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another note: the creepiest thing about the bush period has been its demonstration of the ease with which a variant of neofascist ideology can and will be swallowed by the american people--for a while. i sometimes wonder what would have happened had they not been so incompetent---had they not decided to invade iraq, for example. it's kinda unnerving.
i dont see bush<=>hitler comparisons as useful then because they are hyperbolic on the one hand, and function to trivialize the problem of neofascism on the other by pegging the notion to a particular expression-hitler's germany was one version---what the americans flirted with was closer to italian fascism--but that at the level of parallel. what made fascism particularly dangerous was that it was new--it advanced more or less unnamed because among the first moves in the consolidation of power was the elimination of political positions that would do the naming--the left in most cases.
in the states, things did not have to go so far as the physical elimination of the left, and this is important--both in itself and in that it provides something to think about. in most european contexts (say) of the 1920s-30s, left political organizations had their own press outlets, and so were permanent features of a media landscape--in the states, the dominant media outlets are owned and operated by pseudo-neutral corporations and geared around selling advertising (information as window dressing around announcements of sales as saks fifth avenue, which are more important because they are american reality...) there is a **big** problem with the american mediascape.
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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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