Monday, June 19, 2006
"Focused on the future"
Has Kos lost his mind? Can anyone explain what this means?
As far as I can tell, there are only two salient impulses left in American "politics"--nostalgia, which offers delusions feeding the impulse to cling tenaciously and futilely to what one still has left and/or magically get back what one has lost (i.e. what one never had, but has always wished for); and obliteration, which asserts rather straightforwardly that there is no future but apocalypse and so offers people the chance to exult in triumphant nothingness though the sublime extermination of everything that isn't oneself.
Also as far as I can tell, Republicans have pretty much cornered the market on obliteration and are doing a pretty good job selling it. Which leaves nostalgia to the Democrats. Which is maybe what "moving America forward" really is after all, answering my own initial question.
Of course, the third possible course would be a kind of true conservatism, based on a series of strategies aimed at stopping the Death Machine in its tracks and trying to CONSERVE, for a time, human life. But I haven't seen any indication that we have any political party concerned with throwing themselves under those tracks.
posted by Blicero : 6/19/2006 02:21:00 PM
Small pet peeve. I used to dig the phrase, "Take back America", as in, we Democrats need to take it back from the Republicans who are running it into the ground. It was a staple of the Dean campaign, and I was really into it.
But now the phrase grinds. I don't want to "take our nation back". That's regressive. I want to move it forward. It's Republicans who are trying to drag the nation back into the dark ages. We are progressives. We are forward looking.
So yeah, this might be a bullshit framing peeve, but really, let's remind people that we are focused on the future. And that's where we want to take our country.
As far as I can tell, there are only two salient impulses left in American "politics"--nostalgia, which offers delusions feeding the impulse to cling tenaciously and futilely to what one still has left and/or magically get back what one has lost (i.e. what one never had, but has always wished for); and obliteration, which asserts rather straightforwardly that there is no future but apocalypse and so offers people the chance to exult in triumphant nothingness though the sublime extermination of everything that isn't oneself.
Also as far as I can tell, Republicans have pretty much cornered the market on obliteration and are doing a pretty good job selling it. Which leaves nostalgia to the Democrats. Which is maybe what "moving America forward" really is after all, answering my own initial question.
Of course, the third possible course would be a kind of true conservatism, based on a series of strategies aimed at stopping the Death Machine in its tracks and trying to CONSERVE, for a time, human life. But I haven't seen any indication that we have any political party concerned with throwing themselves under those tracks.
posted by Blicero : 6/19/2006 02:21:00 PM
