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wait...this is fast becoming a trainwreck.
cyn--so what you're trying to do here is defend a collapse of the political altogether, a retreat into immediate concerns, a substitution of indices like how much coffee will cost you on a trip to europe one day to the next as a function of the (politically motivated) collapse of the dollar for thinking about the conditions that might be causing that collapse in the first place. do you seriously imagine that there is no linkage between the patterns of speculation in the dollar over the past year or so and the policies of the bush administration? do you seriously imagine that there would conversely be no linkage between efforts to stage a theater of system self-correction--which is what a prosecution of george w bush would be (after he leaves office, no matter how implausible this outcome might be--i expect that we will be showered with your kind of "advice" after this debacle ends: move on people, nothing to see here) and attempts to alter present political relations, which includes the value of the dollar?
you might think about the exchange rate historically--consider the possibility that when the americans went off bretton woods and allowed the dollar to at once float and continue to function as reference currency, the assumption of the united states as imperial power lay behind it--now, you are starting to see what the collapse of that assumption, and the political configuration which lay behind it, looks like.
you want to talk about food prices? you cannot talk coherently about them without considering very large-scale patterns that the americans have put into place since the 1970s. you cannot talk about them out of the context of the nature and types of food aid/food charity provided by the americans as a way of dealing with the effects of monocrop-based overproduction. you cannot talk about them without considering the nature of the globalizing capitalist order at the level of transportation systems. you cannot talk about them without considering the entire imperial order, precisely the order which is now coming unravelled. the value of the dollar, the prices of petroleum and basic foodstuffs are ALL expressions of a large-scale political situation.
retreating into the immediate changes nothing about this.
arguing that retreating into the immediate is a viable political alternative is your prerogative, but fact is that it is a strange argument to make, if you think about it--the most powerful way to have expressed this position would be to simply retreat into the immediate, just bloody do it, vanish into it--no argument for it, just action.
because when you argue for such a retreat, you put yourself in the position, like it or not, of also arguing that you do not have to look at a fairly overwhelming political configuration--the problem with that is the argument itself--saying I DO NOT WANT TO LOOK is a *problem*
it is obvious that the desire to see george w bush hoisted by his own petard is theatrical in the sense that it is a desire for theater. it is also obvious that political theater is no more or less meaningful simply because it is theater. it is also obvious what the motivations are of those folk who feel it to be an ethical and political imperative that this theater be advance, that it happen. the prospect of such theater is a ritual--the theater itself would be a ritual--a holding-to-account of george w bush for everything his administration has done. what i do not buy about most of this is what i take to be the underlying assumption that the neoliberal system, the "globalizing capitalist" order is itself functional and that the problems the americans currently face are simply the result of a whack-job administration and its particularly irresponsible actions--i think the problems are alot bigger than that--whence the disconnect between the posts i make to this thread and most of the others.
i think the bush administration has engendered a structural crisis.
i think the lack of public response to that crisis is bizarre, and points to significant problems of political agency in the soft authoritarian context we live in.
i think the american system is potentially facing serious serious problems.
and i see your line of *action* (were you to take it--but you don't because you're making political arguments for it here, which is not the same as simply disappearing into your everyday life) as sympotmatic and your line of *argument* as basically anti-political, in the most general sense.
but if the argument is anti-political, does it make sense to advance it in a political forum?
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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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