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the meta-argument:
this incoherent nonsense is a viable form of political participation in a democracy--which means that informed debate is an option and no more than that so effectively anything goes--which is of course as far from a democratic notion as is imaginable---worse in many ways than State Oppression because it guts the process from the inside, and does so in the name of extending and embodying what it guts
why it's being floated:
it's the only line of defense abstract enough to encompass the hodge-podge of far right wing interest groups that have banded together. there's no way to defend the contents directly. so all that matters is Performance. once you go there, the usual facile relativizing moves all follow. for example: poor me, look at how my conservatism is being victimized, why those Evil Leftists aren't accused of being idiots in the same way as i am being. poor me, victim again.
a riff:
i still maintain that what we're seeing here is a performance of nothing more or less than an outburst of conservative paranoia, run through some Outrage over being Persecuted by obama, who is now the Evil Father who exists only to Inflict Injury on the shattered ego of conservative politics.
this Persecution follows not from obama having the audacity, the gall, to say that something has to be done to change the way health care is understood and delivered in the united states--they can't even agree that health care is the actual issue at hand, perhaps thinking that calling for a national debate on the question is some kind of Trap the sole function of which is to Further Persecute conservatives.
the problem is that conservatives had power for 8 years, they fucked it all up, their ideology lay in ruins, they're talking to no-one but themselves.
the problem is particular to populist conservatism, which was always used by the republican party. i suspect that these folk feel collectively cut adrift, and have no sense of being able to influence the coming Wave of New Persecutions.
and the populist right--and it's political expressions--have long shown themselves incapable of distinguishing between their own political fortunes and that of this larger hallucination that is their america. it's as if the feeling of being-impotent politically that is specific to populist conservatism is staged internally as an apocalypse.
however it came into being, it's clearly of no consequence to any of these folk, or the handlers that set them into motion, or the corporate entities that funnel money into those handlers for their own reasons, that the spectacle is a serious problem, damaging the actually existing america of which the conservative hallucination is but a small and shrinking part.
it's infantile.
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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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