Re: [-empyre-] the global Trump effect

[William Bain]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Renate asked about Barcelona (province, I suppose, as well ascity) in relation 
to adjusting to current political trends (snip) “not onlyTrump per se but this 
general shift right.” I’ll be very general here and I’drecommend checking 
wikipedia for things like *2016 spanish general election*and other obvious 
terms. As in the United States there are effortshere to do away with the 
hegemony of the two party system. In the Spanish stateone might say that the 
Partido Popular is analogous to the GOP and the PartidoSocialista Obrero 
Espanyol to the Democratic party—at least in terms of the electoralsystem. A 
difference is that smaller and less voted parties here can get seatsin the two 
chamber congress due to a different system of proportionalrepresentation. As an 
aside let me state the obvious that Empyre’s recent mentionof the USelectoral 
college might be examined in such PR terms. But briefly the 2016 Spanishgeneral 
election is of interest bc the two major parties were forced tonegotiate with 
new new *smaller* parties before a govt could be formed.Wikipedia for 
more.Barcelona, you’ll recall, is the capital city of theautonomous region of 
Catalonia.There are 17 ARs, governed by autonomous statutes (Wikipedia). The 
Catalanindependence movement is similar to that of Scotland. This is 
perhapsinteresting for the Empyre discussion regarding moves to alter 
two-partytradition. Very briefly the Popular Unity Candidacy (Wikipedia) a 
small leftwing party favoring town hall style government *and* independence is 
animportant coalition partner in the Catalan government—based in the capital 
cityof Barcelona but of course with membership throughout the AR with 
similarparties throughout the Spanish state. This is a small part of the 
storyobviously but I think the relationships to your question and to PR 
worldwide makeit of some interest. The link below is old but maybe useful. Best 
wishes,William 



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Re: [-empyre-] The global Trump effect

[Alan Sondheim]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

Thank you so much, Patrick; my issue is, for example, with B's essay
on the Gulf War; of course it _did_ occur and for me, its devastation 
overrode theory. One arm discussed constantly here in the U.S. is a new 
and (again that word I've been using) brutal militarism, which overrides 
again, "outsourcing defence against North Korea to China" - that doesn't 
seem to be what's happening at this point. And a final point; a friend of 
mine who's a diplomat/constitutional scholar in Washington, worries that 
what will happen will be precisely a constitutional crisis - and if that 
does, given the economic/military power of the U.S. in the midst of this 
mess, anything might happen. We're certainly heading in that direction.


We _should_ have a Ministry of Happiness here - but it would most likely 
serve McDonald's/


Thank you for your response -

Alan

On Thu, 9 Mar 2017, p...@voyd.com wrote:


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Re: [-empyre-] The global Trump effect

[Alan Sondheim]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

Hi - thank you for your response. The erratics are definitely there; they 
were there all the way from his primary debates on. It's a form of shell 
game; as (I think) I said, it requires a different form of news response; 
if new has been traditionally both a narrative and reasoned critique, it 
now has to be a form of high-speed twitter doxa - or else it has to ignore 
the smokescreens altogether. And this becomes increasingly confused as 
well because of wiki- and other leaks; there is literally more information 
to be assimilated than the news is capable of (apparently only 1% of the 
intelligence leaks have been released). And leakage, or Wikileaks them- 
selves, or Assange, become problematized in the shifting landscapes of 
Trump. And of course you're right - the hard-drive of the right continues 
unabated as everyone else worries.


Not only are games changing - perhaps there are no longer games at all, 
but a continuous flux/flow of codework.


And perhaps Lyotard is wrong today - perhaps governance _is_ a 
conversation (in Rhode Island by the way, apparently the legislature 
engages in heavy drinking on the job. but like everything else, I may have 
this wrong.).


- Alan


On Thu, 9 Mar 2017, William Bain wrote:


--empyre- soft-skinned space--


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Re: [-empyre-] The global Trump effect

[Alan Sondheim]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

Thank you so much for your reply. PTSD is, I think, a proper term to use; 
so many people, including myself of course, find themselves simultaneously 
at a loss and finding it necessary to proceed. And on one hand, there's 
what I call semiotic splatter, which includes health-care fallout for so 
many of us (including my partner Azure); on the other, there's the spectre 
of a highly-directed brutality that ignores protests, breaks up families, 
and so creates a cold-war military posture beyond anything we've seen in 
decades.


We have to, we must, negotiate all of this. I find mindfulness helps as, 
for me, does playing music (one or another instrument), and even having 
football (soccer) on in the background - domains of orderliness, where 
structure becomes creative structure.


