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hello again host...i was wondering what happened. glad to see you're back in these parts.
on the central question: this is an ideological frame problem.
there is little doubt that the free american populace has in general freely chosen to drift with the machinery that shapes its overall reference-set--television--to the right. there is little doubt that this right-drift is not functional, except to the extent that it enables a management of political opinion, whether co-ordinated or not, it doesn't really matter. the management of opinion happens in the obvious way, by ruling arguments in or out of the "legitimate" sphere, the parameters of which are determined entirely by repetition and the question of what gets repeated is a matter of what "fits" and what "fits" is a matter of format--soundbyte-length ideas for a sound-byte length attention span. personally, i would have thought that a side-effect of the internet would have been a breakdown in the hegemony of the american press in shaping the purview of legitimate opinion as imperiously as it had---and maybe it has--and maybe it hasn't.
in my travels through this fiction we call "the real world" over the past months, i haven't found anything definitive about anything.
what i see is people who are anxious and beleagured---they are under pressure from gas an oil and food prices---they oppose certain current policies--notably the iraq debacle--and treat others like they're weather--the economic debacle.
they worry, they see themselves as powerless--for the folk on the left, iraq seems like it has turned into a theater of powerlessness----so they lower their heads and immerse themselves in the machinery of everyday life.
everyone acts as though everyday life is not part of a broader context, but everyone knows it is. so it seems that this narrowing of focus is a collective3 coping mechanism----the result of processing a complex, uneven and difficult-to-parse reality through the debilitating narrow and stupid ways that we are fed in this the best of all possible worlds to think about them.
so folk hang onto what seems stable, even if they know--if you ask--that much of that is an illusion. they hang onto obsolete notions of nation because thinking beyond that makes them feel even more powerless than thinking in terms of nation--and they are more powerless. so folk seem to work through the machinery of everyday life on questions of local import because they see that as being an arena wherein action can plausibly be connected to reaction and not swallowed up in some huge void.
versions of the same conversation all around all the time--iraq is the political matter that outrages but incapacitates---fatigue at information is fatigue at the constant reminder that we are "free" in a way that prevents anyone from doing anything at all to change anything about the debacle in iraq--and economic pressure mounts steadily.
everything seems out of kilter, from what i can tell, taking tiny town as an allegory--everything seems out of kilter but nothing can be done.
this is a largely democrat town. most of the conversations i hear or am in are about the grinding process of obsessive coverage of the primaries. more impotence.
i think this is a strange strange time.
and folk i talk to keep wondering if the bush-"solution" will be to manufacture another crisis and/or invade iran.
so i dont know--i dont think the board is that different--except that only some aspects of 3-d life are expressed here--this, like everything else, is escape.
within this, there are questions of how one proceeds.
there are always questions of how one proceeds.
if there is a generalized anxiety, either taken on directly or avoiding militantly (conservativeland, its dwindling precincts, remains a theme park built on denial), then you have to proceed with some attention because it's way too easy to get nowhere.
or something.
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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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