roachboy

i dont think anyone engages with the political unless they are motivated by a degree of concern for themselves, for their surroundings and the direction these are moving both in real time and in the future. real time situations are indices of future possibilities: that's why folk spend time trying to work out meanings for real-time phenomena. and in this there is a commonality that runs well beyond the narrow limits you seem to want to draw around political debate: it goes as much for folk who trawl through the field of debris that is the left as for those in the shadowy reaches of the far right who play paintball in camo every weekend as a way of preparing themselves for helter skelter.

maybe folk have other things that they would focus on if they were able to assume that the political space within which they lived was coherent: stuff like finding a rubik's cube on ebay because this time goddamn it i am going to solve it or trying to figure out if it really makes any sense to use pipe from a pipe organ in your car's exhaust system because it should sound cool....

but the fact is that the political space within which we operate is not coherent, and the longer-term trajectories you can derive from this political space are even less coherent. the major political parties really are factions within an oligarchy that engage in periodic rotation--the democrats offer very little that differs from the republicans--periods of deviation apart--and the bush administration has turned out to be quite a period of deviation----such that the democrats suddenly look like an actual alternative, even as their actions in congress demonstrate that the constraints within which they function nearly outweigh any sense that this alternative has a content.


here's a little example:

over the weekend, i watched spike lee's documentary about new orleans during and after katrina. you really should see it, even though the last 2 parts operate like a long, slow drift into ambiguity. it raises a host or problems, from the way in whcih the television coverage of the storm and its aftermath was simultaneously about sensationalizing certain elements AND was a device to enable avoidance of the scale of what happened, to the systematic racism that cuts through all aspects of the situation and responses to it, to the way in which the disaster was "handled": shipping people all over the united states on busses, one-way tickets provided by fema. one way bus tickets. go to utah and rot. buh-bye.

nola revealed many systemic problems--and it showed how folk had managed to cope and flourish even within these systemic problems--a coping and flourishing that did not in any way justify the systemic problems themselves...

one of these problems: racism and its implication with the american class structure and the ways in which these factors coverge in the debacle that was the nola public school system. this cluster is a set of indices of the way in which social reproduction in the united states is entirely geared around an outmoded class structure---one of the consequences of this is that the system itself amounts to an argument, and that argument is that if you are young, poor and african-american, you are expendable.

it was like this before the storm.
it is like this, after the storm.
this is a fundamental element of what makes america as it is.
and this is a STRUCTURAL problem.

it is intertwined with the entire history of the united states since the civil war. it is an expression of that history. it is among the logical outcomes of that history.

and nola was but an extreme example of a situation that obtains across the board insofar as the american class system, racism, poverty and social reproduction are concerned.

both political parties are geared around avoidance of such problems: they are not amenable to short-term solutions, so it is difficult for politicians to offer simplistic packages the primary function of which is the enabling of appropriate photo-ops for the heroic politician. this is what i did. i am magnificent. vote for me.

addressing stuff like this would require a fundamental rethinking of how the united states operates: what class system it actually has (as opposed to the class system the conservatives prefer to imagine that we have, one within which everyone is somehow middle class--an image that is the simple inversion of lake woebegone, where everybody is above average...), what factors it leans on, what functions it serves and does not serve, whether it is ethical to allow it to continue....and what is more, questions of what should be done to change it and to what end do not resolve themselves as a result of thinking about the history of these issues.

the questions that arise even from this are difficult. and neither political party has any interest in attending to them. not really.

so if you position yourself in the center, and define the center as the result of a triangulation of party positions as you understand them, ruling questions in and out of debate in this way, then the simple fact of the matter is that you have no way of thinking about this kind of question either.

now judging from the way in which you present yourself, pan, it would appear to follow that for someone to dwell on this kind of problem, and to do it here, would be tantamount to introducing some vibe of "hate and negativity"---in this case, these empty terms that you like to throw around function simply to exclude issues from debate. and if the claim underpinning this exclusion centers on concern for the future, then i think you create a problem for yourself: i dont see how the future is served by avoiding difficult problems.
and i dont see anything in your preferred exlcusionary categories of "hate and negativity" but a desire to avoid complex problems in the name of maintaining some facile optimism.

"no no, let's not talk about that, man, it's bumming me out."

i dont accept it.
i dont buy the argument, i dont buy its implications and i certainly dont buy its effects.
sorry.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite