Bill Mahr

Bill Mahr is a great guy. Funny, and screamingly liberal--we like this given the alts--he'll load up his panel, guest shots, and audience with like folks and then invite a conservative to the show to make fun of. This week it was some white-haired freak from the right blaming the New Orleans mayor and govt for graft and corruption he says was the cause of the delays--the Louisiana governor didn't order the troops to be federalized. On the libs side, along with Mahr, was George Carlin, who was ripping off old Marxist agit-prop about the "owners of the country" and the "lower class grabbing up the means of production" and I was in political economy heaven. How great is it that on my couch on friday night I can see George Carlin not spiting his tired shit about the seven dirtiest words--he seemed miffed that he was supposed to be funny or had ever been thought of as such--and throwing down unmercifully on whitey (hair and skin) about the inequities of the feds' response to Katrina's aftermath. Called W a fascist and got back that, "oh? Do you mean the Nazis? Surely you're not talking about the Nazis; you're not saying we're (neo-cons) like the Nazis. Have you ever seen the Nazis?" George didn't have much at that. And then came Kurt Voneguet, who of course had seen them, right up close. This old guy--got to be eighty--went off even harder and I was jumping up and down, denting my couch even deeper. His take was that humanity is a virus and the planet is trying to shake us off. And then came New Rules: America, new rule: you must get rid of your president.

Barbara Bush going over the site, comments about the state of the poor in LA and their comparatively better position in what amounts to an interment camp with worse facilities than those supplied by the fascists. At least they have a roof, was the gist.

so, if the hurricane was premediated, which I can see, then Mahr is our old fashioned re-mediated content, but with the funny added in. Mahr can swear on HBO: "no, their saving him for the next fuckup," he said to whitey when he tried to assert that finally the president had dealt with the painfully untalented and not cool-looking in the least "Brownie," as he is called by W:"and Brownie, well, you're doin' a hellova job; workin' 24 hours-a-day." A day later he'd moved him back to wash to watch another storm percolate.

And he is a fuck-up--well, both are (W and Brownie, and Chirtoff): for thinking that God doesn't have it in for us more than the terrorists, or that we won't turn into little terrorists if deprived of the yoke of law.

Whitey chirps up, like he's got the news: "law broke down, and that's what'll happen if ever there's a terrorist attack in a major US city."

In Giorgio Aggamben's State of Exception he suggests that any governance happens under the threat of force. In establishing the state and the rights of citizens of that state--subjects and subjected both--the dominant hegemonic front establishes itself as the only legitimate seat of force, but in so doing allows for itself the very power that the state is charged with containing and limiting in its citizenry, thus providing a stable environment wherein civil rights can e maintained. Many have commented on Bush's willfully extending the state of Exception to encompass his prosecution of an illegal and immoral war in Iraq. Now, we see the extension of the State of Exception--in a kind of moebius strip inversion where the inside/outside binary breaks down--like an exception from an injection, the tip of the needle poking in and spilling out on the surface, even as it flows among the blood, into our collective affective register. All governments hold out for themselves the State of Exception; now we've gotten to be exceptions to ourselves: how is it that we expect to be able to police ourselves, when the apparatus that checks power in the US is the press (a free press, de Tocqueville), and now the press is falling within the penumbra of the State of Exception--gun-toting thugs who are now herding reporters away from the flood areas and most deadly regions in Katrina's wake, while the death-toll estimates suddenly seem to be shrinking (despite having twenty-thousand body bags on tap) and the evidence of the failures of the fed are quietly swept away by some twenty-year-old in camos with a gas-mask and an M-16.

Why play the blame game? Because should we not, we're likely to loose the pieces: bodies like cheap plastic, and little as they are.