|
it's gone beyond this cluck cluck mismanagement of money business now.
it really has.
i feel like a broken record.
we'll see how this small-frame thinking holds up when the credit lines on your credit cards start disappearing.
but what seems more basic a problem for thinking about this situation--whatever you decide to call it---is that this is a global problem, not just a problem of fucked up management at a few institutions. while the right was working on trying to use a neo-con conception of realpolitik to make the nation-state continue as a viable category, capital flows have moved into a different dimension entirely. one reason that folk seem to be having trouble with this situation is that they keep trying to think it as very small, very limited, involving a discrete geographical space. the ideology you think through is not adequate for the situation.
the other problem is that the right is now being confronted with the class consequences of it's project---the transfer of wealth away from the poor and "middle class" that has taken place since reagan is truly massive--the class interests that the republicans carry shit for are not the class interests that they talk about---somehow, the incoherent hodge-podge they have constructed maintains something of its influence, particularly in the economic sphere--all this nonsense about markets being moral, rewarding virtue and punishing its inverse, all this nonsense about the wealthy being wealthy because they are more virtuous and the rest of us being where we are because we are less than they, all this nonsense continues to have some resonance. but it's all an illusion: what you are doing is naturalizing a class order, and one of the consequences of naturalizing a class order is that when the shit hits the fan and the irrationalities within that order reveal themselves, you have nothing to say. o sure you're pissed off---but you have nothing to say. the political oligarchy operates within the same ideological frame. there's another sector that apparently thinks that the world as they know it, the world that enables them to extract obscene profits using questionable devices without there being any consequences at all, that world is coming to an end--and past that, it doesn't matter. sitting in some gated and guarded community with a vast pool of cash behind, it doesn't matter. you and i don't matter. nothing matters: they have theirs, and fuck the rest of us. and within this ideology, there's nothing to say and because there's nothing to say, there's nothing to be done. that's what you are watching burn now.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|