General thoughts to fill up the weekend hole and the gaping hole in my life!

Politics has completely invaded my life this summer. I find it it a very interesting development that I am this immersed in the politics of America, a country where I am still officially statusless. That is literally my status - waiting for a status change, awaiting a green card and in between many uncertainties of life and immigration. Let me tell you, my readers, that it is a strange position to be in life - to be unrecognised so to speak. My sympathy for the many millions of illegal immigrants also stems from my own position. As I extend my opinion on the social and political happenings of the land I am besieged by questions of belonging and of whether I have a right to take part in this debate. The question of who I am becomes even more strained and greyed because of my legal status. What is my definition? Bureaucracy decides that. It is a cold place to reside in but I have decided after a full 6 years here that I have to start acting as if the matter has been decided or that that decision does not matter so much. I have decided to be proactive. A man has to make a stand sometimes, regardless of what he is recognised as.

Besides the years that I have spent here have been full, fuller than even the years I spent being born and growing up in India. I have spent the mature years of my life here after all. The major choices of my adult life have been made here. It has been a weird time here. I have made mostly bad decisions. I have jousted unhappily with the law and had a rough time trying to fit in with society at large. My first couple of years were in Los Angles(misspelled intentionally) in a big university where I lost myself in the worst ways and the best. My intellectual sparring partner from the inceptive stages of this blog, joeoverkill might remember me as a very green freshman; he will certainly remember struggling to understand my thick accent and eccentric classroom positions. It took a while to make myself be understood and a lot longer for me to understand the rich culture that I was thrown into. At the time I joined college I felt mostly disenfranchised from the culture around me. In a certain sense I fit in perfectly but in other ways I was lost, holding on to a plank in the middle of the sun scorched southern cal sea.

I remember other peers, mid westerners and east coast refugees just as homesick and lost as I was. USC is no representation of the country I learnt much later. The war on Iraq started in the spring semester of my freshman year in Trojan hall, the second dingiest dorm on campus(the honour of worst dorm of course belongs to Marks hall, that festering outpost of perpetually horny, loser overachievers! Us Trojan hall residents had them to thank for making us look slightly better. Magnoliafan, if you get an offer at SC, avoid both dorms). I remember my red headed neighbour, an awoved republican - something I would have completely been ignorant of in my freshman, foreigner complacency if not for his subsequent actions - put up fliers around the dorm. The fliers called for some kind of weak, soda and chips party(typical for the deans halls residents who were too scared of regulations to have a real party with booze) in the common hall to celebrate the declaration of war. All I had observed of my neighbour thus far was that he had an elaborate manner about him that seemed to hide a complete lack of personality and a horrible taste in music. This is just an observation of his general mode and not a critique of the war supporters. He just happened to be a zero so far in my eyes and his actions had the effect of raising my eyebrows and forcing me to notice him and the political atmosphere that I was so far ignorant of.

I remember being angry, very angry, upon reading his fliers. I left an obscene message on his dorm door chic whiteboard criticising his jingoistic missive. A few hours later I was hauled up by my epitome of chill RA for a heart to heart in the cluttered basement supplies room. This guy had passed me by several times as I hauled giant, brown paper bagged cases of coronas and Mickey's green 40's past his live and let live gaze. A real mensch and a true American spirit - a spirit that Joe's libertarian soul will find much to approve of. Ask rupey and the analyst, both of them have enjoyed the fruits of my fruitful, never carded because I am brown, expeditions to the 32nd street market. I enabled many a Trojan hall black out and bathroom puke disruption. So this guy(remind me of his name analyst or rupert, wasn't it pete?) took me to task that afternoon and told me that he could not have that kind of disruptive and divisive sentiment clog up the love pipes of his air conditioning free dormitory(I am still mad at you SC). That was one of my first encounters with the limits of political discourse. I think that was a very important discussion. My RA wanted me to apologize to my nemesis and I returned to my room angry and also forced to confront the source of my anger.

Why was I so angry with the posters Scarlet had put up? That nickname by the way fits my erstwhile nemesis appositely, for his mindset was just as ancient as his hair was red. As I composed my apology I realised that what had irked me most was not his support for an opposing position supporting the war. What troubled me most was his call for a celebration of a war - a silly, cheap, carbonated drinks and fried potato affair to commemorate and goad forward the certain death of American soldiers and Iraqi combatants and civilians. I refused to apologize to him and expressed my critique of his call in my letter. Now that I look back at that moment I am struck at the prescience of my anger at his attitude. I could never have guessed at the extent of mismanagement and carnage that the war would unravel into. At that time of my stay in America, I was a complete political novice and my only reason for opposing the war was a distrust for the hubristic, runaway nationalism epitomised in my neighbour. The celebratory(fascistic one could say), carried away by post 9/11 anger and desire for revenge is what allowed the mismanagement of the first 3 years of the war. That running down a hill energy, opposed to any heed for caution or critique is what allowed this catastrophe to happen. Irrational anger is a lot more obvious to outsiders than to someone who is caught up in a patriotic moment. Why did the Bush administration not give any heed to opposition within international bodies like the UN?

The intersection of the political and the personal is my one overwhelming concern. Without the aggregation of persons, the body politic is but a ghost that concerns and addresses abstract causes. Why is it that I am so much more concerned about politics today than I was 4 or 5 years ago. Part of it of course is my strange status. I had to live here for this long to start caring enough about the political system that controls us all, whether we voice our opinions or not. Far too many people are not represented by their representatives because they choose not to express their voices. Freedom of speech also means freedom not to speak. I realised over the last 5 years that even though I could not vote( and probably will not be able to for the next 10 -15 years until I become a citizen, if i do at all become one) there are other ways to express my opinions.

Certainly, going out to try to register voters for the PA democrat primaries has helped me feel closer to the heart of this beast they call the democratic process; a beast that is for the most part distant from individual concerns or opinions. The more one engages in it the closer it comes to you however. In the absence of a true, one to one democracy, the closest one can get to real representation is to take part in the dreary process of representative democracy. If my language reminds you of a college civics geek, then you are right. I am a dumb, drunk college geek in the way I relate to politics, and all the better for it. When I was a reprobate(guess I still am!) and an average, muddleheaded statusless worker(clinging to my beer bottle and my penis since I had no gun or bible to cling to!) I had no chips in play. Now I do and I am betting on change. The game is in session and I am playing. Rupert, history is a shit pile and we will plant our flags on it.