roachboy

you see the lunacy behind the bush/rice argument, yes? because lots of people--americans and Others (who are always necessarily less than americans in the pathetic discourse of selling war)--have died in a pointless, ill-considered, unjustified debacle, it is necessary that even more die in a pointless, ill-considered, unjustified debacle.

another way:

in bushworld, the americans cannot consider changing strategic direction because the previous direction has cost lives--therefore to change direction is to undervalue the lives lost in the context of the previous direction.

it seems to me that this lunacy follows from the direction outlined above--which is compounded by the administration's apparent repression of the absolute lack of justification for this colonial adventure in the first place--so you have a kind of return of the repressed in displaced form via the "reasoning" that rice has been trotting out over the past few days: the justification lay in the action previous, which now floats independent of anything else. so at the level of political discourse, it appears that bushworld has come unhinged. and because of the structure of american "democracy" there is nothing to be done about it.

in the thread about the third party option, folk seem to be concerned about an increase of "instability" that a third option would engender: the present state of affairs engendered by the pathologies of bushworld seems to me a strong argument FOR a more "unstable" form of government: there really ought to be a way to bring down a government from the inside entirely, through something on the order of a vote of no confidence---the actions of the bush administration are the strongest imaginable argument for that.

there is no reason that the united states should have to have two more years of damage inflicted on itself as a result of the wholly irrational politics of this administration and the bankrupt reactionary ideology for which it stands. except thems the rules and at this point it seems that people are so afraid of anything like change that they are willing to put up with it not because the rules are functional, but because they exist.

it seems to me that we are living in a huge socio-political formation that dances further and further out over an abyss, the main characteristic of which is that everyone refuses to look at the facts of the matter, preferring to endorse what is because it is and otherwise to run away, to live to the greatest possible extent within a fantasy of coherence. maybe this explains the popularity of stuff like second life.

maybe it also has something to do with the strangeness of this christmas season---like the headline i saw a few days ago said, americans buy while iraq burns.

reality is hard.
why bother with it if you dont have to?
maybe if we practice long enough, hard enough, when the shit hits the fan we wont see anything. maybe there wont be anything. maybe there is nothing to this "reality" business in any event. or maybe there is. i suppose we'll find out, sooner or later.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite