the withdrawal project blog

LI cut off all our hair yesterday, to get prepared to be a peace soldier – and although it looks a little mange-y, what the hell. There is something startling about seeing the pale, dead skin under your hair…

So I am thinking I am going to take LimitedInc’s Iraq and war posts in the next week or so and transfer them to a new blog for the Withdrawal project. And then I will compartmentalize. Years ago, I started LimitedInc as an art project, and I had the crazy idea that I could use the blog as a venue for denunciations of the war that would resonate with the other elements in the project. But there is a downside to this: it limited the number of people who would read the anti-war stuff, because it was mixed in with material of no interest to a large group of people. That was fine with me – I wanted this to be outsider art from the beginning – but it is time to recognize that the anti-war stuff, if it isn’t going to continue to be an indulgence, needs its own place. My next post, for instance, is going to be about Enlightenment eccentric Antoine de Lasalle, Herault Sechelles, and the epicurean tradition – and that has zero resonance with the most of the audience that is truly riveted by the war and singed every day by America’s occupation of Iraq.

When I get the Withdrawalproject blog set up, I’m going to distribute the password to anybody who wants to contribute to it. As with all Withdrawal Project components, the only rule, at the moment, is to agree to the policy of zero American soldiers in Iraq in 2009. I have to make that a snazzier one liner, by the way. January 2009 is the deadline, but I don’t want to create such a narrow deadline that the movement automatically loses if – as is very likely – there are soldiers there in January, 2009. Withdrawal is withdrawal – if one loses the timetable battle, it doesn’t vitiate the fact that the soldiers shouldn’t be there, and that we should be pressing to get them all, every one of them, out.

I’ve been reading a lot about past social movements, and I wondering whether the Withdrawal project’s lack of a strict to do list – sign your name to this petition, give money to this organization – is a positive (as I think) or an invitation to entropy. To be goofy about it, I want the Withdrawal project to awaken an antiwar Kundalini – a physical and spiritual energy. And I suspect that petitions and donations are ways of putting that energy into a deep, deep sleep. But I may be totally fucked up on this.