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there's no necessary connection between conservatism and clown time. but there is a deep american tradition that makes the two identical. like there is in alot of places but bigger. what's changed over the past years, and has accelerated over the past 2-3, is the degree to which the institutional right has crawled into bed with the far right. i think that's new and it's dangerous. it has implications that run well past this ""fear or the other side" business--which strikes me as arrogant, the sort of thing that only makes sense if you believe in some god who's amurican or some invisible hand that likes the us above all other places---a fading imperial delerium in short.
and there's really nothing at all comparable on the left, which was subject to waves of repression in the united states since the late 1800s, which was never allowed to become a mass movement as it was in europe because here in the land of the free and all that the right spent a whole lot of energy cowering before it's imaginary left and directing armed violence private and public in order to strike out at it. think the fate of the one big union or the coal field wars or the wobblies or the violence that accompanied unionization in the automobile industry---thugs who are the direct ancestors of the contemporary right.
what's amazing to me though is the extent to which political discourse in the states has been made to be degenerate--and affair of and for the ignorant---maybe via the televisionization of politics but more through the rise of the populist right funded with very deep pockets that happen to be attached to authoritarian assholes like the koch brothers of the coors family (among others). and this political discourse does not speak to or for anyone--at all---whom i know. and almost everyone i know is entirely alienated from the present clowntime. and no-one understands why clowntime encounters no friction, or how it came to pass that there's only one party in the united states with two right wings that squabbles about tactics. on and on.
so alot of people don't recognize themselves in this clowntime america, the one that you see being cycled and recycled talking head to talking head, political operative to political operative, all shilling advertisements, all quite committed to the idea that consumption is democracy because it's easier that way---american democracy is a distant fiction, a memory if it every existed, replaced with a soft authoritarian system. consumption likely seems more "real" and shallow---well that's the american way. cheap steak tough and bonzo substantial as gil scott-heron once said about ronald reagan.
it'd be sad if it wasn't so fucking pathetic.
but i digress.
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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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