When you remove the obscuring layers of accusation and acrimonious debate, what you find, I think, is a fundamental and ancient argument: can an entrenched system be gradually changed for the better or is an overwhelming catastrophe required?
To avoid further unpleasantness (lest this time I be accused of working for the NSA or perhaps even the Devil himself, posting *provocative* statements from the infernal depths using a vaporous laptop formed by the despair of the damned) I'll state up-front that I stand with the gradualists. I agree with Zizek when, during his interview with Doug a while back, he stated that *it's not pleasant to live in revolutionary times.*
So no chaos corps for me if it can be at all helped.
Still, I believe that there is heft to both points of view.
Chuck G's argument, which, falls I think it's fair to say, in the catastrophist camp, is very direct: Americans are living in a fevered dream; they don't, by and large, understand the true character of the land they call home. If a Dem wins, he will only put a smiling face upon the whole murderous enterprise, thereby extending its life. Only by going, as he says *all the way down* with the Busheviks, who are sort of mad it seems, will the fever be eventually broken. It will not be pretty and lives will be lost and ruined but that is the medicine required.
To which a gradualist like myself might respond...
Flawed and somewhat illusory though they might be, we do have at our disposal institutions which give us the ability to limit the damage our government can do at home and abroad. Real people are dying real deaths because of the wild hunt the Bushevik's have unleashed. Uncounted others are being wrecked and ruined. We have a responsibility to ourselves and the world to use our power as citizens to remove these men from command. Working and voting for the Dem who's most likely to win a general election (which, at this point, appears to be Dean) is the most direct and practical way of bringing this immediate goal about.
...
This is the debate I think we really should be having, not sci-fi such as who's in favor of *basement bombs* or who's apologizing for Hitlerian Germany or working for the government.
DRM
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