When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid. It isn’t just that the regime loses its legitimacy: its exercise of power is now perceived as a panic reaction, a gesture of impotence. Ryszard Kapuściński, in Shah of Shahs, his account of the Khomeini revolution, located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman withdrew. Within a couple of hours, all Tehran had heard about the incident, and although the street fighting carried on for weeks, everyone somehow knew it was all over. Is something similar happening now? - ZIZEK - 23 July 2009
Some of you (all two of you on a good day) by now know that my political antenna are twitching in small spastic gestures, myopically groping their way to the disconnected future, uncovering micrograms of evidence that we're living in dramatically changing times.
Looking back on my own political wakening I genuinely gulp now how little and how shallow it really was, yet how vociferously it was argued. We argued rowdy politics over calming joints in the early 90's before heading out to the student parties. Ending for me by falling in love with an East German girl only to find employment working for the US army bases in Germany. It is here I started to fully grasp the empirical might the United States.
I really lucked out later on with a political mentor who had read more than anyone I knew and threw more valuable books my way in a few short years than I've read in a decade since. I pickled myself in rum and politics on tropical beaches interspersed with Asian tiger adland bouts and occasional Euro runs.
What am I trying to say? I'm trying to say that growing up politically in the Clinton years that criss crossed and spanned, living and working in the two continents of Europe and Asia is a pespective that only now do I grasp was the solid foundation for moulding my undying love for the idea of ideas. The politics of politics. The meaning of what I mean.
I've slumped countless ideological times since those Hacyonic days of living in the Clinton era to learn of how much damage the financial market liberalisation is the responsibility of the former president. How say the market liberalisation of Haitian rice farmers to choose just one small devastating example, was destroyed by the subsidies of the American rice farmers, is personally down to Bill Clinton. An example I now know extends back into deeper 'merkan history.
Yet does one ever really forget all the merits of a past love affair? Not me. I see what it is that I adored. The only regrets I have now, emerging into middle age is the the frequent bouts of bad taste I've sailed with. Taste is both something we acquire and if we're honest with the definition of taste, are occasionally forced to dispense with as we evolve.
I worry about America. The putrid silence on the part of Capitalist Baconistas. The self evident insanity of the main stream right wing. The endlessly disappointing performance of the wishy washy left and those who hailed hope and change only to strand aspirational ships on sharp rocks of granite despair.
Then I see you again. The Polymath. The Comeback Kid, who with blow-job bravado takes on the Whitehouse press corp in a manner we haven't seen since the late nineties. And I want to believe you're going to make it. To silence the reptiles in the C Suite who control the Oval. I want to believe. I want.
I watch as the self evident principles of neo-sharing mysteriously take place at the highest level of office on the planet. I want to believe again in you America. Eight years of happiness and prosperity for me were pummelled with brutal annihilation into a hazy amnesia.
Please watch this. It's not just about the man, even though it's not just what you say it's how you say it. This is about the nature of ideas. Ideas that live and breath, that change and evolve, adapt and mutate to withstand the most colossal compression of evolutionary terminating forces we're facing.
This is our karma. This is our responsibility. We're all in it together.
