roachboy

that's the main issue, really--that this is a very large-scale multi-variate crisis.
folk seem to want a single magic bullet, a simple solution because they're used to being told that capitalism is a single simple machine that operates on the basis of a single type of simple motivation. this has the effect of reducing a complex social system to a matter of lots of individuals wishing the same thing at the same time. that's infantile--what they call magical thinking.

fact is that there are systemic changes that have to happen and that it is not at all clear that the administration has it's collective head (if you like) around what exactly those changes should be. and they're being covered by a media apparatus with the attention span of a gnat, with the memory of a gnat which is in no way able in its present form to assemble longer trajectories of activity into a coherent narrative--everything that's real in television land is happening now and reality as a whole is little more than a sequence of disconnected now now now points that unfold against a context that is entirely naturalized. this is a real fucking problem because it is not obvious how systemic change can possibly be presented as such unless you can talk about the rationale behind that change in the space of a series of disconnected now now now points. such is the problem with the ideological relay apparatus and one of the central reasons why, no matter what the right says, the medium is in itself conservative--the naturalizing of context is conservative--the disconnecting of trajectories into sequences of instants plays to an ideology that operates on the same assumptions (context=nature, action-instantanious decision such that the state is reduced to the figure of the leader and history to individual memory and action to individual attention spans)....

so not only is there a problem of working out what policy directions make sense given an actual analysis of the empirical state of the economy (not something that has mattered terribly to the neoliberal set, which understood basic statistical indices as an extension of ideology) but also how to present those directions to a media apparatus that atomizes everything it touches.

you can't blame the administration for being circumspect.
and i am not entirely a fan of the administration so far, simply because i don't think they're going far enough fast enough in leaving consigning neoliberalism to the ash-heap of history.
but i have a sense of the constraints at play.
this is difficult--and it is so without even starting to consider the actual socio-economic environment that neoliberalism has left behind in the united states.
i shudder to think of what's there once the dreamscapes neoliberals preferred to traffic in are stripped away.
you should too.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite