roachboy

given that the press is geared toward covering the elections as if they were a horserace, and to giving the impression that somehow they more than mediate that horserace--without going so far as to say they determine anything---it stands to reason that coverage would itself swing around with changes in perceived (by who?) "momentum".
two things i rather like about this election--but they are about the only two things:

1. the conservative discourse generating machinery has been flanked of late--it is increasingly revelaed as a discourse-space and not as "common sense"---this is a good thing if you oppose the politics and the discourse in that it is now possible--in ways that it has not been since the farce that followed 911 got under way--to expose the weaknesses of that discourse across the major media. of course, the right does not like this and looks to trivialize it--whence the rhetoric of "bush hating" that you see thrown about at great and tedious regularity.

it is good because simply by being able to pull conservative discourse into a comparative framework at all, its limitations become obvious--that it is not based on a descriptive relation to the world--instead it seeks to atomize, fragment, and render incapable of action the population in the face of dominant economic forces..it seeks to create an inverted world in which mechanisms for public accountability are understood as the problems in themselves---it seeks to frame transfers of wealth, which are the most effective mechanism developed under capitalism to assure adequate levels of social stability--as theft...the list goes on and on--not a single point stands up to scrutiny--not one--unless that discourse is itself the dominant--ideally for the right, the exclusive--frame within which thinking politically can operate.

instead of thinking critically about the world, what you get is a bizarre kind of social affect-structure whose dominant feature is to deny that it is social; you get a wholly dominant frame of reference the primary feature of which is to present itself as a persecuted minority position engaged in an endless fight with a hallucination of the "left"....

the debates have been interesting only in this respect--if bush is put into a position where his tendency to speak in code to the right is undermined, he is helpless.
even in a debate with somone who is running as far to the right as kerry is this time, bush cannot explain his positions, cnanot spell out their logic, cannot defend anything--instead he reverts to his fatuous language of the Will--hallmark of petit bourgeois politics of the last century in their radical nationalist incarnations across teh board.

2.
the other thing is that all that really matters now is that people vote.
uncertainty is part of democracy.
the americans are not fans of democracy.
but this particular election, which is impossible to predict at the moment, is closer to it at the level of preditability of outcome, than any i can remember.

it is a strange place to be, this is, right now.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite