roachboy

there is a curious turn in us politics toward substituting allegations of criminality for debate about politics questions and choices. i don't understand why this is the case, really--it's hard not to be really cynical about it--like maybe in the contemporary context there is a fear of a politically informed public in a position to perhaps act on the basis of that information, so it's better to feed them bizarre substitutes, which basically function to collapse political positions into questions of personal "essence" like a political figure is a thing that repeats its inward characteristics in every direction so that politics is not a matter of consideration at all but just a way for these essences to express themselves.

but that's royalist nonsense, the kind of crap you'd expect if you really thought that the unity of the state lay in the person of the king. then this kind of stuff would follow. but in what claims to be a democratic polity, you'd think that folk's political positions would matter and that information about those positions would be important and that getting and processing that information would be what one does when one acts politically. so that elections are about something.

i think the political process in the states is at this point largely fucked. everybody blames everybody else for it, but the strange thing is that so many repeat the problem themselves, enact it.

seems to me that there are an enormous number of political reasons to not vote for mccain. and i am sure that conservatives who do not bother with the game of substituting hallucinations based on essence for political viewpoints have a large number of political reasons not to vote for clinton or obama. you'd think we could talk about this sort of thing, not just here, but in general.

the history of the politics of personal vilification is an old one, but since world war 2 it has migrated in a pretty straight line from the american ultra-right whackjob region of the old john birch society straight into mainstream conservative politics---the narrative is easy peasy to reconstruct--hell you only have to do a tiny bit of research in an actual library to find a ton of information about it---but if there wasn't a symbiotic relation between the way the television in particular pre-chews infotainment, rejecting content in the interest of what best sells advertising time, that migration would have got no traction. so this seems to me a reflection of a fundamental ideological problem--ideological in the marxist sense of a type of politics that is about depoliticizing the world so that the social classes that are in power can more easily remain in power.

i keep saying this and while it's true, i get bored with it: american political culture reduces political choices to a type of consumer choice.

this kind of nonsense is characteristic.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite