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the space occupied by the war in iraq is interesting, if you think about it: a thick veneer of denial surrounds almost everything about it, but information nonetheless circulates which blasts that veneer apart. the extent to which political opinion and particularly mobilization in the states around this is a function of information streams is a difficult question--the movement against the war collapsed when move on shifted organizational strategy and moved away from organizing at the public protest level. since then no-one has filled in the gap--meanwhile the war has kinda faded from view in a way--and this seems difficult to not see as a choice.
i am busy this morning, so i'll just leave this at the barest outline and pose the question of what is at stake in the deliberate manipulation of the nature and orientation of information concerning a policy disaster. the war in iraq is a policy disaster. sometimes it seems that the interests of the administration and that of the dominant media in the state coincide to the extent that crisis is a management problem, that all relations which matter to the commercial media operate within a context that substitutes routine disruptions and discontinuities for system crisis, and that therefore the political problems of the administration and the commercial interests of the dominant media de facto coincide in the massaging of infotainment about iraq.
this is the main reason why i think that charlatan's take, while accurate on restricted logical grounds, is problematic at the same time in that it brackets the situation itself.
gotta go.
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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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