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i have some trouble posting to threads about this any more because the topic just makes me angry.
there is no debate about this. the war in iraq was is and will remain wholly unacceptable to me. that it could have happened is an index of dysfunction at the system level. that it continues is an index of dysfunction at the system level. that the administration responsible for it remains in power is beyond comprehension to me--i understand the procedural and political (in the trivial sense) situations--but that changes nothing. benchmarking and low approval ratings and so forth mean very little: the fact of the matter is that this administration remains in power and that fact is somehow ok.
well, it isnt ok.
it is an index of fundamental problems within the american political structure itself. in the end, there is no accountability: not if the crime is huge enough, not if addressing it would require thinking seriously about systemic change. i dont understand this: it seems that the historical situation in which we find ourselves is characterized by a deep, deep ideological paralysis that is repeated and repeated in a total lack of imagination, a complete lack of any sense of coherent alternatives to a socio-economic and political order that is self-evidently incoherent, self-evidently adrift, lost..and in its anxiety about being adrift (those traces that cannot be wished away), the existing order is eating itself---incoherent at the level of rationality, incoherent at the level of ideology, self-blinding at the level of consequences, assessment of consequences, incapable of adjustment, a particular type of incoherence the primary characteristic of which is a simple refusal to see--a refusal to see the consequences of capitalism in its present form, a refusal to see the problems in the nature and characteristics of state power, a refusal to address the evacuation of any meaningful democratic elements in the american political process.
there are so many problems that it is hard to know where to start listing them.
when i manage a list, it is always the same list.
in the context of a micro-space like this, repetition becomes itself a grind. there is no sublimation to be had from it. there is nothing to be had from it. and so i get tired.
i have to say that i admire the fact that host is able to continue, that he is able to direct his anger in ways that enable him to continue---his is a deeply personal anger--the vectors that shape it are such that he can express it and still remain to some extent within the parameters of debate here, such that they constitute meaningful actions.
mine is more abstract.
i dont know what else to say at this point.
it is not this space, but the fact that the situation addressed across it does not move.
the larger stasis is simply repeated in the smaller space.
this is not a "normal" situation we are living through.
this is a kind of crisis, it seems to me, the kind of thing that is not reducable to television imagery and as a consequence is not named for us. but there is always the stream of other "crises" that we can watch unfold and deplore or feel bad about, all of which are in a certain sense distractions in themselves and at another level are fundamentally problematic in that they feed into the circuit of avoidance that seems to be the basic characteristic of the times we are living in.
i doubt this makes sense. i am not going to edit it. i am going to go do something else.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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