Temporarily out of another lull. Like a cloud cover that obscures the sky, or even a dense fog that obscures everything, mental depression and confusion obscures the teeming world beyond one's own pain. In a way, it is a selfish thing, but biochemically necessary.
There are various things floating around in my fog-addled mind that I'd like to write about, if I can just muster up enough energy to do so. Domesticity, the actual appreciation of living things as opposed to the appreciation for the logical symbols we construct that take their place, the nature of trauma...The list goes on. We'll see.
One thing that continues to strike me again and again - it demands my attention with its hypnotizing force - is the strange, ongoing evolution of this state of ours, and the dialogue and impressions that go with it. One especially striking aspect that hit me this morning is just how close in functionality we came to a dictatorship with the reign of Bush. Of course only the fringe political left ever talks about it, and they talk about it in a way that tends to alienate anyone in the mainstream, such as tossing about words like "fascist" and "totalitarian" and whatnot.
Now I admit to such hyperbole myself. I've called this state totalitarian at premature times, and the fact remains that with our working definition of "totalitarianism", the state is probably not there yet. A totalitarian regime seeks to subsume the body politic into a single, amputated family, so to speak, and control the personal lives of its populace. We are still seeing the administration (or the attempt to manage and simulate one at least) of a competitive capitalist society. A more accurate term for this phase would be Sheldon Wolin's "inverted totalitarianism."
But there is a semantic difficulty here that is obscuring a greater reality that should be alarming more people. Our national politics is still very much static and in an adolescent state. We refuse to take note of the dynamism of societies and ongoing change, and so with our linguistic tools we are doomed to mere crisis management, or to utilize a medical analogy, we attempt to treat the disease as it flares into its advanced stages, as opposed to utilizing the modern practice of prevention, or arresting the illness in its early stages.
That said, if you look at the actual facts of the Bush administration, things appear a bit more chilling than many would like to admit. It has become apparent by a growing consensus of historians and political scientists that he stole the election, and so this would very much qualify as a coup. Then you take into account the shocking corruption and the emergence of the market state, or the melding of state and market power ever more closely, and the sheer psychopathology of the administration that surrounded him. Consider the militarism based on deception as orchestrated by the neocons. Consider his primary constituency, the Christian right, and then evaluate the classic components of fascism: the desire for a national rebirth, the desire for a market-state solution, race-based ideology (though it is hidden this time), elimination fantasies, and etc. Now he is out of power but they are all still there, very angry and thirsty for power, eager to recouple church and state.
Now the case could be made that the state was heading in this direction for some time, and this is true. But there has been a dramatic change in the quality of political feeling since at least 2000. Bush made a dramatic impression after he left office (this follows the patterns found in trauma) that Obama inherited when he came into office. They say things have gotten worse under Obama, and this is also true. But the curious thing is Obama's character. Setting aside his rhetoric and PR, his actions betray that he is a people-pleasing type. He is just trying to hold everything together, and is becoming a monster as a result.
The majority of the populace repudiated the Bush-style authoritarianism and jingoism with the re-election of the Democrats, but what they got was merely a state of affairs that was deteriorating a little bit slower than if another Republican president had been installed.
Economies, oligarchies, state institutions...these are all heavy things. With each new trauma ( and the processes unleashed by crisis) the ecosystem with which empire sustains itself is altered, and these heavy things follow the trajectories of necessity.
The direction the state is going displays all of the telltale signs of an embryonic totalitarian society: the surveillance, the militarism, the subsuming of all cultural activity into economic activity, etc. Most people don't want to think temporally though. Someone says, "This is a totalitarian society!" and they may be partially right, while another says, "No that's ridiculous! Study an actual totalitarian society like Nazi Germany or Stalin's Russia," and they would be partially right as well. But the two of them are talking about two conceptually related phenomena that are temporally separated, so they appear to be different, whereas the two are effectively the same on a greater time scale.
I speak from an observer's view, as if I can calculate the trajectory of empire. All I know is that it has to break apart. Past that, I have no idea what is going to happen, and anyone else observing at this point can only speculate. Our socio-political context has changed, probably for the better. There is more communication and information, though the Internet is really the Wild West and contains just as much propaganda as earnest talk. People seem more exhausted with war, less bloodthirsty, though there are still plenty of crazy reactionaries out there. And we have a deteriorating environment to attend to, which affects everyone, not just delineated nations or races or interest groups, to repeat again and again. Collective progressive political and religious consciousness has changed drastically. Things are objectively different now than they were a century ago. Anyways. More later.
