Site of transgression

Remember the heady fun of learning Deconstructive theory? I learned it in college, in the 1990s, and I delighted, then, in fathoming my locus as the "site of transgression" in various binarisms. The site of transgression used to be the locus of the good guys: Experimental writers and Marxists and queers and misfits of all stripes. But "degeneracy" doesn't feel quite so benign now that the "construct" of morality has brought us into a collapse of civil rights. I guess it could be argued that Bush is the "site of transgression" between morality and immorality, the thread to pull to deconstruct the construct. But no one is pulling.

I have been stunned recently by the unmistakable tone of surprise in most American MSM reports about the Hamas victory in the recent Palestinian parliamentary elections. American journalists point out that, under Hamas, violence and terrorism may escalate in Palestinian regions while civil liberties and the respect of other nations' existence may diminish. They point out that secular Palestinians may find themselves doing a lot of self-policing in the newly stringently conservative religious climate. MSM American reporters make it sound as though this situation is a curiosity (that it's "other," if you will). Haven't they been watching our own country where all of these things are happening? In fact, if you look at the context of oppression that culminated in the recent Palestinian vote, it makes a lot more sense than the this country's citizens voting for the Bush regime.