roachboy

i stand by my earlier take on this as driven by barely controlled paranoia.
folk who are trying to wrap it up in narratives that make it appear otherwise in the process simply repeat it's logic.

take a step back and look at it.

for example, i sometimes wonder about the relationship between the missing children collective panic and republican control. i keep forgetting to look into when the floating heads of missing children turned up on milk cartons, floating out of television to invade breakfast spaces as if this was a public service. it's seemed that the structuring of anxiety around the images of missing or damaged children has been among the characteristics of a kind of cultural seachange that took shape over the 1980s--optimism (in a vague way) about an alternate possible world coming out of the political movements of the late 60s & earl 70s channeled into optimism about th workings of the dominant order coupled with anxieties about something intimate, exceedingly so, being taken from you. the way conservative thinking has used the image of "the children" is pretty cynical.
we have been told that it is reasonable to be afraid that someone----unnamed, unknown, surfacing at random-----is going to steal what's nearest & dearest. the Malevolent Outsider.

it's been curious to watch this set-up repeat again and again in the american mediascape. the most obvious expression was the construction of the Terrorist. but it's repeated in the selling of security systems, in the fear of the Viral, in anxiety about identity theft. over and over the hard sell. like the old life insurance technique: buy this so you don't have to worry about your fiery demise. like the structuring feature of cold war ideology: at any moment you could be reduced to cinders by a nuclear device. i'm surprised there hasn't been a campaign to structure and profit by possibilties that a meteor can hit. maybe the only obstacle to that has been the slow development of anti-meteor devices.


and this paranoia seems to have had pretty wide-ranging effects, setting up an ambient climate of fear that otherwise incoherent political statements have presupposed, traficked in, worked on.

it happens that in this particularly absurd action, you see the dynamic itself repeated.

drape whatever you like around it, this is a sorry state of affairs, not only in itself (being persecuted by the president of the united states when he tells you that school is a good thing is among the most ridiculous things i've ever seen) but also for the associations that allow it to have traction.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite