To be a deserter is to be a renegade, to embrace a DeLeuze and Guatari-esque nomadism, to remove oneself from the battlefield at the potential cost of one's citizenship. It is to reject the logics and structures of war and challenge them by one's absence. On a more grounded level, it's an act of fear as much as if not moreso than resistance. People desert with full knowledge of the consequences of doing so, and they do it because the consequences of doing so are worth the opportunity to escape the consequences of not doing so.

George W. Bush was not a deserter. His absence without leave rejected neither the war nor the privilege which insulated bush from its horror and made possible his paid vacation to parts unkown. His was an action withjout consequences because his privilege was steeped in the machinery which sent so many hundres of thousands of Americans, and so many millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, to their deaths.

So when Michael Moore calls Bush a deserter while stumping for Wesley "I love the School of Assassins" Clark, i find it extremely problematic. Rather than examine the mechanisms of death and destruction and their connection to the unelected president and his family of Yale Alumni, Moore essentially, in his hagiographic boosterism for the former general whose politics are almost as suspect as his defense of terrorism, torture, and Empire, can only call Bush a sissy in terms which are highly gendered. In doing so, the true horror and scope of Bush's project is obscured by the strivings of a kinder, gentler model of imperial control.  ¶ 4:06 PM