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gee, what a shock...
the one thing that obviously emerges from even the coverage of this surreal business in the sudan is the selectiveness of press coverage of islam, its fatuousness, its--uh---problematic relation to accuracy---from this follows that the press coverage of islam is an element in the ongoing mobilization of opinion in support of otherwise bankrupt policies--so the "free press" is at least in part and element of ideological co-ordination and in routinized ways DOES NOT function as a critical check on the actions of the political order: it is OF that order, and EXTENSION of the order, which functions, wittingly or not these days, as a co-ordination mechanism. the problem does not seem to be the individual papers--in that you see critical editos (once an issue emerges as clearly problematic, news outlets will bravely move into saying "this is clearly problematic") but rather in the way routine articles are sourced, in the repetition of the same wire-service factoids across outlets--which has the effect of generating an illusion of objectivity (in the sense of descriptive value, referring to objects or phenomena in the world, and not of neutrality in the way these referrals operate). so it follows that a small demo in khartoum gets framed as a representation of an entire (hallucinated) global tendency within islam, which is also presented (falsely) as a unified entity that "we" know as if it were transparent, that "we" have an operative image or map of, such that the absence of "moderate voices" can be attributed not to problems in the shaping of information, but to some phenomenon on the Map of Islam.
this can only follow because folk want to believe that they know the world, they are invested in the illusion of knowing and in the subsidiary illusion that the press, in its routine functioning, provides material that fills out that knowledge. they do not want to face the extent to which this infotainment is **political**
conservatives in the states have reached an almost mind-boggling pitch of projection as a device to cope with this--they see everywhere a conspiracy of "liberals" which justifies a counter-movement of blatant erasure of any meaningful line between information and conservative policy premises--and they WANT TO BELIEVE they desperately want to believe that this is ok.
it isnt ok.
it is a problem.
it is a big problem.
what seems to have happened is that over the last week there was a degree of indecisiveness in the uk government about how to respond to this situation in the sudan. the sudanese government is problematic and has been for a very long time--the civil war, the events in darfur, their resistance to international pressure, their refusal to play by the rules---the fact that the sudan sits on ALOT of oil that has not yet been exploited---and so actions like the decontextualized magnification of the demo in khartoum was functional in that it prepared ideologically for an option that was being considered, organized proactively a bit of consent by enabling EXACTLY the kind of nonsensical blur of this demo into the pre-packaged imagery folk have been conditioned (i dont like this word in this context, but dont have a better one) into using as a default interpretive backdrop for processing information about islam.
you were chumped. again. you were chumped by infotainment.
i dont see anything in the pseudo-realist line from the folk on the right above but an inability to face the obvious.
within this, a kind of distrubing sense emerges of the level of investment in the crudest form of bush-administration marketing--the Heroic Stand Against an Nebulous Other. a wholesale disabling of the ability to think critically follows in the train of this vulgar and one-dimensional worldview.
same old same old, in short: 6 fucking years of the same old same old.
amazing.
depressing as hell, too, in the way that any demonstration of intellectual castration is depressing.
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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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