(no subject)
so i just can't stop saturating myself with politics. i wish i knew how. i think i need at least one day in which i'm not at least somewhat plugged into the blogs.
i'm trying to understand the shape of my attachment to the political; why sometimes i'm enraged, others indignant, and mostly despondent. for some reason, i keep coming back to the same people, wanting them and their intelligence and their bellicosity and their stridency and their righteousness to provide me some sense of buoyancy. i feel like i've become unmoored in my relation to politics. and for some reason, there's a glimmer of something in glenn greenwald, andrew sullivan, ezra klein, paul krugman (why do i only have white men on this list?) that makes me think i might encounter, in their writing, once again, a sense of groundedness. the primary affect here? longing.
i think what i'm doing is something like mourning an attachment to the political as a space where we can have a conversation about what is most important to us as a(n) (imaginary) community. politics is always about aspiration, and about emotion. in fact, what i took obama's "hope" message to be was an attempt to invent a new way of having feelings about politics; and not, as it were, hope that "our" already-agreed-upon policy agendas were finally going to see the light of day at the federal level. no: it was about opening oneself up to the political as a space of risk, of the possibilities of encountering opinions not your own, of being able to, paraphrasing obama, disagree without destroying each other. and i think i bought that. the differences between clinton and obama were always significant; it wasn't about policy, though. or even something as corporatized as "management style." it was about a difference in imagining how people enter into the political, how they can feel about politics, about what they expect a community and a government to be able to hear, and understand, and respond.
and what the mccain campaign has been so ruthlessly effective at doing--not just since the palin nomination and the RNC, but intensified since then--is attempting to exploit people's resistance to the risk that obama was (and may still be; i'm not sure) asking us to take. this risk: to seek to encounter the political as a space of alterity; to not expect that candidates mirror you back to yourself--or, more accurately, to mirror your fantasy of what the good life is back to you. instead mccain &co. manage to play a cunning game: to create the political as a space of legitimate but overintensified fear and spurious reassurance. fear that the terrorists are gonna get you. but also: fear of the fact that the public, the country, the government is not about people "just like you." what people don't understand about government, about policy, about wars, about the economy, about the environment, about all of the ways that we are on the precipice--this unknowledge is vast and frightening. in part, the anti-"elite"-ism is quite simply the non-acknowledgment that there are people who understand the world better than you. acknowledging that understanding in itself would mean opening yourself to the possibility that your life isn't what you thought it was. (another symptom: the popularity of conspiracy theories.) palin provides an opportunity to not acknowledge this understanding. so much of the palin phenomenon is in the fact that she in no way signals "alterity" to so many people on the precipice. she is amazingly generic, beyond even the "small town" "values" that a certain portion of the electorate has cathected. in short, she gives off the very reassuring vibe that politics requires no more capacity or understanding than any of of us could manifest.
what's particularly amazing (if i'm not wrong) is the blatant contradiction between the political as a place of fear (as the site where we must negotiate the calamity might happen at any moment--terrorism, outsourcing, the caprices of the health care system--and the systemic wrongs that plague our country--poverty, education, corruption) and the figure of palin as a (false) metonym for the normalcy of the political. at once, the republicans have managed to cast politics as a place where You Should Be Very Afraid, and the place where Regular Folks Get Together (Bush, Palin). In short, I guess I'm accusing most people of an inchoate false consciousness on the level of emotional attachment. It's the sort of idea that makes me an awful, elitist person. (who had local, organic arugula for lunch; hi,
i'm trying to understand the shape of my attachment to the political; why sometimes i'm enraged, others indignant, and mostly despondent. for some reason, i keep coming back to the same people, wanting them and their intelligence and their bellicosity and their stridency and their righteousness to provide me some sense of buoyancy. i feel like i've become unmoored in my relation to politics. and for some reason, there's a glimmer of something in glenn greenwald, andrew sullivan, ezra klein, paul krugman (why do i only have white men on this list?) that makes me think i might encounter, in their writing, once again, a sense of groundedness. the primary affect here? longing.
i think what i'm doing is something like mourning an attachment to the political as a space where we can have a conversation about what is most important to us as a(n) (imaginary) community. politics is always about aspiration, and about emotion. in fact, what i took obama's "hope" message to be was an attempt to invent a new way of having feelings about politics; and not, as it were, hope that "our" already-agreed-upon policy agendas were finally going to see the light of day at the federal level. no: it was about opening oneself up to the political as a space of risk, of the possibilities of encountering opinions not your own, of being able to, paraphrasing obama, disagree without destroying each other. and i think i bought that. the differences between clinton and obama were always significant; it wasn't about policy, though. or even something as corporatized as "management style." it was about a difference in imagining how people enter into the political, how they can feel about politics, about what they expect a community and a government to be able to hear, and understand, and respond.
and what the mccain campaign has been so ruthlessly effective at doing--not just since the palin nomination and the RNC, but intensified since then--is attempting to exploit people's resistance to the risk that obama was (and may still be; i'm not sure) asking us to take. this risk: to seek to encounter the political as a space of alterity; to not expect that candidates mirror you back to yourself--or, more accurately, to mirror your fantasy of what the good life is back to you. instead mccain &co. manage to play a cunning game: to create the political as a space of legitimate but overintensified fear and spurious reassurance. fear that the terrorists are gonna get you. but also: fear of the fact that the public, the country, the government is not about people "just like you." what people don't understand about government, about policy, about wars, about the economy, about the environment, about all of the ways that we are on the precipice--this unknowledge is vast and frightening. in part, the anti-"elite"-ism is quite simply the non-acknowledgment that there are people who understand the world better than you. acknowledging that understanding in itself would mean opening yourself to the possibility that your life isn't what you thought it was. (another symptom: the popularity of conspiracy theories.) palin provides an opportunity to not acknowledge this understanding. so much of the palin phenomenon is in the fact that she in no way signals "alterity" to so many people on the precipice. she is amazingly generic, beyond even the "small town" "values" that a certain portion of the electorate has cathected. in short, she gives off the very reassuring vibe that politics requires no more capacity or understanding than any of of us could manifest.
what's particularly amazing (if i'm not wrong) is the blatant contradiction between the political as a place of fear (as the site where we must negotiate the calamity might happen at any moment--terrorism, outsourcing, the caprices of the health care system--and the systemic wrongs that plague our country--poverty, education, corruption) and the figure of palin as a (false) metonym for the normalcy of the political. at once, the republicans have managed to cast politics as a place where You Should Be Very Afraid, and the place where Regular Folks Get Together (Bush, Palin). In short, I guess I'm accusing most people of an inchoate false consciousness on the level of emotional attachment. It's the sort of idea that makes me an awful, elitist person. (who had local, organic arugula for lunch; hi,