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this is partly a large-scale ideological matter--a function of the collapse of a viable alternative political project (the left) and a bizarre fossilization of history at the same time--the fossilization seems to me of a piece with the reduction of a sense of the present to an accumulation of things and the past as a collection of film footage, brought to you with a 50s police-show voice-over on the "history" channel--so there are no alternatives which we create as we move through the present, but only repetitions. we don't create anything, really: we find what already exists. and as the dominant order is coterminous with what exists, it is necessarily legitimate.
we have the illusion of immediacy from a vantagepoint of stuffed chairs and sofas.
we imagine that the fact we can purchase consumer goods as a political meaning.
we operate in a strange suspended present--i dont know why classic rock radio seems emblematic of all this to me, but it does--the eternal 1976, the year i graduated high school, late for the party, always and inevitably late for the party. the period that followed the american defeat in vietnam seems to have been one of wholesale repression--of the defeat, of the sense of crisis that surrounded watergate--and an immobilization of superficial images of both--repetition of footage of functionaries climbing aboard helicopters leaving phnom penh substituting for those of functionaries leaving saigon--the early-to-mid 1970s hang in the air like a swamp--they never left, we are all still there, it is juxtaposed with the present, an aspect of it--so the political crisis that vietnam entailed is simultaneously repressed and preserved as film stock, as an atmosphere---"rebellion" imputed to the movements in opposition to vietnam is channelled into a question of which sports utility vehicle enables you best to express your individuality, and which athletic shoe product will best enable you to purchase an entire way of life. so maybe there's a sense in which "we" have "already done" political crisis and a sense in which iraq is a rerun of vietnam except without the draft--the forbidden lightening rod around which neo-con "strategizing" has danced, the line they cannot cross, their explanation for everything that happened during the vietnam period--well that and allowing uncontrolled press access to battle areas.
this is what fading empires are like: trapped in an image of their own past, the present slides by them as if it were a giant repetition--nothing happens because they cannot see anything happening--people sit around waiting for something to happen, but it can't happen. at the system level, the configuration of power is changing, but we can't see it because the information we have access to is structured such that it is more important symmetry be maintain with the fossilized past than it is coherent accounts be generated of the present.
so we drift like some sad, bloated, fading king who mistakes himself for a courtier.
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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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