(More World Cup this weekend I hope - haven't seen a game since my last post!)
(WHY DOES "ENTER" NOT WANT TO FUNCTION?)
So first off, great writers are great editors (or at least have them), and since I am certainly not the latter, I will be never be the former. Instead of letting the prospect of writing cause me anxiety, I am just going to write. That may mean more activity here. Yay. Or it may not.
Just like my compatriot, I am a bit sad from writing the same shit over and over again. It may not appear that I am doing this to you (or it may!) because I have deleted a million drafts of Typical Leftist Blogger Palaver on the typical subjects, all reading something like this:
Surprise, surprise, Obama is not a leftist. Who could have anticipated that? In other news, Democrats are hypocrites, doing the same things the Republicans did when they were in power, only not always as well (except for fundraising two years ago! Democrats in moneyloving shocker!). Who woulda thunk it?
No point in finishing half of these "essays", really. At best they come off like poking a blind man in the eye, at worst, boring, self-aggrandizing bullshit easily summarized as: hey you liberals you aren't that Left, you know. You are not harDCore like me, not at all. Blah.
I watched a documentary on Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent) recently and that feeling of being one of many grooves in a skipping record became even more overwhelming. When will things change substantially enough to require the development of a completely new critique?
News Flash: America kills innocent people with its bombs and justifies this with the complaint that the people it was trying to kill were doing the same thing or going to do the same thing (Bush Doctrine [great name for a political porn? Has someone already said that?]).
Whoa!
For those of you with the same malaise, ie the Left has been the same Left for too long, I propose you answer this question as a challenge so that now you may have something to write about: when do you think that being Left became a reactionary position instead of a progressive one? When did humanism and the dream of collective action become something that happened instead of something that would?
Please answer freely, and you are welcome to reject the question entirely as a means of answering. Here are a few themes:
1. The tension between horror and fascination that lies at the heart of the experience of modernization, industrialization and standardization. The weird beauty of the glow of missiles in
night vision.
2. Is the fight against oppression by oppressed groups about ending oppression or opening up the position of oppressor to more people?
3. The 70s as the reconciliation of 50s consumer capitalism and the 60s desire for intense personal experiences.
4. The collapse of the gold standard.
5. Bush I and "New World Order", aka "The End of History".
6. Clinton ("triangle of love/you gotta be careful how you start/don't be in a rush to play your part")
7. Bush II: the Murmuring.
I guess even this shit has been written about a lot; I invite personal accounts, not historical narrative. My quick "answer":
I guess I have seen these themes pop up in their own ways for quite some time, but I felt like everything really came together for me sometime in 2003 in the run up to the Iraq war. Compared to the broad, sweeping, dystopian vision of the Bush/Cheney administration, the typical liberal complaint seemed so trite, so boring (maybe it is the switch from a Left vision of empowering and fighting for rights to one of the defense of victims that has taken so much energy out of the cause). Not that I ever agreed with BC (apt) but they were certainly looking into the future and, all of a sudden, I felt I couldn't...
(and that whole liberal complaint of Republicans wanting to reenact the 50s are missing the point - the only way these sweeping visions of the future can truly be enacted is with the "50s-style" unquestioning loyalty of the people)
(but wait! fascism happens now and happened in the past? why is it easier to see the New World Order in terms of the future but not the Revolution? It's a trick. I need to read that book by Derrida that's lying around somewhere.)
A bad non-poem I thought up while getting lunch (told u ii need an eDitor):
Title of many overwrought whines = America
The thing about prison is that it's clean
Locked up twenty three hours a day
but the fresh concrete keeps the cockroach away
I guess it's better than China
No comments:
Post a Comment