superfluous people

Yes! Now, I'm a human being!

(A refugee's first words on stepping on shore).

Do we still live in a world? 

I sometimes wonder that, R-ko, my oldest of friends. 

~~~~

The stateless and the superfluous are not the same as the superficial.

What now of human rights? Wasn't that Arendt's point way back when? Without the backing of the state are refugees and displaced people just sheep thrown to the wolves? Bare-forked animals on the heath? (Forgive me, dougal).

This isn't the story but, perhaps, the beginning of one for with the increasing likelihood that due to climate change severe changes will occur this century one can only expect more people to be on the move. 

The idea-if that's the right word-has an older lineage, though. Useless people and useless knowledge..people who can (and therefore should) be dispensed with. Do the statistics of the state inevitably lead to the treating of people as if they were mere numbers (the Camps)? 

Focuault's succinct formula: Nazism = state racism. 

Are the Palestinians even a people? Can you be a person without belonging to a territory, without having your own flag and army? To ask the question reveals the shallowness of the conception. As you enter fortress Europe and are asked to fill in the forms: date of arrival, date of departure, "have you suffered...", religion:?...ethnicity: 32 (or was it 33?). On one of my own passport I have to declare I am a Muslim but there is more; in addition I have to declare that another group is not Muslim. I kid thee not! What next..sexual preference? Can I prove that I do not endorse extremist views, do I really get and sign up to "British values", pass some kind of citizenship test (I think this already happens in Holland or Denmark). Am I sufficiently liberal to be allowed to live?

In another sense, we might ask: without spirituality (I do not say religion), art, music, poetry, education (again, this does not mean schooling), time, a set of relations to other people and things of value, to what extent are we really individuals?

As we destroy our natural habitat, and as the social, the public realm and sociality are hollowed out, whittled away, we have to face the very real possibility that in some sense we're all adrift now.

(photo courtesy of Tom over at Tomclark.blogspot.com).

A lament for the old solid bourgeois world (Adam Gopnik's lovely intro. to Molly Hughes..Rembrandt's local burghers), Simone's "bridges", de Waal's worldly objects, 110-A.

A line from Neko Case:

nothing stays the same
and i will always love you.