Sherry Chandler

…one has to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, a fragmentation that attempts to valorize the concept of a free-floating signifier unbounded to social significance, that sees no meaning outside conventional discourse and only arbitrary codicity (convention’s arbitrary formalism) within it; and, on the other hand, a fragmentation that reflects a conception of meaning as prevented by conventional narration and so uses disjunction as a method of tapping into other possibilities of meaning available within language. Failure to make such distinctions is similar to failing to distinguish between youth gangs, pacifist anarchists, weatherpeople, anti-Sandinista contras, Salvadoran guerrillas, Islamic terrorists, or U.S. state terrorists. Perhaps all of these groups are responding to the same stage of multinational capitalism. But the crucial point is that the responses cannot be understood as the same, unified as various interrelated symptoms of late capitalism. Nor are the dominant practices the exemplary ones that tell the whole truth.

—Charles Bernstein from “In the Middle of Modernism in the MIddle of Capitalism on the Outskirst of New York,” A Poetics (Harvard, 1992)

From the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 — The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.

It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion.

The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law.

The Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department drafted the rule, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period and could be revised, although officials indicated that it was not likely to be changed substantially.

The regulation is the culmination of six and a half years of work by the administration to make it easier for mining companies to dig more coal to meet growing energy demands and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

I find this news too depressing to comment much.

Coal, like oil, would seem to have peaked, at least in the United States, so that methods to get at the last of it become more destructive and less productive.

We have to ask ourselves how much we’re willing to sacrifice to continue our old ways.

This week the Kentucky State Legislature is in special session, voting to give away the state in incentives to Peabody Coal for the promise to consider building a coal gassification plant here.

So looks like we’re willing to sacrifice a lot so we can continue a lifestyle that makes us fat, unhealthy, and miserable.

The rich will eat the poor. They always do.