a brutish, violent upending of the soul--get out the jellies





"I do not understand the 50-million-odd Bush supporters; I do not know how to reason with them. I feel like we live on different planets." - Steven Shaviro.

< sometimes, only a brutish, violent upending of the soul can account for the world's depravity >

<rant cut-and-pasted from various sources: a mirror of the times>

Can someone please explain to me why Kerry is asking for unification and conciliation?

You're telling me that he'd like to see America united under a mandate of discriminatory and theocratic policies such as anti-homosexuality, anti-intellectualism and anti-abortion, a theo-militaristic state devoted to controlling the world's resources through violence and bloodshed and to endocolonizing its poor (bets are on for the draft...), destroying the global environment, and taking on the mantle of supreme world Empire as it triggers the apocalyptic mayhem the globe's religious zealots so desperately ache for?

And the Democrats are supposed to bend over and snort like the urbanite-turned-pig in Deliverance?

IF there was ever a time for the opposition to theocratic authoritarianism in America to step forward and say No, we don't agree, and there will be no reconciliation, it is now. There is no healing-- the ointment Kerry is urging you to apply is there to lube up all the necessary orifices. The Religious Party has a full house, kids; the Senate and the Supreme Court too. There is nothing they cannot pass.

The United States of America is now officially a one-party State, and it is not a party of the people, and even if it was, being a party of the people doesn't make you good.

There is no opposition, furthermore, because the "opposition" lacks the resolve to call the truth of the moment. Yah, the truth: what Zizek argues for in Lenin's 1917 writings is a kind of beyond-the-niceness clarity to the scenario. The truth of the moment is that you don't bend over backwards for an enemy that will take that defeatist politesse as the cue to destroy everything you stand for. There will be no Democrat party sooner or later: the Dems aren't waking up to the greater trend here. Doesn't anyone read The Art of War anymore, Machiavelli or Clausewitz? The Book of Revelations? It's all in Karl Rove's handbook to a hundred year rule--it applies regardless of party affiliation and it comes down to the old adage: Know Thy Enemy.

Twenty percent of the US voted for Bush; just under twenty for Kerry. The majority spoke loud and clear: they don't care (yah, Baudrillard was right again). Can you imagine if a majority quorum was required? If this voting stuff was mandatory?

So is that sixty percent, as some people believe, "naive" or "ignorant"? Is it because of a pervading influence of entertainment media that our episteme has flipped from one of the subject to the object? Or is it the confirmation of the fact that the politicization of the masses still has yet to take place in the US of A--or that the politicization has taken place, and its polis is that of the Church?

The analysis is nary irrelevant if one imagines, just for a moment, that this experiment called representative democracy has failed, that its appearance is just that: the sheen on the controlling mechanisms of transnational corporations and Empire-building, Earth-destroying coalitions that owe their perspective to a confirmed sense of indulgent pride of being the chosen ones to enact their holy place in history (or more accurately, its end). Beyond democracy, we're talking about the reign of emperors, the reign of power that neither democracy nor communism has ever managed to tame. We're talking about owning the planet and fucking it up real good.

The Dems don't need to try and pamper the support of that geographical swath of red that separates the blue islands of east and west. It needs to recognise that the kinds of people who are in power now are the kinds of people who, during the Civil War, were down with slavery. The Confederation is in power: the South won by incorporating its nastiness into the hypocritical liberalism of the North (hypocritical because the North's plan to abolish slavery was just another election promise). And now the word is, from on high: love thy fellow Americans who hate you because you are an ass-fucking, baby-aborting non-believer.

Yah, right.

Time to watch Easy Rider again. Get the picture?



</rant>

* Amended: Abe notes via this article that the turnout was closer to sixty percent; thus the actual figures are more likely to be just over twenty-odd percent for Bush, just under for Kerry, with forty to fifty percent non-voters (that is, the figures we know about).

** From the newly launched (kudos) Indymedia.us :

"But the truth may be much simpler and harder to swallow: We are living in an extremely right wing, conservative religious country with fanatics at the helm who believe they rule by divine right.

If so, those yearning for change in this country might have to stop relying on protest marches in New York and San Franscisco and start going to Sunday Mass in the midwest."

Hear ye, hear ye.

*** Check out Greg Palast, who claims Kerry won.

posted. Thu - November 4, 2004 @ 01:31 PM           |