roachboy

today marks the official passage of the bush administration onto the ant-heap of the past.
already the chewing sounds of forgetting are audible.

how are you feeling about this, about the transition into something else (else but not other)?

tonight i am going to a party. there's a ritual i remember from the new testament that i've liked for a long time--when you leave a town, you stop on the border and kick the dirt off your shoes.
that is my plan.

but i am not one of those people conservatives like to project into the world who understands obama as a break with the past, nor this as a zero-moment that marks a transition from one cognitive regime into another.
that is the stuff of hegelian fairytales.

i'm cautiously optimistic in that side of me that lives day-to-day in this machine, who tries to manage a material life and relationships knit within that, who like anyone tries to simply continue and in the process manage to do what is important to me.

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but there's another side as well, and i post this even though i don't have time at the moment to do this justice.

before the chewing sounds of forgetting get too loud:
and you can almost hear those sounds beneath the approbation being heaped on transition by the same media apparatus that heaped approbation on the period of fascism-lite that issued from 9/13/2001, the same apparatus that was fully participant in generating a climate of nationalist hysteria adequately dense to entirely disable the vaunted systems of checks and balances that folk who believe in the machinery of state as machine point to as central to their faith, the same apparatus that later pointed to the debacle in iraq--after they were willingly participant in selling that debacle---and katrina--and the other fiascos that followed---as aspects of this system, like in the end democracy has been supplanted by the workings of some god and that god is a royalist. the legitimacy of the monarch is reflected in the way fortune smiles or does not--ultimately such checks as there are functionally unfold in response to the matching of inward and outer attributes--so the litany of debacles that is the record of the bush administration amounted to a demonstration of illegitimacy--and the sycophants in the dominant media, protecting their own institutional interests, acquired a degree of detachment by watching this process unfold.

and "we the people" are nothing more or less that spectators.

there is something deeply, fundamentally wrong with the american ideological/political machinery.

to my mind the main thing demonstrated by the bush administration is the magnitude of this problem.

and nothing about this transition changes that--what you're seeing is the same framing machinery changing direction, following it's basic imperatives: what's real is rational.
what matters is the continued flow of advertising dollars.

it's time for a new politics, well outside what currently is, that departs from and loops back onto the myriad problems generated by this ideological machinery, which has assimilated the american pseudo-democracy wholesale into itself.

and which undermines the idea that democracy and a culture of spectatorship have anything to do with each other.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite