It's september 11th, and yet again we find ourselves dealing with the aftermath of a disaster in which the politics of empire and race play a central role. The problem here is not only, and never was, solely the calculated indifference and refusal to respond of the Bush administration, but as much the striated social geography of Souths urban and global, and the rapidity with which the reactionaries turn now (and then) to fantasies of finance capital and post-urban cities shifted from basins to stately, society of control, hills, the "certain schemes to improve the human condition" already profoundly shaped by anxieties about the subaltern and how it can best be managed in or excluded from the new New Orleans or to Freedom Towers jutting out from an ash-strewn city increasingly uninhabitable by folks who make less than $40,000/yr and in which none of us are free while the mayor can rent out the city and police force as a private military for corporate plutocrats like the Republican Party and New York University and immigrants live in fear of abusive employers who lock workers in grocieries at night and of the INS and the FBI who round them up for deportation or infinite detention.

We are in the midst of a global crisis which began neither with Katrina nor with the invasion of Iraq, nor, certainly, with 9.11.2001. Perhaps in grief and rage we can forge or locate the solidarities we need in order to create new social relations and emerge from this global moment of crisis into one of jsutice, of peace, and of a democracy neither propelled by the peculiar imperial logic Paul Gilroy has termed "armored cosmopolitanism" nor confined to categories of citizenship and belonging violently policed by jingoistic nationalisms. It's up to us.