Ah, Take One Consideration With Another
Parts 1 – 4 of Erik Jorgensen‘s award-winning video of anti-war protests in Northern California in 2003′.
Quite apart from the fact that protests rarely succeed in altering anything, any more than voting does, or contacting one’s — and I may add that I take it as a deep and perpetual insult to suppose that anyone can ‘represent’ me — representatives does; ultimately protesters and fascistic guardians are locked in a dance, and in the longer run keep exchanging roles. As Göring once affably pointed out to some ( agreeing ) communist prisoners: it could have easily been him in jail and them as the jailers. In this case I prefer the protesters philosophically, and despise the rigid guardians > yet in another I would as easily crush the iron heel down on protesters I personally despised… And in this case, neither side are efficient — beyond the habitual national characteristic of inefficiency — mainly because each claims to be speaking on behalf of ‘The People’: an entity, who like the Almighty, to which any assorted randomly chosen beliefs and feelings may be attributed. Oddly enough, the protesters prefer not to point out that thus they are speaking on behalf of redneck gun-toting anti-commies who gibber for Bush; whilst the state spokespeople equally refrain from acknowledging part of their constituency are shiftless liberal slackers who would elect for all war-mongers to be hung from apple-trees. Which is one of the prime jokes of conceptual democracy.
But anyway, this is funny and exquisitely chosen: for a state with such a worldwide reputation for wackiness ranging from hippydom to the extreme marcusian egalitarianism enshrined in PC to various cults, Californian policing appears to be modelled on the vague inchoate fascisimo of a Latin American country run by a demented authoritarian general who has been delaying death from extreme old age for thirty years during the mid twentieth century.
As a bon-bouché for a reprise…
