"Painspray"

that on the pyre goes too
heresy blooms, and night draws on
we will change our name to Successland
that on the pyre goes too
mutiny avalanche
carbonaceous I:
that on the pyre
goes too



Sock Monkey Dreams.

The Anti-Streep.



"The
outer limit of this failure of the city to provide employment, services or housing is, for Davis, represented by the city of Kinshasa in the Congo, a city in which "the formal economy and state institutions, apart from the repressive apparatus, have utterly collapsed" (191). "Average income has fallen to under a $100 per year; two-thirds of the population is malnourished; the middle-class is extinct; and one in five adults is HIV-positive. Three-quarters are likewise unable to afford formal health care and must resort instead to Pentecostal faith-healing or indigenous magic" (192). "Wrecked by a perfect storm of kleptocracy, Cold War geopolitics, structural adjustment, and chronic civil war" (192), citizens of Kinshasa (Kinois) "fought for their survival by 'villagizing' Kinshasa: they re-established subsistence agriculture and traditional forms of rural self-help […] They sought release from the 'disease of the whites': the fatal illness of money" (195).

However, Davis says, "despite heroic efforts, especially by women, traditional social structure is eroding" (195). "Unable to afford bride price or become breadwinners, young men, for example, abandon pregnant women and fathers go AWOL. Simultaneously, the AIDS holocaust leaves behind vast numbers of orphans and HIV-positive children. There are huge pressures on poor urban families […] to jettison their most dependent members" (196). This has led to large numbers of abandoned children persecuted as "witches" in the guilty Pentecostal hallucinations of adults."

"..."The real crisis of world capitalism", he argues, is when "a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included, now or in the future, in economy and society" (199). This stigmatization leads to the perception that "the mega-slum has become the weakest link in the new world order" (204). This perception, in turn, feeds "the demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime", which "are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the violence of economic exclusion, and, as in Victorian times, the categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteed to shape a future of endless war in the streets" (202), a war for which the armies of the new world order are currently training..."

(via wood_s lot) --Katrina, Kinshasa...you don't think this will happen to us. But what are you doing so it won't?