|
first off, it would be more extortion than blackmail. more like demanding protection money or you'll burn down the store than "i have film of you masturbating with the aid of a liverwurst sandwich and if you dont pay i'll go public."
second, this kind of horsetrading--you know, crass power politics--is a strucural feature of the way the american oligarchy operates.
trading or threatening not to trade material advantage is a mechanism for building and maintaining factions.
the delivery of material benefits to the public is understood as part of the circuit that constitues power.
in this, the logic of the american system tends, and has long tended, to substitue the accumulation of objects for responsiveness to the people--that is jockeying for position relative to cash streams is what these "representative" bodies do in place of fulfilling any meaningful democratic function.
the assumption is that cash=freedom.
things=freedom.
the amount of things=an index of how free you are.
the right likes to squander huge amounts of money on boys in uniform--other folk prefer spending more on education or health care or infrastructure etc etc etc--but these are variants of the same.
the more money spent on boys in uniform=an index of freedom for the right....the more money spent on other types of projects=an index of freedom for other positions.
faction within american "representative" bodies substitute positioning relative to cash streams for democracy in any meaningful sense of the term: representation is oriented toward the top, if you like, toward budgets and their allocations, rather than toward below, toward being responsive to the polity.
this means that, once elected, representatives cross into a system of the exercize of power that is different in kind from a democracy.
the linkage between the two (horsetrading/power politics vs. democratic process) is a matter of assertion.
these assertions are close enough to arbitrary that they require some maintenance--the feedback loops that enable such maintenance are polls. direct interaction---phone barrages of congressional offices--- by this point have become suspect, thanks in large part to the modes of organization put in place by the christian coalition and tobacco companies (you know, the cold calling pollsters who ask questions about a given political issue, test your views, and, if you seem servicable, ask if you want to talk to your representative--if you say yes, they switch you to that number--this is the technique that allows you to construct a fake grassroots movement)...so polls, which give a vague image of the aggregate, become all the more important.
not in shaping how things go, but in determining when assertions about the meaning of those things require repetition or adjustment.
all this presupposes an uninformed and largely indifferent population, a population willing to accept that politics=a variant of shopping and that one's material position is an index of political freedom.
so while horsetrading and extortion (its unpleasant counterpart) have long been part of the american way of doing bidness, long been a feature of how the american oligarchy functions. but there is no logic behind ustwo's position that it is ok if the bushsquad threatens republicans with exile to reactionary siberia because other presidents have also worked that way.
third: in the continuing refusal of all critique of the bush admninistration, those few hardline conservatives remaining out there effectively treat conservative politics as a variant of juche thought and george w bush as the Dear Leader.
ustwo continues to almost surprise in the consistency of his servicing of the image of the Dear Leader for the benefit of the rest of us.
past, present, future: al are malleable for folk like this---all dimensions of experience can and should be subordinated to the defense of the Dear Leader.
just switch the pictoral aesthetic---substitute polo shirts and suvs for the trappings of the juche ideal.
maybe that's why the right hates north korea so much: the regime makes precisely the kind of closed-minded lock step ideology they prefer look really bad.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|