|
the idea is ludicrous that there is a free-spending party and a party of frugality inside the sad american financial oligarchy. there's merely two different patronage systems.
both parties like buying lots of shiny toys for killing people in great number.
they differ on how much they like to spend on improving the quality of life for regular people.
but it's perverse....the right apparently sees regular people as malleable peasants that do their lords's bidding.
if there's a war to be fought, the peasants are the ones who die in it.
if there's austerity to be imposed in order to maintain the total party lifestyle proper to the lords, the peasants suffer for it.
what's best about the peasants is that they're so convinced that their interests and those of the lords are the same that they willingly bear these afflictions, presumably because at least that way they know the Face of the Lord is directed toward them so they exist socially. without that Recognition, the peasants would be adrift, identity-less, without a proper place or a conception of places that are proper which is required to have a proper place.
in the new feudalism that is the logical extension of conservative economic policies, the barriers that separate peasant from lord grow and grow, but curiously so does the belief amongst the peasantry that the opposite is the case, if they just try and try and try they'll someday be lords...this when the reality is they'll always be peasants and the system they support functions to assure that even as the peasants wander about inside it saying how very not true that is.
maybe that's because the lords tell the peasants that this counter-factual scenario is the case and the peasants like to be like the lords and like to like what the lords tell them to like and so now they like counter-factual scenarios and they like them with all their peasanty little hearts, so devoted are they to interests which by any rational standard at all are not their own.
incidentally, i will simply repeat that i am far more disappointed about the capitulation on the question of israeli settlements in the west bank and around jerusalem, which i see as a pure and unmotivated cave-in to the right, than i am in the appearance of capitulation in the tax bill.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|