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i think the parallel between the tea parties and early anti-globalization protests--which i assume means seattle---are interesting---problematic is you stick too literally to them---but still, interesting.
both movements operated in situations wherein the old ideologies had been pulverized.
both tried to deal with situations that had outstripped the older ways of thinking and/or acting by asserting continuities.
but
the anarchists were far more coherent about the ways in which these continuities were articulated than is the american right.
partly, this was a function of each being a very different types of organization--the anar actions in seattle were theater directed against the emerging global-capitalist or neoliberal order staged through confrontations with the police, where the right is attempting to stage itself as a new reactionary populist movement through assembling itself in these tea party contexts.
the types of media staging are fundamentally different however: in seattle, all you saw was confrontation and this fed back into both the old reactionary way of not dealing with social protest particular to american television coverage, which decontextualizes what it shows and relies on visual associations to substitute for a coherent account of the politics---so the seattle protest became "extremist" because that's the only viewpoint on them that television allows for through its particular way of decontextualizing political contestation. the only forms of protest that television can handle coherently are forms of protest which are either entirely on the surface of the instants that the camera capture---or a form that is symmetrical with the business model.
so the tea parties are in this respect the inverse of the seattle protests--this are television fabrications to a great extent, cut from whole cloth in the image of fox news' business model.
but it's an interesting parallel to think about.
and there's something perversely interesting about these tea parties as well. i'm thinking about buying a pastel polo shirt and turning up for one. roachboy should be interviewed by some faux news nitwit, dont you think? live feed. i'm all about it.
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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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