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i agree with you entirely about the magnitude of the problem and our seeming powerlessness to do anything about it within a political system that allows us to be free for one day every 4 years.
my sense is that the present apparatus is in significant trouble structurally speaking.
i haven't quite figured out how to talk about it really---that sense is at the origin of the things i write like collapse of empire, crisis of empire.
there's something happening and one indication of it is the profound ideological paralysis that seems to afflict most people---this including the folk with power inside the governmental machine, who are not outside. i see most of the populist right as little more than a direct expression of this paralysis---but in situations that aren't debate oriented i have no problem saying that the populist right is simply the most obvious in its paralysis----it has no monopoly on it.
what's peculiar is the extent to which facts as massive as those outlined in this report have been kept off the table.
what is hopeful-making, in a general sense, is the actions of people in tunisia, in egypt and elsewhere in north africa/middle east---with varying degrees of success--in acting against the national-security state model. and those in greece and spain and elsewhere in europe acting against the lunacy of neo-liberalism.
i think we may be heading into a period of renewed radical political activity. that possibility is what keeps me heading back into this sort of question, finding new information and trying to raise the problems again.
but i definitely feel the sense of limited options...and not a sense of any real freedom. more a soft authoritarian state we live in. but that's another matter.,
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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