|
it's interesting the extent to which what the administration is doing is being buried beneath a chorus of calls for the administration to do something.
there appears to be a basic communication disconnect.
some of this obviously comes from conservatives---when i have the ambiguous fortune of seeing one nattering away on television, doing that thing that the right has perfected, which is talking in sound bytes--simple statements that work witin the constraints of an ADD medium---the dominant "ideas" are double: the obama administration should implement an entirely conservative economic agenda, despite the fact that such an agenda would do NOTHING to address ANY of the problems that the administration--and the rest of us--are facing down, coherently or not--and the flip is to say that unless an entirely conservative economic agenda is adopted, that nothing is happening.
or that what is happening is anathema.
which indicates that the framework which shapes conservative economic thinking is being outstripped by reality, but that the folk who invest in that framework still repeat it, as if it were adequate descriptively, as if it was able to generate coherent actions. but it can't do either, and you can watch this being demonstrated on any number of "fair and balanced" television presentations.
but i think there is another problem as well, but i'm not sure i have a handle on it exactly--but it seems to me that the administration does have an idea of the direction it intends, but that for some reason it is shy about coming out and saying it, preferring instead to present it piecemeal. this seems a tactical decision, but i am not sure i understand the rationale behind it. it's as if there's something to be gained by presenting the moves they are making as extensions of "normalcy" and therefore as ways "back to normal" when the fact is that that "normal" is in all probability finished.
there's a real gap between how this situation---the crisis if you like---looks at a transnational level and how it's being spun for domestic consumption. it's curious.
i take these tea parties as a meaningless gesture conditioned by the strangely myopic views of what's happening that emerge from domestic infotainment cycles, and the administration as having adopted information tactics that are geared perhaps too much around those cycles.
its a strange business.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|