2008 The Boo Beast
posted by on October 10 at 16:31 PM
Panicking McCain tries to control the monster he conjured up from the underworld:
LAKEVILLE, Minn. — Sen. John McCain responded Friday to the increasingly angry crowds at his rallies and town halls by urging them to be respectful of his rival, Sen. Barack Obama, despite their deep policy differences with the Democratic nominee.Speaking to skeptical supporters at a town hall in this Minneapolis suburb, McCain prompted boos from his crowd when he called Obama “a decent person” and told an expectant father that he does “not have to be scared if he is President of the United States.”
Yes, I referenced the greatest poem ever written, The Communist Manifesto:
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
Wow. You made me want to re-read the Communist Manifesto.
Maybe some people want to be scared. Maybe they need it.
There is a spectre haunting America
I think the thing that both the Communist Manifesto and the Bible have in common is that if you read them as poetry about a horrifically powerful, complicated and flawed creature (Capitalism in the case of CM and God in the case of the Bible) then they are beautiful and revelatory, but if you read either on as literal fact it makes you go crazy and start acting like an asshole and / or killing people.
We have a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, or rule of aristocracy or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.
They are representatives of abstract forces who have reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of past.
There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.
The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident. Inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.
-William S. Burroughs
awesome quotes; I feel nourished
max solomon
wow, that is amazing
We are lived by emotions we pretend to understand.
James Hillman, Men and the Life of Desire
Videos from the aforementioned rally in Lakeville, MN:
"He's an Arab"
and, high school principle style,
"we will be respectful"
Marshall Berman has a great deal to say about Marx's language. Check out Berman's book, "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air." The chapter on Robert Moses is particularly interesting in the context of the competing visions of Prop 1 and I-985. Will we become a city of cellophane citizens, pumped off to the offices of crumbling financial institutions in sterile pneumatic tubes sponsored by Tim Eyman or will we rip up the landscape and lay down a wide cobweb of mass transit?
Fear.
It is the mind killer.
And frequently backlashes against those who unleash it, for their own greed.
The specter haunting the US is fascism.
wow Charles thinks Marx writes word poems....cool...
Groucho has good ones, too....viaduck ?
On this I agree w Charles today....
Okay. P Diddy, Paris Hilton, Hillary Duff, and Charles Mudede are all starting to make sense. What the hell is wrong with my world?
Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses
I'm not sure what the Marx quotation has to do with Mr McCain; Marx was referencing the fact that alternating economic crises of overproduction and shortage--i.e., free market forces--were threatening the very bourgeois/capitalist means of production that brought them about.
On the other hand, if you apply Marx's idea to the production of ideas and ideology by the modern media establishment, it makes more sense. I remember the 1960s and '70s, when the media weighed in on Vietnam and Watergate, and suddenly felt "dizzy with success" (to borrow a phrase from another Communist, Josef Stalin) at their ability to shape national policy and unmake Presidents. People started getting angry then--anyone remember the 'hardhats?'--and they've remained angry, believing (rightly or wrongly) that media elites such as the New York Times set themselves above the nation's elected leadership and presume to dictate to it. They are, to adapt another popular phrase from a movie, 'as mad as hell, and they're not gonna take it any more.' Naturally this is a news event, and that maked them even angrier as they see themselves portrayed as rubes and hicks. Rubes and hicks they may be, but even rubes and hicks don't take it well when you call them that to their faces.
I would go around with an eternal smile if Marxian theory, which never quite worked out in the field of commodity production, turned out to be true in the field of ideas and journalism. As a journalist himself, Marx might well have seen the irony. But then, maybe not. He wasn't known for his sense of humour.
Greatest line ever written: "Go, then. There are other worlds than these!"
-Stephen King, The Drawing of The Three"
As a Jewish socialist, I agree with Charles. Marx should be our new bible and taught to all children in American schools. As an atheist Marxist America will reach her true potential.
I can't wait for our first Marxist president Barak Obama to take office. I've heard they are already planning wealth distribution legislation in the House.
In Seattle let's start by making Bill Gate's house into a homeless shelter, and forcing taxing all Microsoft millionairs back to lower middle class. The bougoise wealthy and their disgusting condos have ruined Seattle.
Gee 17 Troll much?
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