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will: what the hell do you mean "i am hiding behind the majority thing"?
1. there is no doubt that the democrats are basically a faction within the oligarchical system that the americans confuse with democracy. so there is no surprise in much of what they do when it comes to choosing between party interests and those of representativeness.
2. my point is not at all "yay! democrats"--it is much more what did you expect?
3. my own political view on this is that this paralysis over the iraq war is a protracted demonstration of just how fundamentally a wreck the american system is. i am appalled by the lack of alternative perspectives. i think--and i have said from time to time here--that the situation is such that far more radical positions than you see embodied in existing organizations might get an extensive public hearing at this point. i see the united states as sliding into a legitimation crisis--political discourse is unhinged from reality, the actions of the parties within the oligarchy self-evidently do not and cannot represent anything like the "will of the people" simply because the people are locked out of anything approaching meanigful expression. and i think we are drifting into the twilight of the very short-lived american empire. the ideological direction that the americans have--to my mind--had imposed on them is incoherent, had been incoherent and the legitimation crisis is linked to the simple fact that the americans are playing out the sorry, pathetic endgame of that ideology.
so with all that said, i STILL do not understand how it has come to pass that the democrats are being blamed for their inability to stop the logic particular to bushworld. on the other hand, it take the fact that this logic is still in place at all as an index of the extent to which the problems we observe and debate in this tiny fishbowl are STRUCTURAL---not just the result of particular events but a deep fundamental crisis that is unfolding across events.
i think people have a sense of this--but there are few viewpoints that affirm the problem and many that are geared around management through diversion or avoidance, whether intentional or not. i find little beyond a pattern of structured avoidance in the claims that the democrats have somehow wandered into a kind of waterloo because they have not been able to stop the bush people--when it remains true, like it or not, that they are not in a position to stop the bush people. period. be as snippy as you want about it, but there is no getting around this fact.
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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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