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i still remember bush jumping into his limo and speeding past thousands of protestors last investiture, followed by the television flatbed truck---every camera off, all networks having cut to commercial.
i also remember that the security then was marketed in much the same way as this one...
they did a version of the same thing last time out too in the splitting up of protestors--which was said to be about security, but seemed more accurately about enabling television coverage that maintainted the illusion of unanimity by not showing the protestors. it was a kind of stage blocking. it was a kind of triumph of the will.
i look at this security excess as being another unintentional allegory for the inward nature of this administration---on the order of making a near-nomansland out of the area around independence hall for a while after 9/11 (so you could look at the symbol of american democracy but could not get near it) or the covering of the guernica at the un before colin powell's security council dog and pony show in the run-up to bushwar...for all their concern about opinion management, this administration seems singularly good at creating such accidental symbols of what those who do not support them find most disturbing about them.
it must be some kind of repetition compulsion.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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