Yesterday I complained about the way the Times wrote about Guy Fawkes Day celebrations in England. Today, elsewhere in the same esteemed daily, in the national political page, to wit, I find a delightful article about how libertarian GOP candidate for Prez Ron Paul is using Guy Fawkes as a symbol of good resistance against anti-individual government-uber-alles sprawl. Libertarian fans of Ron Paul know of Guy Fawkes through the futuristic graphic novel V for Vendetta. There a terrorist modeled after Fawkes takes on a fascist government that has taken over Britain. So the individual-freedom-loving Right reads Fawkes as anti-fascist. I'm not going to give the web address for Paul's fund-raising scheme, lest readers of this blog accidentally click it and donate, but you can certainly find it on the web if you are even just slightly inclined. The title of the article in today's paper is "Candidate's Pleased to Remember This Fifth of November." I'm fascinated. Terrorism as libertarianism. It makes some sense (and always has made sense as a matter of domestic politics [think Oklahoma City]), since the libertarian Right has been driven nuts by all the Big Government entailed in the neo-cons' response to 9/11.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Ron Paul loves Guy Fawkes
Yesterday I complained about the way the Times wrote about Guy Fawkes Day celebrations in England. Today, elsewhere in the same esteemed daily, in the national political page, to wit, I find a delightful article about how libertarian GOP candidate for Prez Ron Paul is using Guy Fawkes as a symbol of good resistance against anti-individual government-uber-alles sprawl. Libertarian fans of Ron Paul know of Guy Fawkes through the futuristic graphic novel V for Vendetta. There a terrorist modeled after Fawkes takes on a fascist government that has taken over Britain. So the individual-freedom-loving Right reads Fawkes as anti-fascist. I'm not going to give the web address for Paul's fund-raising scheme, lest readers of this blog accidentally click it and donate, but you can certainly find it on the web if you are even just slightly inclined. The title of the article in today's paper is "Candidate's Pleased to Remember This Fifth of November." I'm fascinated. Terrorism as libertarianism. It makes some sense (and always has made sense as a matter of domestic politics [think Oklahoma City]), since the libertarian Right has been driven nuts by all the Big Government entailed in the neo-cons' response to 9/11.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
