I see what you mean. The irony is, though, that sort of apolitical simplistic reading of Bush/Iraq may very well be quite accurate. The Iraq war, counterproductive and destabilizing as it is to US hegemony, is thus being opposed by more and more of the powers that be, as well as people of conscience. Nothing about Iraq 2 represents the efficient workings of the imperial machine. Ugly, sick human suffering caused by the ho-hum business of imperialism is found more in things from the Clinton era, like the Iraq sanctions, or IMF structural adjustment. Iraq 2, on the other hand, seems now to have been much more the result of individual egos and hysterias born out of a small number of neocon ideologues (and millenarian christianity), and Bush and his crew personally. I know this is a point that would be argued by some on this list. But my point is, if Joe Twelvepack sees bodies with drill holes in their heads getting picked up off the baghdad streets on cnn every day and attributes it to idiocy and evil on the part of specific personalities like Bush and Rumsfeld, I'm inclined to agree, at least in part.
But leaving that aside--- the f-word? I find myself wondering if the eagerness of some leftists to call it "fascism" when ordinary americans start to recoil from the savagery of their leaders relates to how incredibly little the left has been able to harness or participate in the current cratering of support for this war. Has anyone noticed how marginal the left has been to these 80% dissaproval ratings for the war? Does our estrangement from the cultural mainstream have anything to do with this? What else is "potentially fascist"? The NFL playoffs? Chick lit? Toby Keith? Pentecostalism? Mixed martial arts/UFC? Eating fast food? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20070114/8a8d2cbc/attachment.htm>