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i don't think the drill baby drill mantra operates in any rational connection to the state of the oil market past present or future. it is more about an illusion of control over oil markets which plays on the kind of nationalism that the right mobilizes when it comes to things like "the war on terror" and ignores when it comes to things like the trans-nationalization of industrial production---in other words, it is an example of an instrumentalized nationalism which uses oil as a signifier. as an instrumentalized term, a tactic, it links to other things---the notion of being-persecuted by some phantom Left, in this case the Evil Environmentalists who seem at times to lurk about populist rightwing discourse the way the black helicopters lurk around the fever-dream world of the militia set---signifiers which condense anxiety about loss of control and which direct it toward a semi-definite Other and so serve a therapeutic effect. the Evil Environmentalist is understood to think less of the petit bourgeois american's "right" to tool about in an enormous 10 mog pickup or suv or maxivan than he or she does of animals far away-----and in this there is another index of percieved (or manufactured, depending on your viewpoint) victimization--which emerges pretty obviously in the obsession with drilling in anwar in the face of all reason, and in particular in the "drill baby drill, petro inferno" slogan at the rnc, which i thought a kind of genius creation insofar as it allowed you to peer into the strange but seemingly endless tunnel of conservative resentment.
similarly, i don't think this thread is about oil at all, really: the data is not systematic, there is no effort to actually talk about the international petroleum market or system and there's no need for it, given how the thread is framed.
just saying.
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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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