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this all seems very kumbaya to me.
i do not see the a priori problem with a certain degree of acrimony in politics--it would be better of course if this acrimony reflected meaningful debate based on reliable information in a context where the decisions of the people actually mattered in anything like a direct way--but we do not live in a democracy, we live in america.
we live in a context that is changing fundamentally very quickly and there is no coherent political ideology that addresses these changes coherently.
people seem to find themselves in a position of not being willing to look too hard at what is really happening around them, and so revert to assembling ad hoc positions from the various incoherent political positions they find already available around them. perhaps there is some internal momentum this process affords them and so it feels like cone is assembling coherence about the world when one is operating at several removes from that.
sometimes it appears to me that folk are simply not able to face radical change in the states--maybe it has something to do with the primary education system and its rigidity--its refusal to equip people with the requisite tools for independent thought. after all, education is social reproduction and so has a necessarily conservative bent to it.
on the other hand, system adjustment presupposes that folk are able to think about change coherently, which presupposes that people are given the intellectual tools to do that--but these tools also lead to problems of dissent so perhaps it appears functional to not provide them. but if you don't, the contemporary types of incoherence are a direct result. nad if the system of social reproduction is not adjusted, what will result is generation after generation of incoherence such that the united states will in the longer run slide with great noise and violence into the ash-heap of history and no-one in the united states will quie be sure why it happened.
neither political party in the states offers anything like a coherent vision of the world. neither seems to have the faintest idea what to do in the face of basic things like the wholesale restructuring of labor markets along more global lines and the problems of social reproduction these changes bring with them for nation-states. both parties seem more concerned with offering therapeutic palliatives than with actually risking a serious confrontation with problems that they do not really know how to address, that would require improvised solutions some of which would work, some of which would not. so we the people run away and work to convince ourselves that the single party state with two right wings that we find ourselves in is in itself coherent and that some god looks kindly over us all and so no matter how fucked up, no matter how worthless the propositions advanced by these factions of the political right are with reference to actual changes, actual problems, everything will work itself out because--well--nationalism says that we are the Elect and as the Elect we cannot slide as we are into decadence and so q.e.d. nothing to worry about.
what makes anyone able to imagine that the united states is functioning within a political spectrum that enables anything even remotely approaching coherent choices about a problematic future that people at this point do not fully understand? particularly given that both major parties are far more concerned about short-term survival than they are about addressing complex, difficult questions? on what possible basis is a choice between republican and democrat meaningful, really?
within the contemporary farce that is mass politics, i am inclined to vote democrat but with no illusions about their coherence--they are simply less offensive.
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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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