“Yesterday while they were juicing carrots and complaining about their respective careers, Terry had stopped and looked at her obliquely. Isn’t it weird, how nothing coming out now even mentions what’s going on ? And
Catt knew. It was like they’d had to leave the country in order to say it. At least ten times a day for the past two or three years, Catt’s thoughts hit the same wall as
Terry’s . To speak them out loud was completely uncool, because where would you start? God Bless
Our Troops, hanging chads, saw 2 , Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction? Do not expect truth.”

Important Dates
George H. W. Bush Presidency 1989-1993
Gulf War 1990-1991
George W. Bush Presidency 2001-2009
Iraq War 2003-2011
Dick Cheney:
Secretary of Defense 1989-1993
CEO and Chairman of Halliburton 1995-2000
Vice President 2001-2009
Abu Ghraib Scandal 2003

“[Cheney] says it would be a disaster, it would be vastly expensive, it'd be civil war, we would have no exit strategy. He goes on and on for five minutes. Dick
Cheney saying it would be a bad idea. And that's why the first Bush didn't go into
Baghdad. Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he's back in government and it's a good idea to go into Iraq. [...] The day after 9/11, [CIA chief] George
Tenet is going in the [White] House and [Pentagon adviser] Richard Perle is coming out of the White House. And George Tenet should know more about intelligence than anybody in the world, and the first thing Richard Perle says to him on the way out is, "We've got it, now we can go into Iraq." And George
Tenet, who supposedly knows as much intelligence as anybody in the White
House says, "Well, don't we need to know that they have some connection to
9/11?” And, he [Perle] says, "It doesn't matter." It became an excuse. 9/11 became an excuse for a war they already wanted in Iraq.”
-Rand Paul on Cheney and Haliburton

•   “God Bless Our Troops, hanging chads, Saw 2 , Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction?
Do not expect truth.”
•   “In April 2005, four months into Bush’s return to office, Michael Jackson stood trial in
Santa Barbara for child sex and Saw 2 had just hit the multiplexes. Film critics who once wrote for reputable magazines blogged to a handful of readers about the ‘new sadism,’ Last year’s Abu Ghraib scandal had already been recycled as porn; Abu Gag!
(The Best Throat Fucking Ever Lensed) was up for AdultCon’s Grand Jury
Award.” (77)
•   “In the summer of 2006 […] in the US, in Maricopa County, at the very jail to which
Paul awaits extradition, chain gangs of juvenile prisoners dig roadside graves for the indigent. Electorally unbeatable, the affable fascist Sheriff Joe Arpaio was indicted again just this month, this time for hawking DVDs of the women’s jail toilets on the county website, his 24/7 webcam feeding live from the doorless stalls-an abject form of comic relief from the jail’s other tortures: the four point restraint chairs, the hooded suspects detained for drug use and shoplifting, the ‘Tent city’ jail” (195)

Arpaio Tent City (1993 - ) Abu Ghraib (2003)

“It occurred to Catt that the epistemological groundwork for the war in Iraq had been laid by
Paris Hilton’s anal sex video. Like the great Easter egg hunt for WMD’s, the question of whether the soft-porn not-quite-home video had been posted by a sleazy ex-boyfriend, as Hilton claimed, or by one of her publicists, was irrelevant. The only point was, it was there . Once anything entered the mediascape, it was unstoppable” (27-8)

“Catt cannot imagine spending one day in prison.
She’s never done anything she couldn’t talk her way out of. Paul spent sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Of less than one thousand dollars. Meanwhile she’s amassed tens of thousands by working within the tax code’s gray zones. Unaware of his former employer’s massive war crimes, Paul seems ashamed of stealing less than an art gallery spends on an after-party” (133)

“Posters that appeared in midtown Manhattan only days after the attacks show a turbaned caricature of bin Laden being anally penetrated by the Empire State Building. The legend beneath reads, "The Empire Strikes Back" or "So you like skyscrapers, huh, bitch?" Or think of the Web site where, with a series of weapons at your disposal, you can torture
Osama bin Laden to death, the last torture being sodomy; or another Web site that shows two pictures, one of bin Laden with a beard, and the other without—and the photo of him shaven turns out to be O. J. Simpson. What these representations show, we believe, is that queerness as sexual deviancy is tied to the monstrous figure of the terrorist as a way to otherize and quarantine subjects classified as "terrorists," but also to normalize and discipline a population through these very monstrous figures. Though much genderdependent "black" humor describing the appropriate punishment for bin Laden focuses on the liberation of Afghan women (liberate Afghan women and send them to college or make bin Laden have a sex change operation and live in Afghanistanas a woman—deeply racist, sexist, and homophobic suggestions), this portrayal suggests something further still:
American retaliation promises to emasculate bin Laden and turn him into a fag. This promise not only suggests that if you're not for the war, you're a fag, it also incites violence against queers and specifically queers of color. And indeed, there have been reports from community-based organizations throughout New York City that violent incidents against queers of color have increased.”
•   - Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai, “Monster, Terrorist, Fag”

“In the 21st century, the substantial over-representation of racialised   US   groups among the unemployed and underemployed —“last hired and first fired”— demonstrates the concessionary, uneven incorporation of these groups into a system of highly racialised wage differentials, occupational segregation, and precarious labour. As capital sloughs off these relative surplus populations in the core, the surplus capital produced by fewer and more intensively exploited workers in the Global North scours the globe for lower wages, and reappears as the racial threat of cheap labour from the Global South. In the   US, with the end of secure wage labour and the withdrawal of public welfare provisions, a massive
“post-racial” security state has come into being to manage the supposed civilisational threats to the nation — by policing black wageless life, deporting immigrant labour, and waging an unlimited “War on Terror”. The catastrophic rise of black mass incarceration, the hyper-militarisation of the southern   US   border, and the continuation of open-ended security operations across the Muslim world, reveal how “race” remains not only a probabilistic assignment of relative economic value but also an index of differential vulnerability to state violence.” - Chris Chen

“On the one hand, S/M seems to parade a servile obedience to conventions of power. At first glance, then, S/M seems a servant to orthodox power. Yet, on the contrary, with its exaggerated emphasis on costume and scene, S/M performs social power as scripted, and hence as permanently subject to change. As a theater of conversion, S/M reverses and transmutes the social meanings it borrows, without finally stepping outside the enchantment of its magic circle. In S/M, paradox is paraded, not resolved […] S/M refuses to read power as fate or destiny. Since S/M is the theatrical exercise of social contradiction, it is self-consciously against nature, not in the sense that it violates natural law, but in the sense that it denies the existence of natural law in the first place. S/M performs social power as both contingent and constitutive, as sanctioned neither by fate nor by God, but by social convention and invention, and thus as open to historical change. Consensual S/M insists on exhibiting the "primitive" (slave, baby, woman) as a character in the historical time of modernity. S/M stages the
"primitive irrational" as a dramatic script, a communal performance in the heart of Western reason.
The paraphernalia of S/M (boots, whips, chains, uniforms) are the paraphernalia of state power, public punishment converted to private pleasure. S/M plays social power backward, visibly staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy, and the alienation of the body as being at the center of Western reason, thus revealing the imperial logic of individualism, but also irreverently refusing it as fate. S/M manipulates the signs of power in order to refuse their legitimacy as nature”
–Anne McClintock “Maid to Order: Commercial Fetishism and Gender Power”