roachboy

the relation of the electorate to that which is elected is curious.

within the american pseudo-democratic system, there are no mechanisms for making elected officials resposive to the electorate--and by extension, there is no way for the electorate to hold politicos accountable, to make them responsible for their actions---between election rituals---unless there is a clear legal violation and even that obviously is dependent on the political composition of the legislature--such that the notion of legal violation itself has no particular content, is reduced to a function of the composition of the legislature.

it also seems to be the case that there is a functional split between actions a president--say--can and cannot do: watergate and the absurd clinton impeachment were similar in that the actions involved could be construed as having happened outside the purview of the presidency as office or social role. while i dont remember exactly why andrew johnson was impeached (and so could be wrong about this) it seems that so long as a president does things that are construed as remaining within the purview of the presidency as a function or role, he cannot and will not be held accountable for his actions.

so formally speaking, the problem of the "responsibility" relation of electorate to those elected is meaningless apart from these periodic rituals of faction rotation.
the question of what representation is ends up being calibrated by the way in which a politco orients his or her actions around upcoming election rituals.

there is no mechanism that links the status of elected officials to ongoing changes of popular sentiment.

personally, i think the bush people are so bad at what they are doing that they serve to demonstrate the limitations of this institutional arrangement. this administration seems to me a walking talking argument for implementation of mechanisms on the order of a vote of no confidence--that is the bush administration is a living demonstration of the fact that the american system is much less democratic than a parliamentary system.


as for the sense of responsibility that one might have relative to what the selected do---within this political order, the possibilities for enacting that sense are highly limited.

one option for doing something would be the thoreau model--civil disobedience. he opposed the mexican war and by extension the idea that his taxes were going to pay for it, so he refused to pay them. ended up in jail for a little while, until he was bailed out by a wealthy aunt. which in the end didnt matter anywhere near as much as the essay that he wrote. which says alot about where such actions derive their meaning from: from the making-public of them, from the theater. so acts of opposition have to be public, in the sense that they have to resonate beyond the purview of a narrow, individualistic acting out of a sense of being-responsible.

folk in this thread are enacting another mode of distancing, which is a way of addressing the sense of being-responsible, through the critiques they outline.
the main point of the debate above appears to me to be: it is an occaison for a series of disavowals.
in a context that allows for no politically meaningful action, the best one can do to express one's alienation is to say i didnt vote for these people.
think about that.

the limits are obvious.

the underlying problem appears to me to be the design of the american semi-democratic arrangement itself, which like i said, provides no mechanism for the translation of the individual ethical problems that the actions of an administration might pose, except for the one day every 4 years when americans are allowed to be politically free, and even then not directly.

so we are boxed in by the nature of the american institutional arrangement.
a central effect of that arrangement is that actual political freedom is severely circumscribed. usually, it seems, folk find it adequate that they get to talk alot about how free they are as they do the kinds of things that americans tend to confuse with political freedom, like buy things. whatever trade-offs are involved tend to be matters that folk consent to because these trade-offs are obscured behind the usual cliches about the exceptionalness of the american arrangement blah blah blah. and we are highly trained little consent machine as well, subjected to political indoctrination in the form of pseudo-history and civics from a young age. seen from this angle, the equating of the american political (and social) orders with the agency of some god acquires a political weight: of some god authorizes the system, how can that system be fucked up? and besides,
it appears that congratulating ourselves on how free we are is a full-time job, one that requires attention and that leaves little time left over for actually thinking about the questions raised in debates like this as political.

but the bush people show you otherwise.
you are free one day every four years.
the discourse of ethics is in this thread is, as it often is, a displacement of the political--a way to avoid the parameters that shape the problem people are reacting to throughout the whole of the thread.
maybe that's because one can maintain the illusion of effective agency within an order that allows for it only in the most limited and indirect manner by reverting to this language.

have you seen "dogville"?
von trier is right.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite