|
Edited on Tue Oct-04-05 12:04 PM by Cats Against Frist
Many people who are freepers/Republicans/fascists, politics aside, are normal people -- perhaps not the kind of "role models," that shine like a beacon on the mountain, but hard-working people who keep their noses clean, care for their families, and generally believe in doing "the right thing." In many of their capacities, as soldiers, firefighters, policemen and women, businesspeople and community members, they can often display compassion, nobility and kindness.
That said, I think it takes a special kind of psychology to either be a full-on freeper, a religious dogmatist or a loyal, unflinching Bush supporter -- none of which I find healthy, or responsible, or in keeping with the values of the founders, who imparted stewardship of our nation, upon us all.
As a postmodernist and a libertarian, I can "live and let live." I don't feel the need to "save the world," and especially don't feel the need to save a couple hundred million fat-and-happy, consumerist, self-enslaving middle classers from themselves. I also believe that community is local, subjective and that all kinds of segregation are not in the best interest of everyone. Therefore, I can tolerate the ideas of operating at the state level, dismantling most of the apparatus of the federal government, and, though sometimes painful, leaving people to pursue their own course of destiny and even leaving the weaker in the hands of them.
That said, this GOP, and the people who support it, are nothing like the conservatives or small-government enthusiasts that came before them. Indignant militia boys, rolled over like pooches to let their little tummies get scratched by the likes of the right-wing Ivory Tower, money-soaked Mammon think tanks and neoconservative ideologues. The "philosopher kings," and "noble liars," use the conservative base to play out their main theory: "we know what's good for you, and you're too stupid to be trusted with the truth about things."
And do freepers care? Hell no -- they make excuses, all the time: "this has to be secret, or "our boys" will get killed," "the government should know things that we don't," and arguments against Waco-like government encroachment have turned into "well, as long as you keep your nose clean, you don't have anything to worry about." Like victims making excuses for their abusers, they keep coming back to the GOP time and time again, while the right-wing authoritarians concentrate MORE power in the hands of the fed, close ranks around policy and the rationalizations for it, empower large corporations with representation beyond the rights given in the Constitution, and create a hocus-pocus shoestring economy of war and deficit, all while setting their sights on empire, and creating the largest, most in-debt, secretive, unaccountable government that the U.S. has ever seen -- and a one-party totalitarian state.
"But, but," the freepers say, "they cut taxes." Horseshit. The taxes that they cut do not mean that they have anything like a "small government" philosophy. "Cutting taxes," dovetails nicely into another philosophy: corpo-fascism, which can be played off as "less government," but is really part of large-scale, neo-liberal "social engineering" of the economic strata, to provide favorable, short-term "appearances" that the U.S. has a thriving economy. It has nothing to do with "shrinking" or "drowning" any big, authoritarian federal government.
In the meantime, Bush and the GOP called out the feds to stop consumer choice in Florida, gutted the Bill of Rights, and are attempting to pass a flag-burning amendment that is big government authoritarianism of the worst stripe, destroy the right to privacy, funnel all of our tax dollars to mercenaries, the mossad and "fluff-girling" Iraq for corporate takeover.
But is it that the constituency just "doesn't see it?"
No. I think that a large part of the base -- 30 percent or more, is so taken with Bush worship and the blonde jeebus that they are beyond rational thought, and/or help. But the other 70 percent are very, most likely, authoritarians, and always have been -- just waiting for the RIGHT authoritarian to come in, and assume the mantle. These are people who thrive on moral indignance, cultural supremacism, nationalism, xenophobia, romantic MYTHS of the birth of America, and false binaries geared for the totalitarian mindset. Loyal, but not fanatical. Comfortable. Sure -- Certain even.
Are they victims? Or are they lazy? They're certainly the same people that I described in the first paragraph, who, on a micro level, can seem to function the same as anyone else, with shared values that we all have.
They say that all wars actually take place between "the intellectuals," and that the populus is necessary only for the validation or mobilization of force, to enforce what the ideologues want. The people who are leading the freepers by the nose are fantastic propagandists, disappearing artists -- "who? us? we don't even exist" -- and believe that the ends -- power -- justify the means.
The freepers are eviscerated, trampled souls. Led by their weakest and most deplorable feelings of fear, powerlessness and low self-esteem. But these things exist in us all, and can be played, like a piano, by the right Liberace.
Like I said, I'm confused. And, as a postmodernist, it's hard for me to judge. It seems perverse that they can't grasp the disparity between the "polished message" of the GOP, and their actual actions -- and it's frustrating, to me. But, maybe, like the neocons, I believe that it's all "narrative," and perspective, and that the center holds nothing. The people who are the "history's actors" behind the famous Suskind quote, are experts in vapor, in ghosts. They don't exist, objectivism doesn't exist, reality doesn't exist -- making everything a chimera, everything meaningless.
I thought I'd add a poem, on edit, of which all of this reminds me. It was selected, I think, by Bob Hass for the Best American Poetry 2001.
David Kerby
"Dear Derrida"
My new grad-school roommates and I are attending
our first real lecture, which has gone okay,
we guess, since none of us understands it,
when one of our professors rises,
a somewhat prissy fellow
with a mild speech impediment,
and says he takes issue with the speaker’s tone,
which he characterizes as one of “sar, sar,”
and her he raises his voice a little,
“sar, sar, sar,” and wipes his mouth
with a handkerchief, “sar,” and turns red
and screams, “sar sar sar—DAMN EET!—sarcasm!”
The four of us look at each other
as if to say, Hmmmm, nothing like this
at the cow colleges we went to!
After that, whenever we’d spill our coffee
or get a sock stuck in the vacuum cleaner,
we’d look at the mess ruefully
and say “da, da, da—SARCASM!—damn eet!”
Our lives were pretty tightly sealed,
and if we weren’t in class or the library,
either we spent our time in wordplay
or cooking: what with girlfriends
and passersby, we always had a pot
of water boiling on the back of the stove
(it’s like you’re ready to deliver babies,
somebody said once), either for spaghetti
or sausages, though one evening Chris
the English student from England, came by
for a sausage supper, and after he left,
we ran up on the roof to pelt him
with water balloons, though when he did,
he fell down as though he’d been shot,
and one of us said, Jeez, what’s wrong
with Chris, and somebody else said,
You know, Chris eats nothing but sausage,
and a third party said, Hmmmm,
maybe we ought to vary our diet a little.
And that was our life: school, the boiled messes
we made on that stove, and hanging around
that crummy apartment talking about,
I don’t know, Dr. Mueller’s arm,
I guess, which hung uselessly
by his side for reasons no one
fathomed—polio, maybe, or some
other childhood disease—though Paul
said he thought it was made of wood.
Can’t be made of wood, said Michael,
you can see his hand at the end
of it, to which Paul replied,
Yeah, but you can have a wooden arm
and a real hand, can’t you?
And that was what our life was like,
because mainly we just sat around
and speculated like crazy while
the snow piled up outside,
so much so that by the time spring came,
I’d had it, so I moved out of there and in with Grant
and Brian and Poor Tom, who were philosophy
students but also genuine bad asses,
believe it or not, because at the time
you more or less had to be an existentialist,
i.e., tough, and not a deconstructionist,
which was a few years down the road yet
and which would have left everyone
paralyzed, since all texts
eventually cancel themselves out.
Of the new roomies, I hit it off best
with Grant, who became one of the big-brother
types I seemed to be looking for at that period of my life,
and in fact he rescued me
on more than one occasion, such as the time I was talking
to a local girl outside a bar
called Jazz City and her three brothers
decided to “teach me a lesson” and would have
if Grant hadn’t punched one of them
across the hood of a parked car, or the night
he and I were in this other place where
a biker gang called Quantrill’s Raiders
hung out and into which wandered
a well-dressed couple so unaware
of their surroundings they asked the bartender
to please make them some hot toddies,
which set everybody to laughing,
only the Quantrills decided we were laughing at them
and jumped up to “teach us a lesson”
and would have, too, if Grant had not thrown
a table at them and dragged me
out of there to dive behind some garbage cans
and choke on our own laughter
while the drunk, fucked-up bikers howled
and swore and punched each other since they
couldn’t punch us. All this was therapy,
I figured, since grad school was stressful enough
to send three people I knew to the clinic
with barbituate overdoses (two made it,
one didn’t), and I’m not even listing here
all the divorces I know of that were directly
attributable to that constant pressure
to be the best, be publishable, hireable,
lovable, that came from professors and sweethearts
and parents but mainly from ourselves,
as though each of us were two people,
a good and capable slave, on theone hand,
and, on the other, a psychotic master
who either locked us up with our pots
of boiling water or sent us out to dance
with the devil in the streets of Balitmore.
That year magi appeared from the east:
Jacques Lacan, Tzvetan Todorov,
Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida
brought their Saussurean strategies
to the Hopkins conference on “The Language
of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,”
where they told us that all language
is code and thus separate from reality,
and therefore everything
is a text as long as there is nothing
more than this half-conscious
linguistic interplay between perceiver
and perceived, which is another way
of saying that language is only reality
or at least the only one that counts.
As different as these thinkers are,
each was telling us that there is no us:
that cultural structures
or the media or Western thought
or the unconscious mind
or economic systems make us
what we are or what we seem to be, since,
if fact, we are not, which isn’t such bad news,
if you think about it, because it means
we don’t have to take ourselves so seriously.
Derrida and company make it impossible
for anyone today to read a book
as they had before, but we didn’t know that then.
Grant didn’t, that’s for sure;
four years later, he put a gun in his mouth
and blew the back of his skull off,
and sometimes it makes me sad
when I think of how long it takes
for new ideas to catch on, because,
yeah, deconstruction might have saved us.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
