roachboy

i find this slippage between a joke aimed at cowboy george and one aimed at "our boys" to be curious.

it only really makes sense within the bizzaro world of conservativeland, with its emphasis on question of Will, which kind of explains why the rovemachine felt it important that cowboy george go about staying the course rhetorically--it was as if the Will of the Leader directly animated the "troops" who, following the same logic, would be reduced to the status of meat puppets that would twitch about and do things coherently only to the extent that the Will of the Leader remained undivided.

The Will of the Leader is of course negatively affected by the presence of any dissent in the land, whence the recurrent equation of dissent with treason--which we got yet another little taste of earlier in this thread. If the People were as One facing the Leader, like the congregation would face Charlemagne, who faced the altar for them, then it would follow that the Will of the Leader would be One, and so the meat puppets that are "our troops" would be coherent and, of course, the war in iraq would make sense at some level.

but the People are not One on this--for obvious reasons, but no matter--and so the Will of the Leader is divided and so the meat puppets in iraq cannot act coherently.

so it follows--kind of--that in the bizzaro little world of conservativeland, opponents of the war in iraq are to blame for how fucked up everything is there. just look at ustwo and squirt's little rants about kerry1972 for a demonstration.

the curious thing is that this little story--which seems to me a pretty accurate image of such logic as there is in the ideology of conservativeland on the subject of, say, the war in vietnam (which is repeated in that of the war in iraq)---is far more patronizing to "the troops" than anything anyone else could or would say could possibly be. they really are imagined as meat puppets linked by some crazy spiritualist circuit to the collective Will of the People.

one way in which this does make sense, however, is as a function of the identity-based character of conservative ideology---the centrality of faith to it---which is of a piece with the non-falsifiability of conservative ideological propositions insofar as the inhabitants of conservativeland are concerned. that political committments are a matter of faith sure does help the drawing of lines that separate "us" from "them" tho, doesn't it?

and this in turn sets up the peculiar nature of this short-lived pseudo-controversy. it was a one or two day vacation for the beleagured inhabitants of conservativeland, one that let them retreat into the articles of the faith and avoid that unpleasantness that we generally refer to as reality (you know, the actually existing war in iraq, the debacle that it is, the self-evident bollocks that has been the administration's non strategy, etc etc etc)...and in the process it allows for an affirmation of one's faith-based community...which in turn draws a little line between conservativeland and other territories...which in turn provides a little reminder of why the inhabitants of conservativeland should vote republican regardless of the magnitude of the fuck up that is the reality they have set into motion---you want to vote for "us" because otherwise you'd have to vote for "them" and that is out of the question, not for any real reason, but because...well...think of how screwy the situation would be for the meat puppets if the administration was actually called to account for its actions?
there would be nothing but static on the lines.

but now that little vacation seems over.
what to do?

....

i know.

let's put on a musical.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite