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pan---i don't know--the future is wide open. there are lots of possibilities, good and not so good and no way from here in october to know how things are going to play out.
what i think is that obama/biden are *more* likely to be able to adapt to a very rapidly changing global situation--which has lots of implications for the domestic situations--than is mc-cain/palin. this is based not only on looking at the policy directions which the obama camp has outlined, but also based on the ways in which the campaigns have worked. contrary to how the conservative press has presented people who support obama, even at a distance, i don't think obama will "save us"--i don't see the american political system as working in that way, even as it's presented as some bizarre form of monarchy by the television apparatus, which seems only capable of focus on celebrity and a monarch is a political celebrity. i think obama's plans are more rational than are mc-cains--and even if i had been inclined to support mc-cain, the actions of the campaign over the past 3 weeks would have put an end to that.
i don't see obama as a radical in any way.
but i think he's a better choice.
if you let yourself get sucked into the way the mc-cain camp has been trying to frame the election around personality and if you believe the way they've been desperately trying to get various associations to stick to a fiction of obama's personality that they create for their own purposes, then it seems to me that you are not in a position to think in political terms about this at all. you might as well watch e! entertainment news for your information about the world--and this from someone who does not particularly object to such things because i think that's what television in america does well--creates these curious little commodity individuals, follows them around, tells you what they're wearing. i don't think the people who work in television are incapable of doing more, but i think that in the main the medium has chosen a business model that tends to preclude it.
think of it this way: if you go down the personality route, then it increases anxiety because it increases a sense of risk because it collapses the entirety of a presidency onto speculation about personality. an administration is a collective. it fashions and tries to implement policy. what matters is the policy.
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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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