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powerclown: interesting response--thanks for it.
luckily i think this response can be shorter.
the numbers track as yours do.
1. i guess i should have simply said this: i opposed the bush administration on political grounds before he was elected the first time (quarrels about that aside)--but i did not imagine that the administration would veer in the direction that it has since 911--any more than i think the administration itself did. so my sense of what is happening, as it relates to the title of the thread, is that the administration found itself in a curious, unexpected position after 911 with an urgent need to react--which it did--to my mind--in a really quite simple-minded manner that seemed much more about a reaction to a percieved psychological need domestically--for some response, even one that narrowed the meanings of the action on 911 to a surreal extent--the problem i see is not even the response in itself (though i found it foul at the time) but that it did what i expected it to do from the outset, which was to box the administration in politically--the way of seeing the "war on terror" that you outline is to me a restatement of the effects of these earlier choices. i dont find it compelling analytically and see little but damage and hysteria resulting from it.
for all this, i understand that some kind of response was required right after 911--i simply think that it was at this point that this particular administration made really poor decisions.
2. on germany: from the a viewpoint that equates the alteration of an ideological context with the capturing of power by means of an effective coup d'etat, you'd be right. i see the two as related by seperat processes--the alteration of the ideological climate was quite rapid, but not as rapid as you make it out to be. on this, there is a body of newer social history grouped together as "the history of the everyday" in german, written by folk like martin brosazt (i am not sure of the spelling at this point--sorry) that is about trying to work out how this type of cultural alteration/domination happened, when, what reinforced it, what ran against it, etc. when i think about this type of question, i route some of it through this type of research. so we may be talking about the same thing from differing frame of reference that arent (until now) made explicit.
as for the speed of it--well, if you alter the timeframe, everything and anything can be seen as overnight, yes?
3. the press question is interesting--that there has developed a conservative media apparatus over the past 20 years or so seem unquestionable--this works within the dominant media, which i for one DO NOT see as "liberal" or "l;eft" at all--if anything a kind of diffuse moderateness conditioned by a tendency to defer to whomever is in power. so the two terms--mass media in general, the conservative media apparatus--do not cover the same area. the line is pretty obvious, if you think about it: on cable news, fox furthest and most obvsiouly to the right...in print, things like the washington times--in addition to the older-school weeklies and monthlies--the colonization of am talk radio by the right is evident as well. the rest of the institutions within/aroudn this scene are pretty well known.
that there is tight co-ordination between this apparatus and the present administration is pretty obvious--to say that there is direct control is wrong.
there are lots of older, other examples of tight co-ordination without formal control between types of organizations--i could go on at great and tiresome length about the co-ordination between the french communist party and the cgt, the biggest industrial trade union.
there is no need to slip into conspiracy unless your thinking does not allow you to see co-ordination for what it is. it odesnt require direct control of one institution by another. for example, if you think that there is no co-ordination between riger ailes and karl rove across talking points that shape how fox shapes its coverage of "news" then i would argue you are simply mistaken.
4. maybe you're right about a sense of alienation--but i am not sure what you mean exactly...anyway, in my regular life, such as it is, i do research on western european history and have spent alot of time juxtaposing western european and american political discourses/spectra of positions. so i dont tend to see americna politics entirely from the inside. maybe that is alienation--the terms doesnt really interest me, so there we are.
other tasks in real lilfe press on me, so the remainder will be suspended for the moment.
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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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