You say, "It is disheartening in a whole other dimension of
reality that even Hitler could not have imagined." - but I think this is 
precisely what he imagined - on one hand, his projected singular brutality 
against what had been Weimar and its scattered brilliance; and, on the 
other, his fast-forward remaking of the social world by any means 
possible. Arendt and others go into distinctions between propaganda and 
news, and how the latter was set aside; T. sets the news aside as well, 
with platter - a different approach, but with the same end. It seems an 
inverted form of totalitarianism, with a deeply inept leader, and his 
staff, which are more directed and incredibly dangerous.


A final note - for those of us who are distraught, are there groups people 
belong to, which deal with the internal psychological damage? In other 
words, other than outward action, what have people found helpful, that 
enables them to survive with a measure of health?


Thank you so much,

Alan


On Thu, 9 Mar 2017, ghostn...@ghostnets.com wrote:


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Re: [-empyre-] The global Trump effect

[p]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--


First, I apologize to my dear friend 
Alan, as I got tied up in a net.controversy in Pakistan and could not do the 
first post as he requested.

Second, as someone who lives in Dubai the last couple years (well, Sharjah last 
year), I find this topic hard to tackle, mainly because of its heterogenous 
effects around the world.  On Sheikh Zayed Boulevard, the Trump Country 
Club signs are back up on the property being developed with his 
friend Hussain 
Ali Sajwani of DAMAC. 

I 
hear some of William's reflection in hearing the somewhat disconnected 
narrative when he sees America from afar via the news. In fact, here, Trump is 
non-news. From my observation, the main issues here in the UAE have to do with 
the cycle of the economy (we have a Ministry of Happiness here) and making sure 
ISIS does not get a foothold here. I believe the main issue that Trump's 
actions might rock the region would be the movement of the US Embassy to 
Jerusalem, or changes in the Iranian sanctions.  The feeling that Trump is 
another Hitler is a largely North American effect, and the reality is probably 
that he is just a toxically corrosive plutocrat.

This does not mean Trump has deep effects, and that I am not deeply 
troubled by him, but to describe all of the effects he has had on my out here 
would be a book; one I do not want to write.  For now, I am thinking of 
two things - the collapse of Kroker's bimodernism into spheres of influence and 
Baudrillard's The Illusion of the 
End, and  The Gulf War Did 
Not Happen.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States declared 
victory for neoliberal catalyst democracy and engaged on enacting a form of US 
Imperialism, including the Project for the American Century, the TPP and its 
botched Central Asian/Middle Eastern policy.  But with the unexpectedly 
high cost in Afghanistan (let us not forget the Soviets and Brits to remind us 
of American exceptionalism in entering this theatre) with the continuing 
squeezes to the Middle Class by offshoring, productivity hikes, and cuts in 
Federal domestic spending as well as general erosian to the American 
infrastructure, the Left was taken unawares of its own moral superiority 
signified by the "deplorables" quote.  They won, and their zvengali, Steve 
Bannon, rests relatively unscathed on the security council.  The madness 
has already begun normalization, and the question is no longer resistance, but 
how to weather the storm.

However, with the collapse of American hyperpower status under Trump and his 
abandonment of the TPP, outsourcing defence against North Korea to China (in 
media, in a way) and alignment with Putin, Geert Lovink and I agree that the 
globalist discourse will shift to Spheres of Influence, such as the Indian, 
Chinese, US/'Canadian, Australian; and as such, the world will only care about 
Washington in terms of its sphere until war comes about, which I believe that 
Trump's quote about America winning wars again is his resistance to the 
collapse from The Superpower to a major power.

2016 was Baudrillard's election, for sure.  As in The Gulf War 
Did Not Happen, Trump's media machine created a scenario of misdirection 
and simulated Republican Reich Federalism created a candidate that simply did 
not exist except as an avatar.  Even Melania's sad plagiarism of Obama's 
First Lady speech was a signifier of empty signification. But Donald reassures, 
But I'm telling you, it's going to be great, believe me... Such is the clueless 
raving of a megalomaniac CEO whose media promises are now just a storm of 
mirrors.

Many in North America consider the Trump Presidency an "end of the Republic" of 
sorts. Although severe, unless the Contitution gets rewritten, the worst he can 
do is create damage, but (hopefully for this year) not enough to really 
collapse the Union, unless Bannon has a black swan up his sleeve.

