that's how i feel

[piranha]

way too much reminds me of recent history. and it scares me. the AP/ipsos poll released shows about how european attitudes about bush's election are generally sad and disappointed, and how those feelings no longer are just aimed at the bush administration, but to a growing extent also at the american population. canadians, while more scared than before, still retain their strong liking of americans overall, despite preferring kerry over bush by about 2:1. i find myself somewhere in between.

i imagine few people will read "releasing the hounds". that's a pity.

I keep waiting for the magical moment when the people will stand up as one and express their astonishment, will say they put up with this and they put up with that but they have now reached their breaking point. (Clearly I've watched that Eminem video too many times.) Just yesterday I read that the U.S. reversed a 70-year ban on admitting evidence gained by torture and for a second had that same fleeting hope that this, this! is what it will take to turn the tide. But that hope passed as quickly as it appeared.

yeah. that's how i feel.

highly recommended: slit.

Comments

[daev.livejournal.com]

I am really glad you found her journal, and if it's the result of my plug to James (http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll/21819.html?thread=156475) I'm even gladder.

The phrase I heard a while back was "free fall to the right" and that's what it feels like. Every time I think there's something so fundamental to the American character that no politician can convince people to lose it -- like Social Security, nature conservation, open government, or the Bill of Rights for everyone -- it turns out that plenty of Americans have been convinced that it's "liberal" and, as conservatives, they're happy to help President Bush relieve us of such oppression.

I think the fact that Western Europeans find Bush and his supporters incomprehensible is less the result of any fundamental leftism built into their countries; it's more that they haven't moved away from the consensus we all shared (at least "officially") in earlier times -- before Reagan, certainly, and even well into the '80s. The consensus has been broken here, and it's mostly down to the media shifting into outright Right-Wing advocacy on one side. (Economically it seems like the consensus has re-formed way off to the right, siding us with third-world shitholes like Singapore and Chile rather than our fellow Western practioners of regulated-capitalism-tamed-by-democracy like France and Britain, but that's a different tangent.)

There used to be a woman on the rec.arts.sf.fandom newsgroup named Anna F. Dal Dan; she was Italian and wrote about the takeover of the Italian government by Silvio Berluscione, a right-wing media magnate. He's sort of the Fox News-man of Italy, and he was successful by using his TV and news control to move his country away from the standard Western consensus into the same sort of patriotic unipolarization as we have in the US. It didn't really surprise me when, in the article you quoted, the one Western European country that had the least objection to Bush's victory was Italy.

(Also, just as a polite request -- it's OK if you don't want to edit your post, but you might consider it if you're willing -- could you consider taking the author's name off your link? She's nervous about Googleable pages that have her full name and her LJ name side-by-side.)

Stay free up there! And if you do decide to come visit down below for a while, I am really looking forward to talking with you again. (Insert over-typed VICTOR smiley here.)

slit

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yup, that was your doing. :) it came at the right time; i was looking to expland my reading some.

and i remember anna dal dan, yeah.

i wasn't sure about the name thing, whether my wording was obscure enough, but decided to heed your advice instead. better safe than sorry.

and hey, if y'all ever become seriously unfree down there, come on up. i am determined to make room and help out anyone i know who needs it, and i am going to make a contact list in preparation for that. i am not quite paranoid enough to think it'll really be needed, but if it is, well, i'll at least have made a start.

[boxofdelights]

Thanks for the recommendation. Well worth reading.