The Nervous System

Buh, thanks for the nice posts, keep it up.

So yesterday after work I went to the bar at the corner and ate some food and ended up engaging with two guatemalans over beer, one from my moms department, the other from Panajachel. They'd come up for work in the restaurant industry. They told me they live with a ton of guatemalans, probably all Mayan in White Plains and that area. It was strange because there's something so different about Guatemalans here. I'd venture to say that they're subjectivity is under extreme pressures, to the point that they're alienated from themselves. Not only that, but the bare minimum state support that they'd learned to expect at home post peace accords, is inverted into an omnipresent threat by omnipotent networks of intelligence and force. Here there's none of that stuff for us is what Tomas told me. All there is is beer, hot waitresses and lots of work. Nevertheless, this giant reaper of an economy needs them to keep running, and does with them and their lives and their families and their countries, what it wills. Maybe there are no rights or law here for them, but what there is here for migrant workers is the growing trend of using the terms "terrorist" and "illegal" interchangeably. The confusion of terms speaks to no logical or even political connection between the two. The only connection is that of the demands of the nervous system. When they're needed, they come on their own, when they're not, they're arrested, locked up or deported... When they pose a threat, persecuted, blown up, interrogated or assassinated, here or there. I've come to realize that capital is global, wall street is symbolic, used for desperate protestors, there's no center, the center of capital is your computer screen, where your stocks dance up and down and the news keeps you paranoid. The prospects of ejection hit Rafael here over a Corona, as hard as losing a job hits Josefa at my Dad's Casa del Mundo "economia my mala" meeting in Guatemala.