roachboy

ok pan.

i understood what there was to understand about your op when i read through it.
i even agree with the sentiment, to a certain extent.

but...again...what exactly are you calling for people to do?

you seem to be under the impression that the american pseudo-democratic system is set up to accomodate the kind of waking-up process you point to--but it isn't. "we the people" have political power one day every other year. one day every 4 if the presidency is the problem, as it is now.

yet you insist that "we" do something.

ok.... the reason i posted ned beatty's speech from network as over against your biting of peter finch's "we're mad as hell..." speech is simple: when push came to shove in the film, it was beatty's character who laid down the law--it is ned beatty's character who outlines something of the actual order of things.
and the problem was not the rousing of people from their customary torpor to yell out the window--that was harmless and what is more, it was good for ratings.
the problem came when finch's character started attacking advertisers and that because, by making that move he attacked the commerical underpinnings of the network itself, and by extension he was attacking the system for which that network stands, in the name of which it operated, for the benefit of which it functioned.

so as a film, "network" is far less naive than you are, and far less naive than you make it out to be.

if you are serious, you need to shift into trying to understand how the system itself operates--you know, capitalism. in its present form. which is the beast that is the "natural order" of things. and it is that order for which the oligarchy stands, regardless of the various phases of internal turbulence. like this one, the one that has you in a twist.

and if you are serious, you should understand that you are starting to travel outside the space of conventional political remedies, and are, whether you realize it or not, proposing something quite radical.
if it were not quarantined within the limited and limiting space of a messageboard, you could be understood as calling for something on the order of a social revolution--a wholesale withdrawal of consent from underneath the existing order.

but instead, it seems that you are--or could be---calling for a new type of interest group politics that would have people gathering in a single place to yell "we're mad as hell..."
but the problem with that is that once you say it---"we're mad as hell...", there's nothing left to say.
you don't really offer any coherent countervision.
and you cant because you've convinced yourself that you are a political centrist. so instead, you are forced--and i mean forced--to limit yourself to saying things like "do your job."

without some understanding of the system--the mode of production in marx-speak--and of the position that the political order we endure and maybe lives under occupies within that order--you can't say anything different. and claims rooted in attempts to think about that order itself are exactly the kind of claim that, in other contexts, you have attempted to rule out of discussion.

but i suspect that were you to organize a movement of people who are, like you, "mad as hell and aren't going to take it any more" you'd stand a reasonable chance of getting on television because that sort of anger--the sort that offers as a vision of what is possible simply a slightly altered version of what already exists--that would be good for ratings.

i'd say go for it, pan. organize something. do it.

but in this space, where there is no organization to be done, it seems fair to ask: what do you actually want?

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite