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that's an effect of the way in which conservatives prefer to stage power as a media event. it's all about inwardness dontcha know. in the same way that poverty in conservativeland is about lack of gumption or drive or any number of other inward attributes. certainly not about class position or the social distribution of opportunities or anything else. its about soul, man.
it's kinda hard not to see in this a kind of strange royalism, really: the person of the Leader is supposed to Embody the Nation and does that by Mirroring Back onto it, and presumably us, a List of Virtues. so we are as the Leader is. no matter how arbitrary that linkage might in fact be. it's all the second body of the king. you know, that old kantorowicz book. great stuff if you can find a copy and read it.
except that it's not a royalist situation and conservatives have, since reagan, had a kind of penchant for this vacant manly man Leader-images that in the world govern out of a state of emergency when the chance presents itself. so that makes this aesthetic something quite different from royalism. but i don't feel like running out this obvious line of argument again.
i don't see having convictions for their own sake as a rational approach to actually living in the world, but it's pretty obvious that ace doesn't either, given the way he moves around his frame for argument, if you want to call it that.
so this isn't about actual human beings.
it's about image, and it's about the Image of the Leader.
in my humble opinion of course.
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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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