwoven choices made by human beings, made out of a certain consciousness. The decision to order an attack, the choice to obey or disobey an order, to fire or not to fire a weapon. Armies and indeed, any culture that supports them must convince the people that all the decisions are made already, and they have no choice. But that is never true. So, mad as it may seem, this is the terrain upon which we base our defence of this city - the landscape of consciousness.”
- Lily Fong in The Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk.
Other Me gets up at 7am and does yoga before downing a wheatgrass shot, a fresh lemon tisane and something involving LSA. Then she rides her bike to uni and is at the desk before 8.30am. She checks her email three times a day and occasionally reads and writes blogs in her lunch breaks. The rest of the time she is Working on her Thesis, to which she has a balanced approach.
In the evening she rides home and performs some kind of wholesome, relaxing relationship building activity with her partner and/or friends. She goes to bed well before midnight. She is not afraid of the telephone or indeed of sociality in general.
She most certainly does not write “Ana - Misanthropology - Compulsory Sociality” on the form that is on display in the centre of the postgraduate research centre she works in where people are sunnily invited to fill out their name, discipline and area of research towards a friendlier communal Vibe and productive, collaborative Research Culture.
She meets deadlines, rarely drinks alcohol and has one cup of coffee a day.
This is another urge I’ve had for some time, spurred on today by this news report about the state of the Australian stock market*. Just look at these words:
a day of carnage
its worst one-day fall since 1989
fears the slowdown is spreading across the world
dived
slumped
No sectors secure from the hammering
deeply in the red
crashed skyrocketed
tipping point
There is so little use of terms that even imply economy, don’t you think? It’s all terrifying excess.
*Are shares the same as stocks?
I’m marking time this hot afternoon in a Piura internet booth, recalling the drive here from Loja, Ecuador and hoping for some of the same en route to Lima tonight. Some - not all - of the same; onto the elimination pile goes the speed at which the drivers take the narrow streets at high, high altitude. In the first few hours out of Loja I was having trouble prising my hand out of the Jesus grip on the armrest. I thought the nice old man next to me might have been having similar concerns due to the number of times he had crossed himself since we had left town, so I smiled weakly at him and said “ah …. pretty fast hey!”. He replied “Yes … very.” Heartened that at least there did not appear to be a difference in cultural definition here, I added breathily, “ah … isn’t it a bit dangerous?”, to which the man laughed and said “no, only the best choffers drive fast!” and gestured to our very own choffer’s hawklike vigilance over the wheel. Of course, said vigilance took place while exchanging obscenities with the other driver, listening to rapid beat salsa at top volume - all night - and occasionally glancing up at a plastic statue of La Virgen del Cisne (above) who sat above the dashboard and seemed to light up according to certain speeds (take note, s.c.a.m-mers - the catholic merch here is beyond our wildest dreams). I eventually realised that the instances of the man crossing himself corresponded to our encountering of Virgen shrines (bigger plastic statues of said Virgen encased in elevated plastic boxes filled with flowers and ornate crucifixes) along the road. Before he got off the bus he turned to me and said “very fast!!!” to me about every twenty minutes and looked at my white knuckles with an avuncular chuckle. Something tells me that scaredy-cat-anglo-restraint gringos are the butt of more than a few jokes in these parts.
What I would repeat is the beautiful, mountainous Andean landscape - dwarfing hills, verdant valleys, orange and brown scrub with startingly green-trunked trees in flower, small plantations of maize and sugarcane, ambling donkeys, pigs, and chickens. I swear, if country towns and I didn’t suspect each other of so much, I’d live in one tomorrow.
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