``...This whole scene is a nightmare. So let's roll---on into the abyss.'' (CG)
``This is the foreign policy equivalent of the hope that an economic depression will revive the Left...
...The best strategy to prevent Iraqi invasions is to focus on the cause of the Palestinians, since that is already emeshing the Bush administration in the politics of the region which will restrain intervention in Iraq. If invading Iraq threatens to cause war over Israel, a lot of support both globally and in the US will evaporate.''
Nathan Newman
----
No, I don't think it is the equivalent of wishing for a depression to revive the Left. I think that wish might be closer to Carrol's more optimistic position.
I don't dispute the second paragraph at all---in fact I agree. But consider for at least fifty or sixty years the US Left has acted as the good conscience to the public mind, with the idea of trying to save the US from itself. In a sense the Left as acted as the saving grace for most of the society, which then played exploitive variations on the practical alternatives to a Left idealist good conscience.
What if that organized and vocally critical role of good conscience ended?
What if there was nothing for any established party or organized power to point to on their left? Contrary to a lot of posts, I don't think the Left is anywhere near dead, at least not around here---but be that as it may...
What if there were no reminders that most of our food is industrial sewage, our working lives are a meaningless authoritarian bore, our government is evil, greedy, and stupid, our whole way of life is destroying life on the rest of planet, and that we should change our ways for a better life for all. What if all that good conscience laden reminder stopped?
Hey, let capital exploit the fuck out the planet, feed bourgeois gluttony until it bursts and call it economics, let politics claim any lie will do as politics, that basic human rights are dribble, and get on with appointing more brain dead killer clones from Texas. Hell, let it rain toxic chickens from Mississippi.
The point isn't to revive the Left, but leave established power and its mass consumer apologists to their own devices. They claim common sense, a good public conscience, and in general a progressive and humanitarian sentiment are somehow all wrong. Fine. Grant them the field. Go for it.
On a another thread (self-sacrifice) Jacob C posted a nice quote:
``From Erich Auerbach, _Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature_ (1953), pp. 53 - 56:
...From the end of the first century of the Imperial Age something sultry and oppressive appears, a darkening of the atmosphere of life. It is unmistakable in Seneca, and the somber tone of Tactitus' historical writing has often been noted. But here in Ammianus we find that the process has reached the stage of a magical and sensory dehumanization. That the sensory vividness of the events should profit from this paralysis of the human is indeed notable... the characteristics of Ammianus' style...are to be found all through his work. Everywhere human emotion and rationality yield to the magically and somberly sensory, to the graphic and gestural... And the background of it all is this: the persons treated live between a frenzy of bloodshed and mortal terror. Grotesque and sadistic, spectral and superstitious, lusting for power yet constantly trying to conceal the chattering of their teeth--so do we see the men of Ammianus' ruling class and their world. His strange sense of humor might also be mentioned... In this humor there is always an element of bitterness, of the grotesque, very often of something grotesquely gruesome and inhumanly convulsive. Ammianus' world is somber: it is full of superstition, blood frenzy, exhaustion, fear of death, and grim and magically rigid gestures; and to counterbalance all this there is nothing but the equally somber and pathetic determination to accomplish an ever more difficult, ever more desperate task: to protect the Empire, threatened from without and crumbling from within. This determination gives the strongest among the actors on Ammianus' stage a rigid, convulsive superhumanity with no possibility of relaxation...''*
Sounds familiar. So, sure, bomb Afghanistan from rubble to rubble, egg on the Palestinian slaughter, invade Iraq using mercenaries, call it war on terror, and then terrorized all the poor, disenfranchised, miserable peoples of the earth. Randomly threaten a dozen different countries with nuclear annihilation, then scorn, demean, and bully all reasonable opposition. Never grant one gesture of mercy to anyone, no matter what. And, always always make sure no deed good, bad, or indifferent is ever turned without profit.
Isn't that what's going on here? So, take that longed for stroll on the dark side boyz. Be my guest.
Chuck Grimes
*[Ammianus Marcellinus, 330-395 AD, The last great historian to write in Latin, was born in Syrian Antioch. He served in the Roman army in Gaul and in campaigns against the Persians, and was an officer in the Praetorian Guard. On the usurpation of Marcellus in 366 AD, he wrote umbram principatus funesti capessit (he seized the shadow of a fatal principate). Bio. from Forum Romanum]