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11.08.00, 11:31 a.m.

ME: "You're going to have to become a punk rocker again -- the 1980s are back and a surrogate Reagan is in office."

TAIT: "I know, I'll have to get a mohawk all over again."

I don't know how to explain the twisted-gut feeling I get when I think about Bush in office -- it makes me want to riot. All my fancy analysis goes out the window and I'm left with, "The people are stupid. There's no other possible reason why half the voters would want a racist kill-happy moron for a president." Tait suggested we force the Midwest and the South to secede from the Union -- "It's not like anything was ever invented in Mississippi anyway." (Please note that Tait was born and raised in Mississippi, his parents live in Kansas, his sister in Texas, and he's so not being serious. For real. We're not really getting mohawks either.) Everyone I know (including myself) is in mourning and otherwise thinking (wishfully or realistically) about moving to another country.

I'm a nervous wreck, and the necessary ideological work --dismantling hegemony, denaturalizing capitalist relations, the inevitability of exploitation, the logic of racism-- seems so impossible.

I'm reminded of small episodes in the classroom, resistance to the work of thinking critically about the world. In a women's studies class --after weeks of discussing the ways in which discursive notions about race, gender, sexuality, and "in/appropriate" bodies are naturalized in our everyday to seem "harmless" or "commonsensical"-- two white women suggest that humor is the great equalizer. "I don't understand why Filipinos would get upset about that janitor joke in the campus humor magazine -- I mean, those guys make fun of everybody, including themselves!" Somehow everything I've tried to teach them in the last three months is wasted -- when it comes to questioning their own investments in this stuff (one of them is a writer for the campus humor magazine), representation is ahistorical and somehow completely unrelated to uneven power, and humor is "just" humor.

And after explaining the "development of underdevelopment" and the dependency that cripples Third World tourist economies --generally agreed upon by sociologists and the like since the 1970s-- and the problem of "leakage" as most profits from the three main branches of mass tourism -- airlines, tour operators, hotels-- are funneled not into local economies but into the pockets of the transnational corporations, it seems incredible to me that a black woman in the class might say, "I don't really like thinking about the hotels and the economic and environmental stuff, I mean, I know it's important and bad and all, but if I thought about it, it would ruin my vacation!"

I understand about hegemony, the psychic and ideological investment in not questioning our social practices --whether we're dealing with bad jokes or resort vacations-- and I understand that complex negotiations are involved, but sometimes I just want to put my head down and cry, or find a nice cave, or move to a desert island, or pretend like I'm not myself invested in social change and cultural justice.  

11.07.00, 9:05 p.m.

I hate this place and the people. America, bah! I am now taking suggestions for other countries we might move to, because there is no conceivable future for a nation (let alone myself) that would vote so overwhelming for Bush despite his EVIL.

Burn the flag tonight.