PUBLISHERS license [cc-by-nc-nd3.0] licensed underacreativecommons The NewInquiryMagazine @newinquiry thenewinquiry.com SEPTEMBER2017. 63. VOLUME PATRIOTS RACHEL ROSENFELT FRANCIS TSENG EDITOR IN CHIEF AVA KOFMAN EDITORIAL BOARD MAX FOX ROB HORNING AYESHA SIDDIQI CREATIVE DIRECTOR IMP KERR MANAGING EDITOR KYLIE BENTON-CONNELL SENIOR EDITORS is MAYA BINYAM AARON CANTÚ WILLIE OSTERWEIL TIANA REID EDITORS AARON BADY LOU CATHERINE CORNUM MALCOLM HARRIS RAVEN RAKIA SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR SAM LAVIGNE WEB EDITOR LAURA CREMER PUBLICIST AND DEVELOPMENT LEAD LAURA THORNE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS RAHEL AIMA CHRISTINE BAUMGARTHUBER LAUREN M. JACKSON MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI MIRANDA TRIMMIER BOARD ADRIAN CHEN MARC DACOSTA ROB HORNING AELFIE OUDGHIRI RACHEL ROSENFELT ARIELLA THORNHILL MOIRA WEIGEL EDITORS EMERITUS ATOSSA ABRAHAMAIN HANNAH BLACK TIM BARKER JOSEPH BARKELEY ANWAR BATTE ALEXANDER BENAIM ADRIAN CHEN EMILY COOKE JESSE DARLING BRIAN DROITCOUR SAMANTHA GARCIA NATHAN JURGENSON KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED NATASHA LENNARD SARAH LEONARD ANNA MONTGOMERY SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT ALIX RULE PACO SALAS DERICA SHIELDS VIRGIL TAYLOR FOUNDING EDITORS JENNIFER BERNSTEIN MARY BORKOWSKI RACHEL ROSENFELT PUBLISHERS RACHEL ROSENFELT FRANCIS TSENG EDITOR IN CHIEF AVA KOFMAN EDITORIAL BOARD MAX FOX ROB HORNING AYESHA SIDDIQI CREATIVE DIRECTOR IMP KERR MANAGING EDITOR KYLIE BENTON-CONNELL SENIOR EDITORS MAYA BINYAM AARON CANTÚ WILLIE OSTERWEIL TIANA REID EDITORS AARON BADY LOU CATHERINE CORNUM MALCOLM HARRIS RAVEN RAKIA SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR SAM LAVIGNE WEB EDITOR LAURA CREMER PUBLICIST AND DEVELOPMENT LEAD LAURA THORNE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS RAHEL AIMA CHRISTINE BAUMGARTHUBER LAUREN M. JACKSON MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI MIRANDA TRIMMIER BOARD ADRIAN CHEN MARC DACOSTA ROB HORNING AELFIE OUDGHIRI RACHEL ROSENFELT ARIELLA THORNHILL MOIRA WEIGEL EDITORS EMERITUS ATOSSA ABRAHAMAIN HANNAH BLACK TIM BARKER JOSEPH BARKELEY ANWAR BATTE ALEXANDER BENAIM ADRIAN CHEN EMILY COOKE JESSE DARLING BRIAN DROITCOUR SAMANTHA GARCIA NATHAN JURGENSON KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED NATASHA LENNARD SARAH LEONARD ANNA MONTGOMERY SARAH NICOLE PRICKETT ALIX RULE PACO SALAS DERICA SHIELDS VIRGIL TAYLOR FOUNDING EDITORS JENNIFER BERNSTEIN MARY BORKOWSKI RACHEL ROSENFELT MARI MATSUMOTO INTERVIEWED BYSABUKOHSO INTERVIEWED MARI MATSUMOTO BY ALEX KARSAVIN AND BY ALEXKARSAVIN CAPITALISM WITHAFLUFFYFACE CAPITALISM LANGUAGE UNDERHOUSEARREST LANGUAGE THE NUCLEAR NATIONAL FAMILY THE NUCLEARNATIONAL BY MOHAMMEDHARUNARSALAI HANDS UP, DON’TSHOOT! HANDS UP, BY GABRIELLEDACOSTA BY WILLIEOSTERWEIL LIBERALISM ISDEAD BY A. MAUREENTANT BY A. BY BRANDONBRYANT GREEN NIGHTMARES THE HAVOC OFLESS THE HAVOC SYMBOLIC THREATS AMERICAN WOMAN BY JONNYBUNNING A SENSOR, DARKLY A SENSOR, BY BRIANKAMANZI BY JASBIR K. PUAR BY JASBIRK. BY SAMLAVIGNE BY JORGE COTTE BY JORGE SOFT BORDERS BY JACK GROSS BY JACK FASH AT SEA AT FASH BY RAFA RED BY RAFA MUST FALL C-SPAN 5 C-SPAN MARA ISKANDER EDITORS’ NOTE AS summer wanes, we find the globe seized by into a death trap. Black residents who fled their homes multiplying superstorms. In the ever growing man-made for nearby southern states were marked as “refugees,” catastrophe of climate change, these crises unfold along a title given to those for whom the nation reluctantly strictly drawn borders. Hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, makes space. Today, in 2017, the administration seeks to floods, and landslides lay bare the calculus of care as it is eliminate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, in an divvied up along national lines. affirmation of what people of color have always known: In the Gulf of Mexico, concern is portioned out Patriots are born, not made. according to metaphorical proximity to the United States Nothing so tightly congeals which who counts as a of America. Politicians offer prayers for U.S. colonial person as the word “patriot.” A patriot is not just a person properties, the most they can spare for the black and brown but a human, imbued with all the rights to life that category people who call the islands home. And yet, even within affords. And so, the role of patriot is intoxicating. continental borders, additional borders further divide Those within its reach will fight for it, will die for it, the deserving and the left-for-dead. In 2004, Hurricane and, especially, will kill for it. They stand by their nation Katrina transformed the very black city of New Orleans through good and ill, even when the nation fails to hold up its end of the bargain. And when citizen interests are protesters, Rafa Red describes how any “militant action inseparable from oppressive state regimes, alternative viewed