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10.12.00, 4:30 p.m.

watching: Best In Show, Waiting for Guffman, The Cube
reading: Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs, and Cyberspace , ed. by Jenny Wolmark

It's a question of function. In the contest for meaning, we're forced to detangle the working of ideology and the conjunction of fantasy/desire from the history of conflict embedded in the body, the text, the object, the event, the exhibit, the betrayal. 

Leaning in across the kitchen table, R says, "Okay, am I crazy? M has a friend who is a white boy, and he's totally down for all kinds of leftist causes. His house is decorated only in Mexican art and all he listens to is hip-hop because he says it's revolutionary, right? But okay, I feel really weird about the fact that he only dates women of color, and M told me that he's dating this Latina woman now, and this boy thinks it's really sexy when she speaks Spanish to him while they're having sex. Now, okay, is it just me or is that weird?"

We run into each other on a summer afternoon. Mark goes inside the restaurant to order our salads while J and I discuss graduate seminars and magazine publication on the sidewalk. He lifts up his sleeve to show me his latest tattoo: the familiar icon of a black-swathed Zapatista with the words, "One Settler, One Bullet" beneath. I laugh until he tells me he's recently purchased a nine millimeter for "the time," i.e., the revolution, and has been a regular visitor to the local firing range. Later I read his words in the punk magazine we both work for: "It's not that a people united will never be defeated, but a people well-armed will never be defeated!" I am both skeptical and worried about what his kind of revolution will look like. Will there be lines drawn in the sand? Will the counterevolutionaries be lined up and shot to maintain their silence? (Shudder.) The rugged romance with violent revolution is hardly the terrain simply of white middle-class boys in Che shirts and "solidarity" caravans, after all, and is a fantasy reproduced with alarmingly little critique of consequences or context. Is it different when the gun-toting boy is a Chicano political activist and well-versed in Latin American revolutions? Or does the critique of First World romanticization of the Third World still apply?

That was months ago, but I'm reminded of the tattoo and the gun, watching the news of escalating Israeli-Palestinian violence, blurred photographs of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank patrolling shelled streets and shifting borders. They carry machine guns originally manufactured in Connecticut, mouthing "Death to Arabs!" and firing upon Muslims daring to defy their claims to a stolen land. Television commentators say they are bravely defending their homes from the circling Palestinians, inspiring frontier visions of settlers in the American West waging war against the indigenous population. I am afraid to ask one of my best friends, a Jewish girl who reads Foucault and has walked the Golan Heights with her father, what her position might be.

An editorial in last Sunday's paper is titled, "Indigenous Idiocy A Slur to Italian Americans." The author doesn't understand why indigenous peoples might abhor the occasion of Christopher Columbus Day, and go so far as to protest mock landings and reenactments of the invasion. (I remember that protest, and remember ducking plates thrown from restaurant doorways in North Beach.) He then complains, "there's nothing like a genocide claim to ruin a parade." 

The Berkeley Art Center, nestled in a wooded park, currently houses an exhibit of racist memorabilia (Ethnic Notions: Black Images in the White Mind), forcing a confrontation with the material culture of violence and oppression. There are the familiar "mammy" figures and Amos 'n' Andy merchandise, alongside terrifying comics of caricatured blacks chased by alligators, dartboards composed of black faces, a children's "plantation book of ABC's" featuring a range of slaves in various household and field occupations, an ashtray formed from the bottom lip of a "bush man," a tube of "Darkie Toothpaste" (still marketed in Asian and the Middle East), a watercolor postcard entitled "evolution" in which a watermelon is shown transforming into a "coon," photographs of black women nursing white babies, "pickaninnies" sharing a cotton bale, a small black child captioned "I'm an Alabama coon." There are over 1,000 commercial products and household items including food, utensils, toys, jewelry, books, and sheet music culled from the last two centuries. I leave the center crying, but thinking to myself, "What is the purpose of this exhibit? What is here that I didn't already know? Does this exhibit reproduce the original violence?" 

This is not the end of the story.  

i reviewed this for maximumrocknroll: ON HOMOSEXUALITY: A STALINO-LENINIST GUIDE TO LOVE AND SEX  ($1ppd, copied, 24 pgs) If you took the hackneyed television staple Kids Say The Funniest Thingsand substituted "sectarian communists" for the kids, you could broadcast this reprinted phamplet as comedy. The original document, published in 1975, is the "position" of the Revolutionary Union (later the infamous Revolutionary Communist Party, RCP, of college ca mpus recruitment and newspaper-pushing fame) on homosexuality. Still circulated as dogma, unfailingly authoritarian Stalinist-Leninist ideology theorizes that homosexuality is a by-product of capitalism, and that "after the revolution" all those "bourgeois individualist" queers will revert back to a "natural" state of heterosexual coupling. "Revolutionary," my ass. Soon after this first document was published, a group called the Front Homosexuel d'Action Revolutionaire juxtaposed this document against altered comics lampooning heterosexual romance and the homophobic commentary of "revolutionary" communist leaders. The result was this "guide," also originally published in 1975. They prefaced their parody with a clear condemnation of the RU/RCP's position on homosexuality: "[Homosexuals] are, with women, the moral door-mat on which you wipe your conscience." This is a great historical document bootlegged for both entertainment ("What will those wacky commies say next!") and education. This kind of politically-justified homophobia still lurks in the leftist descendents of this ideological fog. Contact Sean Sullivan for a copy at: 548 Bolton Rd. / Vernon, CT 06066 / seanthomassullivan@hotmail.com .