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let's say that the chomsky piece i posted yesterday (which may end up being too long to generate a discussion, but we'll see) is accurate. the united states is a kind of empire, but one that runs via direct economic domination and consistent physical coercion (though not constant, one would assume) all in a context built around superficial freedom--so countries are formally independent even as their economies remain organized on either old-school colonial grounds, or on the new-and-improved neo-colonial model we quaintly refer to as "globalization."
patterns of systemic violence extend back to the earliest phases of the history of the united states---the treatments meted out to native americans & the slave trade are examples of explicit violence; routinized violence operates through the class order; the various mythologies of the united states (city on a hill, an Exception blah blah blah) take shape at roughly the same time and are instituted as aspects of the post-revolutionary war origin mythology which sets up a sense of autonomous nation-ness.
the imperial dimension is usually extended back to the spanish-american war, and the development of american empire extends across the twentieth century, but takes explicit institutional shape after world war 2. the accompanying nationalist hallucination fares variously well in the post-war period; close to being dismantled by the vietnam period; triaged by the reaction against that period spearheaded by the reagan period.
across all of this, the american empire has been held together by registers of violence; internally this violence is dissipated into the collective stupor of nationalism, which folk protect with varying degrees of energy, which enables an avoidance of the not just the characteristics of the underlying socio-economic configuration but of that configuration itself. so it follows that people still imagine nation-states to be operative centers of meaningful power in areas that are not about coercion. it's quaint.
what the bush people's astonishing incompetence managed was to exposure aspects of the way in which this system was operated since world war 2, in part because the logic that shaped it was coming unravelled and the neo-con gambit was to attempt a new triage by imposing the united states as global military hegemon and so to shape what they called the post cold-war world around political continuity (nation-states uber alles) and systemic continuities (the role of the military hegemon would be to enforce it's vision of the world by force and/or by threat of force)---of course they fucked everything up (of course not because it was inevitable, but of course because, well, they did)...witness iraq, the Great Gambit itself.
in the process of fucking up, the bush people managed to expose elements of the normal operating procedures of the american imperial system itself--and to create the illusion (the traction of which i cannot figure out--i mean it's not like the history of the american system is secret--maybe folk really do know so little about it that they're willing to believe most anyting that explains what becomes visible in factoid form of the characteristics of the system they prefer to pretend doesn't exist) that the bush people invented this stuff. so the practices AND the bush people's framing of them were collapsed into each other--and in the last campaign, obama was able to run against both as if they were the same--and it worked.
because of the relative publicness of the bush people's fuck ups, obama was able to frame himself as moving against the bush people AND the practices that they extended/distorted/continued. now all we're seeing is a series of indications of the boundaries that in fact obtain between the bush people's distortions and the continuities of imperial practice that preceded them.
what's good about the obama administration's encounter with these boundaries is that it's public--people can see it.
what's not so good is that there's no coherent acknowledgement of what is in fact the case--so the process is getting misframed--this thread reflects nothing beyond the right's perverse attempt to seek vindication of the bush administration and by extension of it's own ideological framework by misrepresenting EVERYTHING about what's happening. it's a scary world so violence is necessary so we can continue buying shit and living our oblivious lives blah blah blah.
this seems to me yet another consequence of the simple fact that the obama administration is ideologically quite moderate and of its correlate which is that moderate politics provides and can provide almost nothing in the way of system-level critique simply because apology for the system itself is central to their ideology. another way: the obama administration's central committment is the maintenance of the existing situation---that maintaining it requires changing it in significant ways follows from te conjuncture it finds itself in historically--but the logic of the administration is primarily maintenance. it remains to be seen how far they can go with this before maintenance itself becomes dysfunctional and its modalities force upon the administration something more radical.
but we aren't there yet. we're nowhere near it.
i think everything about the way this process is understood in the popular ideological machinery is fundamentally wrong. this is mostly about preserving the prerogative to not see reality by substituting for it pseudo-realities that can generate pseudo-debates which provide the illusion of motion but which in fact accomplish nothing, get nowhere. treading water while jockeying for tactical advantage in a strategic context shaped by the erasure of the actually existing world.
this is how empires collapse.
enjoy the ride.
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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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