They would plan their channel surfing, getting as much news in as possible, trying to de-veil the unknown. Flick through 7-10, stay glued to SBS. Video tape the extended report on ABC, so that we could watch it again & again. Channel surfing became an important skill in the task of linking migrants to their home communities. We cross ourselves, praying for hope; we channel surf, searching for the vindication of our hope.

everyone ‘we’ knew would partake in this practice. But who is this ‘we’?? Is it yogo’s? Surely not. It is a ‘we’ that is neither west, nor east, south or north. it is a limbo that looks as if it were a junk yard of so many other suppoedly uniform cultures. No Yuogo-land, no Jugoslavija. That is a dead land, a non-place, ‘the’ failed project. Now we are ‘croatian’. It is the brave new forever. An ancient history was found for a place that had only begun to exist. Maps could not be drawn because we were yet to define the countries borders. It was freedom with an insidious undercurrent.

It was the birth of the nation. It was the birth of the ‘we’. Or perhaps what you have so aptly (and eloquently) called structural narcissism. Mourning, grief, anxiety, & searching are all so inherantly part of the nation, of the ‘we’. They are constitutive elements that excite the affectual elements of identity production. The unique arousal & displacement that comes with such trauma constructs us. Like scar tissue that remains after a severe wound, so does cultural/national identity sick out after a trauma, letting it self be known.

There was an old slavic folk tale of of the construction of a town that required the sacrifice of the wife of the young prince to applease the spirits of the land. In many ways this mirrors our psyche’s own need to generate communities, separated by their own mythical walls based in the principles of loss. The spirit of the dead constiutes the life of the nation. The nation is the living dead. The nation. The dead. The mourning.

I wonder how long before the Cronulla rhetoric mentioned by Melissa opens up into “we are taking our sweet time because of all the gang-rapes that they commit”. I give it… 48 hours.

i hope family and friends are safe and sound. i have extended family in lebanon too. you wouldn’t believe the rhetoric on tv here about “getting aussies home” — it’s as though Cronulla never happened.

i ran across your blog somehow and twigged that it’s you. i hope hong kong has been good. kate sends her best.