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July 11, 2001, 12:20 p.m.

Mimi-

I just read your web entry about "national sentimentality" and I thought of two things. One is the whole Bob Kerrey (right name?) scandal -- he's the recently appointed President of New School who it turns out led massacres while in the military in Vietnam. The school has stood by its man, and at a forum to discuss the issue students thanked him for creating an opportunity for the school community to discuss the war and "heal" through emotional processing. Ugh. Also the deployment of this sentimentality you describe explains for me my uneasiness about the way Matthew Shepherd's death was mediated. It was totally absorbed into a project of "right feeling" in response to the "bad" feelings around an unjust murder of a white home-grown boy. And used to affirm the idea that America is a site of justice and non-violence, this instance being an abberation.

xo Craig

P.S. I wonder about that whole idea that the U.S. war in Vietnam "broke America" -- you know, that it was like a trauma in the growing-up of a nation of boys/soldiers. Also about a sentimental construct that draws lines connecting manhood--war--citizenship.

________________________

Craig,

I've become so suspicious of the uses of "feeling" as a political force (for "good" or "evil"), especially when, as Berlant pointed out, "feeling good" becomes the horizon of political transformation. I think I feel nauseous every time "healing" is brought up as some sort of political goal because it so often obscures the material and ideological conditions of the so-called "wound" in the first place. There's actually quite a lot of work about the language of the "wound" (and particularly the "wounded phallus" of U.S. global hegemony) around the Vietnam war, and how this popular discourse individualizes the pain of war onto the bodies and minds of the iconic Vietnam veteran (think Stallone and Norris as both "wounded" men seeking to recuperate themselves and those also "wounded," i.e., imaginary POWs, in all those Reagan-era films), and renders war responsibility ambiguous.

Speaking of the supposedly pre- or post-political nature of "healing," it reminds me also of Reagan's trip to the Bitburg cemetery with Chancellor Kohl, and his speech about how SS officers (having laid a wreath on one's tombstone) and Jews were "both victims of the war." Ugh. Adorno aptly wrote: "[Coming to terms with the past] does not imply a serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness. It suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if possible, wiping it from memory."

And your comment about the way Matthew Shepherd's death was mediated reminds me of your essay on Boys Don't Cry, and how a "Main Street U.S.A." nostalgia most definitely narrated the mass media circulation of his "boy next door" image, and how the language of suffering --between "your empathy" and "his pain"-- was used to "meet across differences" in a way that both constructed a sense of national mourning and threatened to elide those productive conditions of Shepherd's murder in the first place. Blah.

I'm loving the dispatches, by the way!

xo Mimi