>From The Guardian, Decca Aitkenhead [fwd Ian Murray, Is Democracy
boring]:
``Young people will be prepared to riot in the name of democracy on May 1 - but not to vote on May 2 ...
...Parallels with the current situation in France are obvious. Youngsters there couldn't wait to rush out and riot once Le Pen was through to the second round, but would they go and vote? Their objection - just as it is in Britain - was that the election was `boring'.
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If the UK and France think their political figures are boring, they should sample some of ours.
In Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, he poses an implicit question that he never answers. The question is why has radicalized Islam taken on secular western Modernity or Postmodernity of the US Empire? It is understood that the Empire is symbolized best by the free market ideology of neoliberalism, and that this apparently universal hegemon is the western Fundamentalism that was attacked in September 2001.
While I was working my way through the chapters of Ahmed Rashid's Jihad, in the interminable passages on Tajikistan and the IRP (Islamic Renaissance Party) I realized something about both Ali and Rashid. Since they are westernized Muslims and completely reject religious ideas, that is they are creative and rational in the enlightenment sense of the words, they are completely blind to the yawing void that greets their western contemporaries who grew up here in the US. In other words they can not see, or at least didn't choose to write about, the tremendous abyss that lays at the heart of the enlightenment, made exponentially deeper and wider by the endless ascension of capitalism, and its free market ideologies that erase everything that can not be transformed into a commodity, and which is so grossly forced down the throats of every breathing soul on the planet---starting with us. Their own relative success as writers and the satisfactions that brings, makes them blind to the spiritual and culture void of their adopted worlds.
Ali complains in A letter to a Young Muslim, ``...We are suffocating. Why can't we breathe? Everything seems static. Our economy, our politics, our intellectuals and, most of all our religion. The West does nothing. Our governments are dead. Our politicians are corrupt, Our people are ignored. Is it surprising that some are responsive to the Islamists? Who else offers anything these days?...'' (306p)
It should take next to nothing to see the parallel between Ali's complaint and Decca Aitkenhead article. Yes we are all suffocating, and the evidence is exactly the same. The ascension of ridged, unmovable, dogmas. On the one hand the postmodernity of disciplinarian neoliberal capitalism, backed up by reactionary Christian social fundamentalism---so neatly encapsulated as a ready-made US Empire forced without nuance or mercy down our throats day in day out, hour in hour out through the virtual sensorium of mass media. On the other hand Empire's titanic Other, principally the radicalized Islamic worlds that Ali and Rashid have written about.
The clash of fundamentalisms is a clash of anti-civilizations, since neither resemble anything like what I would call a civil and habitable life. Oh, yes for a few some ten or twenty percent of the West among those people who have accumulated sufficient wealth in various forms to live without devoting their entire lives to work, yes it is quite civil. It is just barely livable for the limited intelligencia of whom Ali and Rashid are a part and who have managed through their own creative powers to make up a world of sensibility to inhabit. Otherwise for the remaining masses it is an appalling abyss, made only that much more incomprehensibly empty by a cheesey consumerism and the absolute rule of satisfaction by sedation of the upper twenty percent and their ruling elite.
Chuck Grimes