NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Whether you call it the Muslim Ban or the Travel Ban, I cannot help but think of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer whenever the issue of Trump's poorly conceived executive order blocking immigration from seven Muslim-majority nations. It is intriguing the way that Trump's candidacy and now his presidency has ended up revealing so much of the guts of the political game in the United States, that it threatens to rend the whole thing asunder. What I mean by this is that politics is a game that is designed to keep anyone from fundamentally changing or challenging anything. A narrow range of ideological options are offered, neither of which would change much about the structure of society or the distribution of power. As long as everyone plays their roles, you could argue that revolution in both positive or negative sense is avoided. But Trump's refusal to be a typical politician or leader or even just a serious, mature person is leading to a crisis where the guts, the bones, t...

--> I'm already quite tired from a long day, but before I go to bed I wanted to post some articles about American Sniper. I tried to watch the film last weekend on a Sunday night when usually theaters are empty on Guam, but to my surprise it was sold out. In just a week it is now a huge blockbuster and seems to be a commercial and critical success. Amidst all the buzz, people have been criticizing the film because of the incredible amount of fabrication that went into creating the movie figure of America's most lethal sniper. The Chris Kyle in the film is very different than the Chris Kyle of history and who published a memoir and loved to exaggerate his history of violence, even to the point of boasting and lying about fights he was never in and murders he never committed, all in the US, not the Middle East. I have written so many times over the years about the way in which national policies become conflated with the soldiers who enact, in some cases illegall...

I've been scrounging the internet looking for good articles about the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the public's response. It is such a difficult things to make sense of, because while for some it is very simple, crazed terrorists attacked some cartoonists and police because of cartoons, and the end of the discussion is everyone stand tall claiming "Guahu Si Charlie lokkue'!" from their cellphones, ipads and Facebooks. But in the larger scheme of things, this generally isn't productive. You can focus in on this one instance, but such can be deceptive, it can prevent you from seeing how that may actually change or help little. It is easy to look at the relationship between societies and say this society is bad and this is good. This society allows this while the other does not. In terms of free speech there are definitely key differences between some Western and some Islamic societies. But if you are truly trying to improve things, you also have to acknowledge the...

 In his book Saina Chamorro poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez does something that really intrigued me. I recently wrote a review essay of his three poetry books hacha, Saina and Guma', and this was one thing that caught my eye. Throughout parts of the book he includes the names of soldiers from Micronesia, who will serving in the US military were killed in the Middle East, in the Horn of Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq. He lists them in the way that is customary for KIA lists, with their age and a hometown. He crosses out however everything except their names.  The tactic of crossing things out can be a beautiful strategy. I used to use it alot before, most notably in my article "The (Un)exceptional Life of a Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA. The act of crossing it out can mean that this doesn't really exist. It can be a way of de-emphasizing something. It can be a way of drawing attention to it, albeit in a circu...

 The website Common Dreams is a very good resource for those interested in a wide range of progressive topics. You'll find Democrat politics articles, which aren't very critical or radical. You'll find pieces that both support Israelis right to defend itself but also condemn it as a nation that is perpetuating genocide and colonialism. There is plenty of environmental coverage and economic justice news on everything from unions, to climate change, to resource wars. For me personally, as someone who comes from an island in the Pacific that is known as the tip of the spear and an unsinkable aircraft carrier, I truly appreciate the coverage that Common Dreams provides on militarism, in particular American militarism. Naturally, their lens for filtering through the possibilities of news focuses primarily on the hotspots where Americans troops are currently bombing, fighting and occupying and so it doesn't attend much to places where the bases have existed for a long ...