But as Baudrillard once wrote, an End is merely a terminus; after it, there is 
always another End, and after then, what then?  At the risk of being 
flippant, I think that American is entering the realm of "post-postism" in 
which eschatology fails, and the necessity of considering the continuous 
becomes neccessary, however distasteful.

At this time, it just seems that The crisis for America is plutocratic 
exceptionalism that is corroding the Obama legacy of foreign policy and 
threatening to fleece its populace through Trumpcare.  This  is life 
after the end, and the world is turning its back.




 

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Re: [-empyre-] The global Trump effect

[ghostn...@ghostnets.com]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--The most powerful t. effect is personal and intimate. 

I have been hesitant to jump into this discussion because it is so ubiquitous 
in my life now, I can hardly bear more. I teach at Stony Brook University, the 
most diverse school for students from all over the world, and it is obsessive 
there. i teach a class in Collective Action and Advocacy in the Sustainability 
Dept. to earnest young people, who are over-whelmed, but the department policy 
is to avoid direct allusuions to this "administration”. My most important 
collaborator is Dr. Jim White, Director of the Institute for Arctic and Alpine 
Research at the Univ of CO at Boulder, tasked with monitoring climate change, 
where I’m an Affiliate, and we both work with Dr. Gene Turner, who has been 
monitoring the Gulf Spill, which continues to destroy the third largest 
watershed in the world. My own present work is a series of installations in the 
path of natural gas pipelines, to try to stop them with a combination of 
copyright law and eminent domain law. All my colleagues, feminists and artists 
working on climate change, biodiversity and nuclear issues have their hair on 
fire and speak of waking up in tears every morning. As I move forward, I am 
literally in fear of my life. Recently, someone tangential to my project, The 
Blues Trees Symphony, was shot dead with 150 rounds, for shooting at a natural 
gas pipeline. That’s just the professional part. 

Personally, as a someone living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome who couldn’t 
accrue enuf quarters for social security due to disability,and as a cancer 
survivor, assaults on health care, environmental protection and unleashing 
banks to do as they please, my life is threatened in a whole other panorama of 
horrific outcomes.  The upshot, is that I sleep walk thru every day with 
chronic PTSD, while trying to see a future that is a beacon to the diverse 
nationalities of the young people I teach, and plan events that might thwart 
the global effects of fossil fuel proliferation, that could endanger my 
collaborators. I think many people I know are living like this now.

Intellectually, I have long analysed the relationship between over-population 
and species decline under threat and pressure. I think t. is a “natural” 
corrective for what our species has failed to manage more wisely. What I never 
anticipated, was the sheer cruelty of those who are implementing his regime. It 
is disheartening in a whole other dimension of reality that even Hitler could 
not have imagined.

The task is to carry on, but it is often incredibly difficult.


“What the world needs is a good housekeeper.”
Aviva Rahmani, PhD
Affiliate INSTAAR, University of CO. at Boulder
https://www.nyfa.org/ArtistDirectory/ShowProject/1446ef3a-0a9d-4449-96be-74023eb9c376
Watch “Blued Trees”:  https://vimeo.com/135290635
www.ghostnets.com
www.gulftogulf.org





> On Mar 9, 2017, at 11:05 AM, Renate Terese Ferro  wrote:
> 
> --empyre- soft-skinned space--
> 
> Thanks William  for your perspectives from Barcelona.  I teach at Cornell 
> University in upstate New York.  It is so true that in the course of a few 
> weeks the “temperature” politically and socially has changed for not only 
> citizens living within the United States but also globally.  That said I 
> wanted to share a few of the personal instances where personal lives are 
> affected.  At Cornell we have declared our university to be a safe space with 
> many of the departments putting up statements on their websites.  In fact the 
> art department posted this one about a month ago. Just under ABOUT US there 
> you will find it.  http://aap.cornell.edu/academics/art/about
> 
> Working with students both undergraduate and graduate I find students daily 
> whose parents are undocumented and are afraid of losing their support 
> systems.  There are students and faculty from the international countries 
> that have been targeted by the ban who are afraid that if they go to a 
> conference outside of the states leaving Cornell or perhaps return to their 
> homelands they will never be able to enter again.  Just last week at the 
> grocery store I ran into a young academic who is a visiting scholar who was 
> in near tears because her immediate travel plans had to be curtailed.  A new 
> media theoretician from Turkey who lives in Canada just canceled her plans to 
> attend an upcoming media conference in Chicago because she would have to 
> cross the border.  And most dramatically the number of students applying to 
> our BFA and MFA programs has been affected.  
> 
> I write these rather localized observations now because I believe that while 
> we spend hours reading, listening, watching the news, lives are affected on a 
> very localized and individual level where individuals, families, work is 
> being directly affected.  I continue to be awed by the actions of so many in 
> a positive mov