as an existential threat by fossil fuel companies is imaginaries in the hands of “the people” can look just as now likely seen as such by the White House.” terrifying as the structures they might replace. Much of Fossil-fuel corporations are not the only victors. this issue is motivated by who does and does not get to Willie Osterweil’s “Liberalism Is Dead” offers a vision of be a patriot, who is compelled to be so, who is afforded the near future crafted by corporatocratic libertarians, the protection for pledging allegiance, and who remains Silicon Valley counterpart to the reinvigorated author- vulnerable either way. itarian ethno-nationalism of right-wing fascists. In this The nation is strengthened by crisis, such that it flipside of fascism, the left fascists dream of a world must manufacture these crises to survive. The feminist where instead of “citizens, there will be customers and anti-capitalist activist Mari Matsumoto, in her interview consumers, CEOs and boards instead of presidents and with scholar Sabu Kohso, notes how Japan is “constantly congresses, terms of service instead of social contracts.” If seeking to absorb the endlessly expanding accident.” the nation-state no longer works as a conduit for capital Their conversation draws out linguistic associations let alone power for the Left, a revolutionary politics must between the disaster of the Fukushima nuclear facility seek new ways to destroy the unfolding fascist future. and the ensuing disaster of the nuclear family, in which Lest the corporatastic future tech visions be another slippage structures the sovereign’s relationship confused with workplace governance of old, companies to citizens as that of a father to his family. The contra- like Amazon and Uber communicate a new, humane dictions of a nuclear nation lay bare the contradictions workplace culture through office dogs. In “Capitalism of many national “families”: The sovereign tends to his With a Fluffy Face,” Jonny Bunning discusses how own power first before tending to those in his charge. “dogs on the job” are just another perk, implicated in Similar to Black evacuees displaced by Hurricane Katrina a larger push to garner good faith in “the new spirit and governmental neglect, Japanese residents forced to of management” and keep the unsavory parts of the evacuate are treated like “illegal immigrants” even as the industry—“institutional misogyny,” “shady data use,” official nationalist rhetoric uses the occasion of disaster “micro-waged jobs”—out of focus. to speak of strengthening the collective. Invoking both a In a much more disruptive technological venture, world without borders and a necessary shift in political Sam Lavigne offers C-SPAN 5, where you can catch all the consciousness, Matsumoto states that “to confront the latest “unadulterated hits of U.S. political dysfunction.” It’s post-Fukushima disaster situation, we need a much longer C-SPAN for the overbusy gig chasers in all of us. view: a planetary history.” Patriots need outsiders and so must invent a foreign This is the kind of longer view often argued for in threat lest the efforts to preserve their special status be in environmentally focused political movements, which face vain. In the Canadian imaginary of itself as a multicultural particular attacks from both national and transnational friendly neighbor to the north, as described in Jack Gross’s entities. In the violent fervor needed to preserve state “Soft Borders,” such violent enforcement is masked by a interests that are increasingly private business interests, bureaucratic apparatus and the technique of pushing the environmental activists are subjected to a foreignizing border out to create not “a geo-political line but rather a discourse, marked as mercenaries and terrorists with continuum of checkpoints.” And in “American Woman,” similar markers used to target other racialized peoples. In Jorge Cotte discusses a special myth sprung from the an overview of recent backlash measures against pipeline American West that now dominates the way U.S. culture conceives of heroism and disaster. 2017’s Wonder Woman economy of injury “promotes disability empowerment considers the possibility that heroes are a convenient at the same time that it maintains the precarity of certain national fiction, however by the “official conclusion, bodies and populations precisely through making them the threat against humanity is made external again.” In available for maiming.” America, the post-9/11 superhero has the additional task “A Sensor, Darkly” is a first-person account from 2015 of rewriting history, “offering opportunities for a spiritual Whistleblower of the Year Brandon Bryant on serving his rehearsal of disaster every summer.” country as a drone operator. Bryant found no glory his A racist campaign known as Defend Europe both work but is transparent about the job—killing people— suspended and reinforced borders in its transnational,