The notion of a rooted-cosmopolitan is paradoxical despite the insistence of those who have argued that local and global feeling can flow in the same direction. To insist on the paradox is to pay closer attention to those moments when our rooted feelings block the route to their global expansion. This is true enough, but there are a few ways of inhabiting this paradox besides simply insisting on the clash between global and local.

First, and to use my own guilty language, we must locate the paradox in and as a historical moment. While this is academic common sense, it is worth noting because it rejects the universalism of the paradox, transforming it instead to a necessary and unsettled position. That is, we may have to face both ways at once for now, but this may not hold true in the not too distant future to come. Rooted-cosmopolitanism is less a paradox then and more the political position necessary for a Left that must attend to the decay of American urban centers because of job loss, and to the possibility that job movement overseas helps ‘those’ people. However, it is possible to imagine a moment when newly industrialized spaces abroad develop unions, and unionized labor, that turn to their American brethren for transnational solidarity. This crudely Derridian position is strengthened when we take account of power’s spatial relations.

Power is a slippery thing for poststructuralists generally, and Foucault particularly, because, following Gertrude Stein, “there is no there there.” One consequence of this, often unsaid, is to acknowledge that we (the dissenting public) have power. Note, for instance, the careful avoidance of the word “camp” in relation to Guantanamo Bay. The Bush administration was aware of that word’s memory and rejected its use for fear of the public’s disapproval; implicit here is an acknowledgement that public opinion, at home and abroad, must be attended to lest they lose what Bush called “political capital.” In this moment, there seems to be a synergy between the global and local so that “public opinion” becomes something of a transnational force to be reckoned with. Recent Israeli aggression in Gaza, however, reminds us that the power of public opinion is not always so holistic, but may create the circumstances where rooted-cosmopolitanism is indeed a paradox.

Those in American hopeful and optimistic that Barack Obama’s presidency will right the ship as it were should be called by their proper name, patriots. His silence, or rather lack of explicit condemnation of the Gaza strikes, has been disappointing. There is a disjoint here between national and global feeling here because we are at once patriotic––disappointment and criticism too is a form of patriotism (Chomsky?)––and want to end the Gaza massacres. These two feelings, however, may be more inline than previously noted, however, because we want Obama to speak out against Israel, to let the world historical record note that America condemned these actions. What we want, in other words, is a public opinion. (Divestment, of course, is this opinion’s material realization) Israel’s cooptation of the American “War on Terror,” I think, is an attempt to sway the superpower’s (and its voting public’s) opinion in its favor, to create a synergy between local feeling and its more cosmopolitan instantiation in the form of backing Israeli actions. If you support a(n American) “War on Terror,” you must back our efforts as well. Here, however, other forms of power muddy the picture.

Are the public relations machines only directed at the militarily and economically powerful? Are those the only spaces that matter for Israel, or do they also need to court something like “world opinion,” including less well-endowed countries?