I’m back at 3rd and Pennsylvania in Southeast DC, watching the Capitol Hill people go by and typing away in the window of the many-tentacled international capitalist enterprise, even though I wrote in July that I wouldn’t come back, though the issue at the time was more the quality of their wireless connection than it was their rate of appropriation of surplus labor. And, well, if nothing else, at least the wireless seems to be better, and there are some of the same types of people: fewer interns, maybe, but a coven of well-dressed lobbyist types who’ve got the comfortable chairs and are typing, telephoning, and PDA-ing away (the my-age-ish blonde one is attractive in a Bryn Mawr hair-tightly-braided severe kind of style, and I’m scoping for the ring or absence thereof), and sure enough there are a couple of Marines from the Eighth & I Street barracks again, in jeans but the too-tight olive drab T-shirt is always a giveaway when you combine it with the muscles and the buzz cut and the Marlboro reds.
And so I’m thinking about whether they count themselves lucky or unlucky to be stationed here, on duty that’s pretty high in the spit-and-polish division but otherwise totally cush, while the boys in Baghdad — including a lot of the 3rd Infantry — are getting shot and shot at every day.
I was an enlisted man in the 24th Infantry Division out of Fort Stewart during the early to mid 1990s. The 24th would later on get reflagged as the 3rd, after the draw-down. We spent a lot of time loading and unloading vehicles at the rail yard and the Port of Savannah for all the times they took us on and off alert, and one of the things folks would do when things slowed down — the Army’s updated version of festina lente is “Hurry up and wait” — was paint slogans on their vehicles. I wasn’t sure what to make of the fatalism of one guy who painted on the 105mm gun barrel of a tank, in an elegant and flowing calligraphic hand, “Diplomacy Has Failed.” I didn’t think many tank drivers knew much about 19th-century German historical figures. The thing was, most of us knew it wasn’t about diplomacy and it wasn’t about politics. We knew it was about resources; about, ultimately, cash.
Michael Ignatieff makes a different point, contending that many contemporary conflicts have at their hearts disputes not about politics but about ethnic nationalism. While the discourse of globalized economics argues that national economies have simultaneously splintered and coalesced into globalism, Ignatieff contends that nationalist ideologies have simultaneously splintered and coalesced along ethnic fault lines, from the Field of Blackbirds to the camp at Bugendana. I don’t have anything even close to the expertise or authority to talk about what Ignatieff is saying, but it seems to me from recent history in Iraq that economic imperialism in the service of old-fashioned nationalism is as alive and well as it was in the era of Bismarck, and as it was two hundred years earlier for the Dutch West India company.
There’s a connection here I’m trying to make; I bring it up because I remember hearing NPR’s piece on stock exchanges last week and the detail they mentioned about the early exchange established at the south end of Manhattan, then New Amsterdam, a counterpart to the original Amsterdam stock market. The majority of public opinion in the U.S. seems to understand the goals of Al Qaeda and similar organizations as extensions of ethnic nationalist ideologies, even after the New York targets of September 11 2001 served as unmistakable and highly visible symbols of globalizing economic imperialism: they were, after all, the towers of the World Trade Center. So: symbols of globalizing economic imperialism become a target of groups we had originally thought of and continue to think of in terms of ethnic nationalist ideologies. In such a sense, the so-called war on terror, a war Susan Sontag has rightly noted cannot be other than a war without end, is far more economic in nature than any of its contemporary representations admit. For that reason, I’d suggest the Bush Administration is actually correct in positing a link between terrorism and Iraq, if only in that both conflicts are symptoms of American economic imperialism.
And even as I bring this up, I’m asking myself: Mike, what the hell does this have to do with your dissertation? Let’s see if I can drill back down through the layers and get me some kinda connection to first-year writing courses. I’m taking this “Rethinking Economy” seminar, where we’re reading all these different authors on economic globalization, in the hopes of (1) availing myself of the professor’s expertise on Marxist constructions of class and asking her to be my extradepartmental committee person and (2) developing an understanding of capitalism as something other than the implacable and monolithic agentless imperial power dominating every aspect of contemporary experience. Developing such an understanding of capitalism and then placing it in relation to the contexts of the post-Fordist information economy and the contemporary university may then allow me to see how the ways students learn to write with computers are affected by their own class positions and relations, and may also allow me to see (I hope) the ways in which the wired composition classroom are connected to those contexts in complex and sophisticated ways that might be able to foster rather than forbid the agency of those students. I’ve also got the sense that the interactions and transactions of the wired writing classroom are highly economized and laden with class connotations in ways that academics have a vested interest in not seeing.
I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record with this stuff. I’m into it, I’m totally enthusiastic about it, but at the same time, it feels so vague and abstract that I gotta keep reminding myself how I’m trying to hold it together. Which reminds me that I’d promised to post an annotated bibliography of my readings so far, but I’m now a good ten hours away from my books, which means that making good on that promise will have to wait until Monday night at least.
For what it’s worth, it’s a gorgeous afternoon in DC, and the Bryn Mawr lobbyist just left with her well-dressed companions. No ring and a pretty smile, and I watched the Marines try not to look, too. So I figure I better stop here while I’m ahead and before I start trying to make equivocations about constructions of feminism and whether it constitutes objectification to check someone out and think they’re cute and wind up sounding like the worst kind of obnoxiously spineless and passive-aggressive Sensitive Academic Guy.
Personally, I think the word “foxy” has nice unfashionably dated feel to it.
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