crypto-Christian?

Here is an idea I'm throwing out about everyday life studies as invented by Michel de Certeau -- its flattery of ordinary people, its idealization of everyday life is crypto-Christian.

De Certeau thinks he's following Freud, but Freud's crypto-Judaism praises not the everyman for his inventiveness, but exists in a state of mimetic fraternity with his senseless suffering, his unhappiness, his kvetchy discontentment.

Why is Freud not so "up with people" like the cultural studies academics who are always praising that mythic, unicorn of an ordinary person who is always eluding our grasp?

There is a certain "realism" about Jewishness that Christians find hard to take. I remember the mid-Westerner appalled by Jewish jokes, which are entirely deflationary in their logic...

Which do you think produces a more compelling political narrative -- in the long run?

MacBook Pro is NOT a laptop

that is the real reason why I'm not blogging as much as I used to. I used to blog on the run -- or at least, my iBook was mobile. After my first warranty covered repair on the MacBook Pro because of a warped case, I have been told that it runs too hot to really use on a lap -- it should be used on a table top at all times...this keeps the fans cooling its' Intel processors working efficiently. So, now I compute when I am at my desk on my brand new iMac, and at work with the MacBook Pro, this ventilation problem has completely changed my computing habits. That, along with the intense phase of writing, -- but no more bedtime surfing, no more couch potato philosophizing.

I know I made jokes about the first reports of burnt thighs and the cooking potential of the new MacBook Pro's, but I got one anyway with my computer money...and here is how the gadget schools me -- in subtle ways indeed.

soccer is too working class

for a very nice French guy I talked to in LA last weekend. Dad of two, comic book illustrator -- gentrifier of East LA -- blueprint of your nice liberal guy right?

Wrong!

He was all about class aspirations that made him distance himself from all things having to do with "le foot." Um, so imagine his confusion to talk with me -- but then another woman chimes in and says to him that girls should play more team sports because then they would be more successful in business and I am left to make a dialectical about face and ask, "Why should play be preparation for work?"

Shouldn't some forms of play remain play -- or is that actually too pseudo-aristocratic?

Blogging will remain spotty until I finish my book ms, which is continuing apace. Please send me items of interest to post during this "special time."

Olbermann on the current regime's web of lies...

Keith Olbermann's passionate remembrance on 9/11. There are voices against the mist of propaganda in which we live. Thanks to Eric.

Revenge: Sort of -- France beat Italy 3 - 1

in the Euro 2008 qualifying game on September 6, which somehow I managed to miss. Sidney Govou stepped up to Zidane's place and scored twice. Italy it turns out, has only scored two points in three games. You can still be World Champions based upon such a sorry offense, but as Italian fans have not failed to remind us, this victory means NOTHING. And their psych out win in Berlin means everything...

Between back to school preparations, home repair, single motherhood and other multi-tasking opportunities, I have found myself immersed in -- Battlestar Galactica -- which is every allegorist's dream come true. Thanks to Horacio to turning me onto this!

Populism, Pragmatism and the Labor of the Reasonable Center

A debate between Krugman and Delong cuts the line between a pragmatic populism (Krugman's strategy) and a technocratic rationalism (a return to reasonable Republicans).

On Labor Day Weekend, I think it appropriate to remind ourselves of the fact that class interests are characterized by conflict, and that the American worker little imagines his or solidarity with other workers, and has been re-shaped in the public imaginary as the American consumer or the American voter. What are the stakes in the conflict between Krugman's strategy of strengthenin labor and Delong's pragmatism? I can't exactly say yet, but there is a critical struggle for supremacy here.

One could say that Delong's position is founded on a moderate form of technocratic rationalism that does little to address popular discontentment about any sort of "solution" to social and collective problems. I suppose government has become synonymous with bureaucracy and market with freedom of sovereignty in the public discourse of our era. Talking about the problems of everyday life and "every man' has been a populist tactic that is very effective when there are high levels of discontentment, that is all I have to say about this now since I am nearly delirious wtih jet lag.

Happy Labor Day!