Jaded - GZ

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’m chalking it up to basic blogger fatigue. For me, we’ve sketched out the basic terrain of placebo art such that a law of diminishing returns has set in where the quotient of new insights to repetition starts to turn downward. I worry about becoming a ranter who just reacts to the most recent headlines. Perhaps this is just a long way of saying that nothing has particularly struck me recently as blog worthy. The political scene in the States seems to have shifted slightly. The question is whether GOP support has slipped enough to undercut the Cheney cabal in their ongoing campaign to unleash nukes on Iran. It’s nip and tuck, but the long term trend seems clearly to be moving away from the radical right. The Neocons seem now to be playing a cut-our-losses kind of game, going into remission as it were, clutching their doschloss (stab-in-the-back) narrative like any good fascist would. The Dems, meanwhile, are playing a waiting game hoping the GOP will continue to implode and that the ‘08 election isn’t stolen from them. If they manage to attain a filibuster proof majority in the Senate I do think there will be some changes in the correct direction. Clinton has always been on record that the 1997 Telecom Act was his gravest error domestically, for example, and I think a Dem president would get aggressive with the media conglomerates that have been so egregiously propagandistic since 2000. As much as I agree with you that the Dems are really GOP-lite, I would welcome anything that would rob Rupert Murdoch of any amount of peace of mind. Then again, perhaps that’s naive.
Culturally speaking we’re beginning to see Hollywood’s reaction to the creeping fascism of the War on Terror ™. Valley of Ellah, Rendition, De Palma’s film…there’s a long list. Michael Clayton I did see and it’s not bad but not all that noteworthy either. I couldn’t find much to say about any of these films that isn’t obvious. Culturally the pendulum will shift back in the direction of “progressive” values, but it will all be familiar terrain, thoroughly bourgeois with some adventurous work done on the margins that manages to squeak through. The poetic will remain largely fugitive. The growth agenda, the reified self and the religion of progress will retain their white-knuckle grip on the engine of history as we careen toward a parking lot planet. No doubt this is how Euripides felt in his little cave - the jaded Cassandra syndrome.

But this mood is likely to blow over soon, so I’ll tee this up for you to take a swing at…

UPDATE: Richard Nixon almost killed me this morning. On a blog I read his tape recorded comment about Fred Thompson - “Dumb As Hell…But Friendly” - and I laughed so hard I aspirated a carrot. You gotta miss ole’ Milhouse and his verbal gifts.

Guy Zimmerman