No subject

February 15 pre-war demonstration, contrasting its "much fuller demographic 
spectrum" with memories of demonstrations against the Vietnam War where "we 
were bound by a sense of self-selected minority identity, sociological 
martyrs united in spirit against the misguided mainstream." 

Expressive rights are fundamental to an anti-war movement, since to contend 
with violent nationalist ideologies is to refuse their articulations and thus 
speak from an alienated, inherently questionable citizenship. Hostile 
delimitation of the extent of expressive rights increasingly relies on 
'market forces' and, in public environments, on nominally benign 
institutional guidelines. Two essays focus on the incursions against speech 
and civil rights, part of the Iraq War cultural environment. Niaz Kasravi and 
Rafik Mohamed review two post-9/11 high-profile free speech cases ? Bill 
Maher and Michael Moore ? to illustrate how corporate-denominated 'profitable 
speech' operates. Michelle Matisons examines how a university that protects 
free speech in relation to the Iraq War simultaneously sets out to channel 
unruly expression and sentiments via teaching guidelines that normalize a war 
culture.

Another group of essays reflect on the American Empire and its iatrogenic 
social communications. Max Fraad-Wolff and Rick Wolff review and describe the 
basic form of imperial America and its elements, emphasizing their 
inseparability from the lengthy history of global imperialism. A vital 
interrelationship between games, entertainments and empire, once the 
sustainer of the British empire, has re-appeared in Iraq War video culture 
that conjoins military training and media reportage. Debra Benita Shaw 
relates the ethos of Iraq War militarism and its 'invincible warriors' to 
Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel, Starship Troopers, as sharing an 
endless military-political pursuit of empire. In a set of personal 
reflections, Bad Subjects Collective editor Arturo Aldama explores similar 
themes of video-games and reality television as para-war imaginative 
entertainments. Television critic Cynthia Fuchs continues such engagements in 
her essay, "The War Show," which examines the features of televised war, its 
embedded reporters, and the specter of a 'disloyal' media informant like 
Peter Arnett. Babak Rahimi argues that US media are deeply implicated in 
formulating and transmitting a ritualistic cycle of war sacrifice, 
memorialization, and civil resurrection of the dead. CNN, MSNBC and other 
major networks become, in this reading, sites of "ritual enactment that 
[allow] the deceased soldier in the immortality of a transcendent entity…the 
nation."

The rituals of American reportage provide an interpretive key for Michael 
Hoffman's reflective essay, one that implicates pattern repetition across an 
array of media reports of historical events during the past decades. In the 
end, Hoffman prefers the cool medium of newsprint to understand the Iraq War. 
Mass communications lecturer Steven Rubio blogged under heavy fire from the 
Berkeley fedayeen to complete his mission: a media review that considers the 
Iraq War as the first blogging war. Jo Rittenhouse and Elisabeth Hurst bring 
the home-front back into focus with an essay that addresses the news that 
disappears, the news of everyday life and human rights violations that 
disappear beneath the war news. 

Just as visibility is key to political campaigns, visibility is key to 
individual human rights. The Iraq War makes clear the consequences of 
violence's invisibility in a world-system, as the destructive invisibility of 
the closet has internalized gender violence to catastrophic effect. Beginning 
in queer theory, Nathan Snaza maps out reflections emerging from this 
parallel. New sets of permitted visibilities and enforced invisibilities 
create conflicts that demand humanization without reference to 
particularistic identity.

Binoy Kampmark examines the paradox of an American demand that a foreign 
nation disarm while US citizens arm themselves as part of a gun culture 
unequalled anywhere else in the world. Gun culture provides a false 
emancipation, a belief that freedom arises from an equality of fear. 
Kampmark's essay points to the role of the gun-state, to the symbolic 
reification of destructive will in underwriting political monopolies, and to 
the equation of precise sniping with precision bombing. Claire Norton 
identifies another paradox in the naming of the agents of violence, or why 
Western combatants are called 'soldiers' while Iraqis are called 'fedayeen.' 
The naming of enemies is heavily value-laden and by legitimizing government 
terminology the media situates enemy combatants within an official narrative 
whose purpose is to legitimize the US-British invasion.

Developing responses to the persuasive capacities of capital-intensive media 
that dramatize and provide running commentary on exhibitionist state violence 
is crucial to creating resistance. tobias van Veen discusses Brian Massumi's 
theorization of a tactics of affect, a discussion that reformulates a 
historic debate in US progressivism, dating to at least the early nineteenth 
century, between the roles of warm sentiment and cold analysis in shaping a 
receptive political topology. van Veen advocates mass media involvement and 
"tactical engagement with affect" as means of creating positive and 
communicative politics.

This Extra Bad! edition of Bad Subjects is only a beginning, a sample of 
social critique occasioned by rampant state militarism. Go read, go act, be 
extra Bad! yourself.

 Joe Lockard teaches early American literature at Arizona State University 
and has been a member of the Bad Subjects Collective for nine years. He joins 
the Collective in thanking Elisabeth Hurst ? eshet hayil ? for her 
instrumental work on this emergency issue.