Captain Future's Log

Couch Politicos

I was thinking about what Harold Pinter said in his Nobel speech about Bush being clever in refusing to sign international treaties that could hold Americans accountable for war crimes. It was pretty much an announcement that Americans fully intended to commit war crimes, and they have, though whether they would fulfill the definitions of those treaties is unknown and (since they did not sign them) irrelevant. The rising child malnuitrition in Iraq is evidence enough. You don't even have to reference Guantanamo and other torture.

The defining moment for the current political regime was the fall of the Soviet Union. Then the neocons and remnants of the militarist establishment decided they could do damn well what they wanted in the world and nobody could stop them. And nobody has.

Still, they needed an enemy in order to control the American electorate and they're busy creating a really good one. Not being very bright, they've done it way too well.

But when we get around to their reaction to Clinton, the Impeachment and the rest, or even this weird bonding of the neocons and the fanatical religious right, the rubrics of politics, historical analysis and economic analysis all fail to give a complete picture. We need psychology, and we don't have any.

While the right runs rampant with their projections and other raging emenations from their unconscious out there in broad daylight, the "reality based" left can't agree on how to approach the reality of the psyche, especially as it gets expressed in political behavior. Apparently, what psychology means to the reality based is a mechanistic dependence on drugs to manipulate behavior.

I keep coming back to Carl Jung's statement in an interview in the 50s, that humanity hangs by a thin thread, that thread is the psyche, but we know nothing about it. And in nodes of political discussion on the Internet, we don't want to know. We actually seem to think it's irrelevant.

Right now, with no American elections to obsess over, the left blogosphere is considering its own future influence. These days there's a lot of dialogue that is unconscious stuff masquerading as rational argument, but that's fairly normal. Not recognizing that possibility is perhaps normal, but dangerous.

For one thing, it means missing the point and going off on wild sidetracks. Someone should do a statistical study of posts on these community blogs, to calculate the number of comments that actually focus on the topic. Maybe that kid on Numbers can come up with a formula.

Which means to me that the big political blogs will provide certain services: rallying money and participation in campaigns, exposing information available on the Internet pertaining to a lie or policy or whatever; and with a few noble exceptions, it will be less effective in honing a message or focusing on an agenda. Thats not to say these wide-ranging discussions arent valid and valuable. Just that I don't seem them fulfilling that function. I could be wrong.