David Foster Wallace Spitting Truth

David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Sept 12 this year... but Asher sent me this really interesting commencement address he gave in '05 to Kenyon College graduating seniors. One excerpt in particular gave me pause, not just because it talks about suicide but because of how he re-conceptualizes the act of thinking:

Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull- value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

I don't know about the alone part but this really resonated with me in a way that spoke to the potential for re-conceptualizing activism as well. Wallace talks about how we automatically center ourselves partly as a function of how we look at the world - with ourselves at the center and everything literally going on around us - and partly as the product of how our society places value on the individual. It is important to de-center yourself in a way that is not necessarily how we're socialized. Wallace's point is that we need to be more conscious of others and their needs around us.. I would extend that to say that in an activist model we need to look at the collective as the way both to true unity/solidarity and to power. Can we learn to value the individual and not ignore needs of each member of a group while simultaneously drawing on the energy of a unified group as a vehicle to confront structural oppression/inequity?

Continuing struggles..

There's new technology for policing the border apparently - people can be minutemen now from the comfort of their living rooms. For the full article on NPR click here

Texas sheriffs have erected a series of surveillance cameras along the Rio Grande and connected them to the Internet.

Thousands of people are now virtual Border Patrol agents — and they're on the lookout for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.

On Blueservo's Web site, each camera focuses on an area that's known for illegal crossing. Next to a real-time view of a grassy meadow is the message: "Look for individuals on foot carrying backpacks." A shot of a border highway says, "If you see movement from the right to the left, please report this activity."

When a citizen spots suspicious activity, they click a button on the Web site and write a report. That message goes to the corresponding sheriff's office. The sheriff may handle the problem or call the U.S. Border Patrol.

To date, more than 43,000 people have logged on and become, as the Web site calls them, "virtual Texas deputies."

But resistance to the military/prison industrial complex lives on.

PhillyIMC reports that:

On Monday, February 16th, a diverse group of 30 anti-war and peace activists occupied the Army Experience Center at the Franklin Mills Mall in Northeast Philadelphia for about ten minutes. Activists had taped signs to their chests that read WAR IS NOT A GAME. Upon the arrival of two officers from the Philadelphia police civil affairs unit, the activists who had been holding freeze positions left the Center. A press release was read to the retired Army civilian director of the Center and two Army officer connected with it. For the full story read here

The Funeral for Democracy

AZ Maricopa Supervisors/Worst Sheriff Arpaio Arrests Nine Pro-immigrant Activists

Dear NAIR activists, [Please distribute widely.]

See below video entitled THE FUNERAL FOR DEMOCRACY. It calls attention to the arrests of 9 pro-immigrant activists--mostly Anglo-American justice advocates--in Phoenix in protest of racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his practice of racial profiling. Video below:



The struggle in Phoenix has sharpened after the defeat of the Democrats in the recent Arizona presidential elections. Aided by Joe Arpaio, Andrew Thomas,20Randy Pullen, and Russell Pearce, the Republicans will now control the Governorship, the state Senate, and the state House of Representatives. (Janet Napolitano is leaving to join the Obama administration.)

Perhaps a similar repression of migrants that ocurred nationally in the 1930s and the 1950s (Operation Wetback) is in the horizon here in Arizona. Migrants families are being torn apart: mothers from children; children from fathers; brother from sister; aunt from nephews.

In struggle,


Manuel de J. Hernandez G.