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you know what's really absurd about all this? we just passed through a period that it's hard not to see as a neo-fascist one. what characterizes fascism? a nationalist ideology predicated on an identification of the "real" people with the person of a Leader, which presupposes a tight co-ordination of opinion through a top-down media apparatus (there were no fascisms before there was radio. in the united states, it's television mostly) which enables a sense of immediate identification with the Leader who is the embodiment of the State---which is typically in a state of more or less "total mobilization" around a military project that involves an Enemy that is both within and without, everywhere and nowhere, the actions of which Threaten the Real People with annihilation---a threat that justifies the state of total mobilization, that enables the identifications to take shape.
*that* is not a bad outline of what fascism looks like. and *that* is a pretty fair outline of the "war on terror".
this is one of many reasons why i see conservative anxiety about obama as pathological. they've found themselves dragged from the Happy Place of anxiety about "terrorism" to the unhappy place of trying to muddle through the aftermath of the bush administration itself.
this is quite apart from bigger problems that may well have been triggered by the Epic Incompetence of the bush people, problems that may well result in the unravelling of the american empire as it's been constructed since world war 2, as it mutated under the figleaf of "globalizing capitalism"
what the right is doing is acting out. the underlying basis for this is a simple inversion of the structure built around the Leader during that Happy Valley Trip of the war on "terror"
again, the problem really is that there's little in the way of perspective that's being provided by the main opinion co-ordination mechanisms. so this acting out seems somehow a legitimate form of politics.
meanwhile, i expect that much of the planet thinks---again---that the united states has flipped its shit and is devolving at speed into some bizarre-o collective delusion-space.
and conservatives, who seem incapable of not conflating their own political gain with the Interests of the Real America that they like to pretend they and they alone embody, continue to drive us all further and further into the same downward spiral put into motion in spades by the endgame of the bush period.
it really is lunacy.
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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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