Reply #9: I see it's mid-January in Finland [View All]

[Lexingtonian]

and the cheery, upbeat, sunny side of Scandinavian life is in full swing. :-)

We're in a wonderful little Mediterranean/Levantine phase over here at the moment, chaotic and mentally oppressive, all about very corrupt and vain old men lying and doing stupid things with ever more flimsy and very jealously held faux majoritarian power.

The part you're not seeing is that this is not about reality or the future. This is all about pent up social and economic and psychological frustrations from the Cold War, and it's the medieval European aspect of American society in a very ugly (and deluded) argument with Modernity- and incrementally losing that argument. If you know much recent American history, the five Bush years have been a recapitulation and rearguing of its issues/events starting with 1960 (the Gary Powers shootdown) to the American-Iranian crisis of 1978-80 now. The Right's present control of the American political system is based in the electorate's sense that revisiting and re-solving all the (now inadequate) domestic compromises of the recent past is the historical priority- and its support falls, slowly, as measures the Right hates are identified, tested brutally, and the deficient ones are broken up and replaced (the good ones don't break under the pressure). It's very painful stuff. And as the process continues, the perceived utility of the Right declines. In five years we've gotten up to nearly 60% opposition at a pretty constant rate of 12% per calendar year.

As foreign policy, the medieval European ('Christian Right', 'war hawk', etc) component of American society was there and caused American intervention when Europe refought its Roman Era internal divisions, the Continental Powers war aka World War I/II, and the Feudal Age fight of Europe's colonial feudalism ('capitalism') with the Asian Hordes ('communism'), aka The Cold War. Now these ancient fights are resolved, this component of American society has focussed on another ancient enemy, the opportunistic Arab Hordes fought down at Tours and Poitiers and the reconquest of Spain (presently 'terrorism', 'Islamofascism') and the countereffort that was the Crusades ('freedom and democracy' in e.g. Iraq).

For the U.S., you also have to understand that additionally 'terrorism' is in the eyes of the people who are paranoid of it not a matter of 300 middle class men from the Arab world who live on donations. 'Terrorism' is all about the provincial American fear of a world full of people they don't understand and can't dominate and to a large extent are unprepared to compete on equal terms with- an evoking of all their sense of inferiority and undue provincial entitlement and the way Modernity takes away all the easy selfjustifications and wounds fragile egos. This second, domestic, interpretation of 'terrorism' is deeper and roots in the Settlement/colonial experience- in fighting with American Indians, mostly, but also dim memories of fighting down the black slave revolts and the federal armies' destruction of the South during the Civil War. It comes out as domestic racism against Latino ('illegal immigration') and black people (the New Orleans debacle), and that grotesque hatred of 'liberals'/'government'.

There is only one thing to juxtapose to the behaviors springing from groups' paranoia for their psychological existence and role, and that is the social contract which their role and meaningful existence truly roots in.

So I'm not pessimistic. But I can't say I like how long it will take to finish this idiocy and recover from it here.