Work with Us, People

The more we cast our baleful eye upon the the faux currency reproduced in yesterday's post, the more it troubles us. What the fuck does this thing mean, anyway?

On one level, as a cleverly disturbing publicity stunt, the logic is transparent: "Whose country are you working for, George?" the anti-immigration paleo-conservatives ask. "Are you Mexican or American? This bill, like your service to the United States, is worth precisely 'nothing' to us, your Conservative Constituency, so long as you appear to be doing anything other than simply arresting and deporting [undocumented workers]."

Hell, maybe it's even simpler than that, and what we have here is a thinly disguised insult of the lowest playground variety: a way of attacking the president without actually using offensive racial and national epithets frequently directed at undocumented workers from Mexico, Central and South America.

Perhaps, however, there's something else happening here as well?

Is it an invitation to transpose processes of symbolic exchange and substitution (inherent in the very concept, theory, and praxis of money itself) onto the very different processes of migration and immigration: that is, a reworking of the concept of citizenship itself as an assymetrical process of symbolic exchange? Does it present labor as perfectly free of individual character, but in such a way that we understand not only the worker to be a unit that bears (without possessing) the value of its own labor, but the citizen as such a unit? Why else would the Good People of Bumfuckia require protection from George W. Bush's head, the head of capital, the head in the capitol?

Sorry that we've broken our promise to share our new Rough Guide to American Paleoconservatism, but we can't get past this image. Our attempts to work this through are further hampered by an eye that is leaking pus faster than Dick Cheney leaks classified information -- inhumane we may be, but nevertheless human -- and we've only got two more days of health insurance with which to sort it out.

So work with us, people. We want a goddamned close reading of the George W. Bush "Nada Pesos" bill, and we want your help. Do you think you can simply stroll by, drop in whenever you feel like it, sup at our hermeneutic table and take your leave with nary a fare-thee-well? No, the Swill is a two-way street, and it's about fucking time you swept your side of it.

Fuck! Our eye!

(Tip: do NOT type "eye infection" into google images. Trust us.)