Unsurprising news

I was not surprised... though greatly saddened to hear the 'results' of the US elections this morning. I had been watching the results for half the night on the BBC and talking about it with a friend in the US. I told him that I wanted Kerry to win, not because I liked him because I didn't want to be afraid of America anymore. My friend replied that he wanted Kerry to win because he no longer wanted to be ashamed to be American. Even as I watched I allowed myself the smallest glimmer of hope that Bush would be out but, inevitably, there wasn't any point in hoping. The saddest thing about the whole matter is that by re-electing Bush it is as if the American people approve of all the fuck-ups that have happened during his term. I know that this isn't true of the people who I know in America, but to the rest of the world it's how it appears.

But anyway, things will continue... Bush will continue to be an illiterate fool, Michael Moore will continue to make dubious documentaries, people will 'Praise the Lord' that the party blessed by God has one... and I will continue to be afraid of America.

To cheer myself I decided to buy Lyotard's Libidinal Economy. Here is the first paragraph, it should brighten up your day:

Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and continguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes - but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dress-maker's scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines' alleged interior, the jenjunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats' wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you're sunbathing or taking grass.

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