On this historic occasion...

Like all good former journalists, scholars of rhetoric(s), and news junkies in general, I stayed up to listen to Obama's acceptance speech in Grant Park, Chi-town. And then I listened to the pundits do their last punditing of the season, which turned into some really poorly done "analysis" of the speech. Leave the rhetoric to the rhetoricians, please.

On this historic occasion, (yes, I voted), one can feel the historicness. Whatever that means. Perhaps it means we can feel the mark of a new trace beginning. A new set of cultural assumptions, shared values, and mass experience (experience of the masses, experienced en mass, massively) ready to launch new language, new critical distance to be attained, a different progress narrative to be made hegemonic.

Hope, says Obama, but I remain cynical, because some part of my indoctrinated brain holds echoes of fundamentalist teachings. In days to come, some will name Obama as the anti-Christ, will point to the signs and wonders that prove we're headed for the end of days. And while I have critically distanced myself in some ways from that particular reading of Revelation, old ideologies are strongly embedded in my thought processes, my language, my view of history. While I have turned those views around--made negative copies of them and embroiled them so deeply in theoretical language that only those who know me can see the original under the postmodern brush strokes--they still remain, even if they are only now a starting point for further meditation.

Thus, I provide On This Historic Occasion, some Stuff I Wrote last week, having no explicit connection to an Uncovering. Explicit.

First Place

Plated into place, this nomination of ours lays flush against the wood,
as though the name will fix in place for as long as aluminum brackets hold.
But we live in four dimensions (And now they tell us eleven!),
so the thinner lines that mark the dates will rub out first, from all these boxes,
from being packed in newspaper, unwrapped, propped again against a different white wall;
from all these state line crossings the edges will not hold.



...and God only knows what this is--maybe a piece of fanfic? Or my own apocalyptic writing?

The night was warm, well, warm for this far north, when he woke with a start. The scientists would say later that it would have been impossible for him to hear it, to see it, or to feel it in any way with the five senses, but he always went with his gut, not his eyes or facts anyway. The last of the fire was winding down, and he could think only of death, despite his previous state of dreaming of tall buildings, bright lights, and skin. He woke his fellow traveler with a panicked poke to the ribs--"What the fuck was that?"