NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

In the film The Matrix, the Agent Smith played by Hugo Weaving holds a short, but memorable philosophical session with his captive, resistance fighter Morpheus. He tells him about the first versions of the Matrix that were created in order to keep the imprisoned human population occupied while their energies were siphoned from them like batteries. In the early versions of the Matrix everything was perfect. It was like paradise, free of conflict and problems. It was a perfect world. That perfection is what made it impossible for humans to accept, and so when confronted with this perfect world humans rejected it wholesale and so those early versions of the Matrix were total failures. So instead of having the Matrix make people happy and give them a perfect world, the machines decided to give them a world similar to what they already knew. Imperfect, full of struggle, pain, loneliness, doubt and rejection. People accepted this and the Matrix continued to functi

I got an email the other day which featured the "purest" example of ideology I've seen in quite a while. It contained an email that had been sent to my friend (who I won’t name in case she wants her identity kept secret) from a “Marxist” professor which basically attacked her for not being Marxist enough. I only know some of the context, but she had just recently helped organize an Ethnic Studies summit in San Diego and so the listserv for the conference has been the site for a lot of pointless posturing, of which this purely ideological email is a perfect example. Reading the snarky, snippy Marxist email was both hysterical and depressing. It represented on the one hand something so hilarious in the way in which the author took himself and his orthodox defense of Marxist theory, thought and intellectualism so seriously. It was depressing because it made him look like someone so sublimely out of touch with reality and even the nature of the very theories he was shrou

I recently re-watched Capitalism: A Love Story, and saw Elizabeth Warren's parts in the movie, and so since she's popping up on all the US progressive blogs lately, I wanted to post something about her. But first, after watching Michael Moore's latest film again, I saw it in a slightly new light. When I first saw that movie last year I didn't completely grasp how radical what Michael Moore is proposing in that film, how he created a mainstream artifact which didn't only talk about the evils of capitalism (which any film about big corporations as bad guys does), but he also called on something to replace it. And in coming up with his replacement he places under the wholesome signifier of democracy plenty of old and new socialist imagery. Things which you can invoke as the bad guys of action films or straw-men-nations of economist fantasies, but never as something offering much to the world (remember what Francis Fukuyama said, history is over, it ended with the fall