> However, it now seems to me, that we are playing metaphorical
> Palestinian to an intractable Israel. They creat facts on the ground,
> we compromise for less pain. More facts, more compromise over and
> over. It is as if the political space of a US progressive reform
> tradition or gradualism has become something like the Palestinian
> territory, sliced and diced into a string of isolated archipelagos,
> interstitial spaces criss-crossed with roadways, barriers, check
> points, nomanslands, free fire zones, and fortified settlements---an
> ever narrowing space of oppression, zero future and absolutely no
> contiguity or promise, except in the imagination. All the while, its
> life is bled out slowly in front of us.
Are things really this bad? Are we slowly being smothered while pretty pictures flash on megascreens 24/7 and Adult Contemporary Muzak rains from the skies? I dunno. It's a romantic notion, granted. But when I think back to the 20th Century -- y'know, a couple of World Wars, a couple of genocides, assorted mass murder and repression, among other blood-caked delights -- the occupation of Iraq isn't on the same level. Nor Bush's demented rule. In fact, I think that Reagan's time on the throne was much worse, and I don't recall anyone seriously suggesting in 1983 that we vote for Dutch 'cause Mondale or Hart, neither of whom differed from Reagan all that much on, say, the slaughter in Central America, would lull us into inaction and make us believe that things were better when they were not. The opposition to Bush's lies and crimes came together rather quickly, another legacy of the much-hated 60s which has spread into areas of life that the Yippies and Commies and Libs of that period could not have conceived.
So long as powerful nation states are kept alfloat by globo-corps and run by private interests, we will have a fight on our hands. But this self-pitying Woe Are Us position is not only ahistorical, it diminishes the ongoing resistance that continues to free minds and create new opportunities for personal and collective freedom.
DP