Re: [-empyre-] The global Trump effect

[Renate Terese Ferro]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--

Thanks William  for your perspectives from Barcelona.  I teach at Cornell 
University in upstate New York.  It is so true that in the course of a few 
weeks the “temperature” politically and socially has changed for not only 
citizens living within the United States but also globally.  That said I wanted 
to share a few of the personal instances where personal lives are affected.  At 
Cornell we have declared our university to be a safe space with many of the 
departments putting up statements on their websites.  In fact the art 
department posted this one about a month ago. Just under ABOUT US there you 
will find it.  http://aap.cornell.edu/academics/art/about

Working with students both undergraduate and graduate I find students daily 
whose parents are undocumented and are afraid of losing their support systems.  
There are students and faculty from the international countries that have been 
targeted by the ban who are afraid that if they go to a conference outside of 
the states leaving Cornell or perhaps return to their homelands they will never 
be able to enter again.  Just last week at the grocery store I ran into a young 
academic who is a visiting scholar who was in near tears because her immediate 
travel plans had to be curtailed.  A new media theoretician from Turkey who 
lives in Canada just canceled her plans to attend an upcoming media conference 
in Chicago because she would have to cross the border.  And most dramatically 
the number of students applying to our BFA and MFA programs has been affected.  

I write these rather localized observations now because I believe that while we 
spend hours reading, listening, watching the news, lives are affected on a very 
localized and individual level where individuals, families, work is being 
directly affected.  I continue to be awed by the actions of so many in a 
positive movement that is growing.  Just last night artists, both faculty, mfa 
students, and alumni hosted a benefit exhibition where we raised a lot of money 
for local women’s groups who have been affected by some of the new changes in 
legislation. 

Also just yesterday the day without a woman strike on International Women’s Day 
was ceremoniously celebrated with both action and non-action.  My 85 year old 
mother decided she would stay home and not go get her groceries in response to 
the strike.  the https://www.womensmarch.com/womensday/ 

So William and those of you in Australia and London and China and Singapore and 
so many other places I would love to hear how artists and non-artists are 
responding to the global shift to the right.  How are you and your friends, 
peers responding to not only Trump per say but this general shift right.  

Thanks William for sharing I would love to know more.
Also thanks to Allan for pinch hitting while I was on strike yesterday.   

Warmly,  Renate





On 3/9/17, 4:41 AM, "empyre-boun...@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of 
William Bain"  wrote:

>--empyre- soft-skinned space--
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Re: [-empyre-] The global Trump effect

[William Bain]

--empyre- soft-skinned space--Dear Empyreans
*Theglobal Trump effect* seems to me a well chosen phrase because it’s easy 
toforget that governments are made up of groups of people, not just one person, 
evenin truly authoritarian regimes or dictatorships. So global obviously means 
botharound the world, *international*, as well as *overall* in the sense of 
thewhole administration around the figure of the presidency. I can’t sense 
fullythe day to day experiences in the USof things like attacks on religious 
temples, on people because of their faiths,on gender or sexual orientations, 
because I live in Barcelona. I mean, yes, things like thathappen here and all 
over the world, but I personally can’t feel them happeningas they’re happening 
anywhere else. But I keep up as I can through thepress—that same press Donald 
Trump rails against—and I’ve tried to act againstsuch attacks since my 
undergrad years in the 60s. Last month I posted a shortassessment of *global 
Trump* on my personal weblog, link below. Today I thinkthe press both onpaper 
and online is responding courageously to the dangers ofTrumpism. And people in 
public demonstrations as well—against arms sales, forone thing. In the 70s I 
read a short press piece by Eduardo Galeano about a manin a South American 
country who had been detained for political reasons.Galeano says the man had 
been lined up against a chain link fence along withthe other people. The armed 
police had told them to stand there with theirhands on the fence. He found 
himself so frightened that his hands were tremblingand rattling the metal 
links. Ashamed to appear so cowardly he took his handsoff the fence, disobeying 
the orders of the soldiers. And the fence went righton rattling. As to analysis 
of *the global Trump effect* (and democracy ingeneral—government in general) I 
think it is a question of common sense--maybe common e-sense. Thanksto Empyre-l 
for the ongoing forum. Best regards, William (link to 21 February blogpost >>> 
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