View current page
...more recent posts
Digby has a good post about the "real reason the US is in Iraq," based on revelations from Bob Woodward's new book State of Denial. As we all know, VP Cheney and SecDef Rumsfeld were higher-ups in the Gerald Ford administration at the time the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam. Believing, as an article of faith, that the defeat was a result of hippies and "liberal media propaganda" and nothing else, these warped old specimens waited twenty-five years for the chance to get back into power to "do Vietnam right." "Getting back in power" meant biding their time until someone as limited mentally as the younger Bush got in office.
This all rings true to me. I know some people who come from the so-called "Silent Generation" of the '50s who believe everything wrong with America can be traced to the '60s counterculture: they viewed Clinton as a bong-smoking libertine and welcomed Bush Junior as the second coming of solid Christian values. No amount of evidence of Republican corruption (Enron, Abramoff), incompetence (the war in Iraq), skankiness (Mark Foley), etc. will ever convince these folks that the Republicans aren't the party of the angels. And no evidence of the good that came out of the counterculture (tolerance, civil rights, environmental awareness) will ever convince them that "dirty hippies" aren't the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the world.
We could feel sorry for them, but unfortunately their kind shows no sign of voluntarily relaxing its grip on power, so I'm afraid we must hate them, at least until they admit they were wrong about everything and promise to behave. It sounds "intolerant," but these people are scary.
A theorist who spoke in connection with the "Low Grade/Fuzzy Logic" show I was in summer before last is cyberfeminist Sadie Plant, who is probably better known in the UK than the US. I found these online notes on her book Zeroes and Ones to be pretty helpful. Apologies to Michael Connor, one of the "Fuzzy" co-curators, who I was talking to last night: the theorist Plant discusses at length is Luce Irigaray, not Julia Kristeva.