How to Not Think and Dominate People

Over dinner last night, Tim Kreiner and I decided that the proper response to the Sarkozy government's remark that "the French think too much" would be a gesture of American solidarity in non-thought. We could immediately send Bush and the rest of his government to France as special envoys of not-thinking. He could head his own department of sophism, rhetorical misfire, and false commonsense. The new propaganda: a blank page. The new early warning system: 4'33''.

I think I know what "not thinking" means, a special kind of thinking too much, the thought of what is, of the status quo over and over, that complicity stitch. You see: as the baptism-gift of my class, I was given at birth a special certification in not-thinking: no alternatives, no discontent, no political solutions that involve doing things, just the non-thought of the market, the war, grinding away at bodies and lives. But for the fortunate classes, freedom from thought, from necessity! What glories: an underlit Ketamine lounge, where the placid, pacific sounds of TINA and the End of History gurgle away in the background .

Thought: current that leaps the distance between what is and what could be.