(no subject)

[substitute]

When George W. Bush took office after the bitterly fought end of a tight race in 2000, he promised a consultative government of unity in which he and his opponents would work together. He then spent eight years behaving like King John without the Magna Charta.

Currently our President-Elect is making similar noises about reconciliation, moderation, including the opposition in government, and generally making nice and compromising. I don't want him to be King John, but I myself have no interest in making nice.

I am forty-three years old. I came of age just as the Equal Rights Amendment died, Proposition 13 gutted services in my state, and Ronald Reagan was elected president. In the last 25 years the country has gone so far to the right that nobody remembers what it was like before. Words like "liberal," "conservative," and "moderate" have entirely different meanings.

In this world, an Eisenhower Republican is a Socialist who has come to take everyone's hard-earned money. The middle class makes $300,000 a year. Endless war is a duty. Health care is a privilege. Basic environmental responsibility and a concern for the welfare of children are signs of creeping Communism. And the Bill of Rights is a "liberal" obstruction to the great tasks of war and policing.

The people who brought us to this place found Richard Nixon to be a dangerous internationalist and compromiser. They are extremists.

The idea that I should accept this state of affairs and sit down at the table of compromise with these phalangist maniacs disgusts me. They have never shown interest in negotiation themselves; they just take.

I am angry that my country has been shoved in the toilet for 30 years. I don't feel any great need to accept the world of religious fanatics, demagogues, warmongers, police state advocates, bigots, and whiny billionaires. That's not my America.

Fuck this conciliatory shit. I want my country back and I'm not interested in conciliatory arrangements with the people who stole it.

Comments

Yes, but...

[mr-flippant.livejournal.com]

"Manipulation, sloganizing, "depositing," regimentation and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are components of the praxis of domination. In order to dominate, the dominator has no choice but to deny true praxis to the people, deny them the right to say their own word and think their own thoughts. He and she cannot act dialogically; for to do so would mean either that they had relinquished their power to dominate and join the cause of the oppressed, or had lost that power through miscalculation.

Obversely, revolutionary leaders who do not act dialogically in their relations with the people either have retained characteristics of the dominator and are not truly revolutionary; or they are totally misguided in their conception of their role, and, prisoners of their own sectarianism, are equally non-revolutionary. They may even reach power. But the validity of any revolution resulting from antidialogical action is thoroughly doubtful."

from Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Re: Yes, but...

[substitute.livejournal.com]

Holy shit, an actual leftist. Are you one of those holograms?

Re: Yes, but...

[mr-flippant.livejournal.com]

Don't tell. They'd banish me you know.