Here is a mind-bending ditty of deconstruction that took me back to my time as an undergraduate reading Paul de Man (yeah, I was that guy in your college). Remember Obama's statement from his "closing" argument / stump speech that more partisanship isn't the answer?
It's change that won't just come from more anger at Washington or turning up the heat on Republicans. There's no shortage of anger and bluster and bitter partisanship out there. We don't need more heat. We need more light.
And remember what he meant by more light?
In the face of slavery, it's what fueled the resistance of the slave and the abolitionist, and what allowed a President to chart a treacherous course to ensure that the nation would not continue half slave and half free.
On Mar. 2, 1867, Congress enacted the Reconstruction Act, which, supplemented later by three related acts, divided the South (except Tennessee) into five military districts in which the authority of the army commander was supreme. Johnson continued to oppose congressional policy, and when he insisted on the removal of the radical Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act, the House impeached him (Feb., 1868). The radicals in the Senate fell one vote short of convicting him (May), but by this time Johnson's program had been effectively scuttled.
That's right, the bearers of "light" were civil war abolitionists, and they transcended the abilities of mere bitter partisanship by impeaching a President who refused to enact their policy, and nearly convicted him in the Senate. Even though the conviction narrowly failed, the whole process succeeded as a means of blocking his policy. Thus, according to Obama's closing argument, surpassing the limits of bitter partisanship means Congress impeaching a President of a different party who refuses to enact congressional policy. A equals not A. Opposites are identical. You are me and I am you and we are all together. Cosmic.
Maybe it isn't a paradox and / or inherent contradiction in Obama's new stump speech. Maybe this is actually what Obama means by more light, since he did say that he would just push the pharmaceutical companies out of the way if they didn't sit down and listen to reasons. Maybe Obama is actually just arguing that we do, in fact, need more partisanship, only he is doing so in such a rhetorically brilliant way that it sounds like exactly the opposite to anyone untrained in 1970's style Francophone literary theory.
Awesome. I'm totally confused now. Side note: this post has the best tags of any post I have ever written, ever.
Yesterday, discusson of my post on Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine took an unexpected turn, with accusations that Klein was peddling some sort of conspiracy theory. It took me too long, really, to post a link along with some excerpts from an interview with Chip Berlet that explained just what conspiracy theories are, so that it would be clear that Klein wasn't doing anything of the sort.
But beyond the confusion about the nature of conspiracy theories, I saw something deeper at work--a distrust of the creative, artistic expression involved in the short film promoting Klein's book. This sort of distrust is quite widespread. It is, in part, a distrust of what cannot be rendered into cold hard factual arguments, at least the way that we define them. We can see it in the legions who dismiss George Lakoff without ever actually having read him. It is also, in part, a longstanding distrust between the political and the cultural left. And that made me think of a short article I wrote for my paper back in 2002. Because, you see, there are very important truths that can best--if not only--be told in the form of stories, which is to say, true lies.
