So, if I feel that I am an American, with a special connection to the traditions and customs and the people of this country,and moreover that this is not a bad thing to be, but even a good one, I am necessarily a bloodthirsty bigot, a scoundrel, and and hollow man who fails to to recognize that I have a special bond to each and every human being in the world? Sheesh, no wonder the American left can't connect with anyone... jks
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Justin, come on.
This isn't just a confusion over a few idle flag wavers. We (you, me, everybody) are completely surrounded by a mass media envelop of mythological representations that purport to be, literally BE America. The entire government and corporate media apparatus is driving this bullshit. But these mythological constructs (virtual commodities) are worse than garbage because they utterly corrupt the heart and mind with a ceaseless stream of vile trivialities---a flow of shit that can not be filtered out, can not be stopped, and can not be re-claimed. It is load of poisonous junk food of the soul.
This fabricated system of signs and symbols promulgated through the totality of the senses, composes as a totality the ideology of neoliberal capitalism as Empire---and it is sold to us and everybody else on earth as America. It speaks for us (which is why it has to be denounced as the big lie) and it is completely oppressive.
While I was glancing at David Hawkes' book, (Ideology, Routledge, 1996, BTW worth reading) tonight I recalled old thoughts about the ludicrous nature of patriotism, belief in country, nationalism, Cassirer's Myth of State, and the rest of it. (Hawkes doesn't actually deal with the fabrication of State, but rather with the fabrication of the capitalist commodity as a representation then as a replacement of the real, i.e. material)
In my absolute trashing of patriotism, I am not talking about what are your tangible and living experiences, your life---but its commodified Other, its expropriation, its representations, its branded USA logos and eros that animates in a dance macabre the whole mythic force of this country and hence its conceptualization of itself as Empire.
Remember (about two years ago) our exchange over Hegel and his identification of state with world spirit and its uses during Bismarck with developing German nationalism---a kind of ghost or after image of what Hegel felt as a young man, was the promise of the French Revolution? (I am not explaining this well, sorry, but you must remember).
Well, we, all of us are living it, right now---this violent angst is that, whatever you want to call it, re-incarnated, called up again out of the night.
Look at us! There is nothing but talk of war, slaughters, death, power, terror. This is insane. But so far it is mostly a kind of titillating madness. There are real dead, lots of them, but not yet in scale with this ridiculous slide into unreality. It is still small. But if the US and the pigs in power keep this shit up, it seems to me, this threatens to get very dark. Look at Pakistan and India. That unelected idiot we are supposed to call president and his stupid fake war on terrorism is starting to stir up some very threatening stuff. Look at the trashed West Bank. I put that on Bush, with Sharon as an opportunist.
So, I want to put as much conceptual distance as I can between me and that fucking USA.
Chuck Grimes