livingfromlove

Facilitate the power of love - confront the love of power

Tue, 24 Aug 2004

President Bush—four more years...?

Dominant elites such as the present US administration create, replay, repeat, re-iterate and re-inforce stories that explain, garner support for, and justify their actions in the world. These stories are often only adjacent to, or independent of the facts on the ground and it is a part of being a citizen to suss what is over-simplification, or special pleading, and what is lying. And when the time comes vote accordingly.

Over the last several years, I have casually collected what has come to seem a very large number of examples of derision, rage and contradiction directed at the Bush administration and the stories it tells. More, even much more, it seems to me, than there was coming towards past presidents, (though Reagan and Father Bush generated notable resistance) and amplified hugely by Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 film - the first documentary to gross over $100m at the box office, and a 'political event' as John Berger calls it.

The sheer quantity and quality of this opposition raises a question for this enquiry into domination: does it make any difference? Will the scale of opposition being directed towards the Bush administration be sufficient to influence the November electoral outcome? Can, as so often throughout history, incumbents still ignore to death (the Germans call it totschweigen) a take on history, culture and daily life that contradicts the dominant stories?

Since, unless you have been quite diligent, you may not be familiar with the huge scale of the derision, contradiction and anger that has been directed at the Bush Administration, I've assembled some examples that I had to hand (thanks Vincent) and listed links to others.

I've created a page devoted to writing that doesn't buy the Bush administration 'story of our time'. It is overshadowed by the excellent site maintained by Michael Olteanu which has accumulated a literally overwhelming series of such links. This site is doubly remarkable, one for its size and secondly because it is hosted on the christusrex domain.

Alongside this I have put together a page of links to a mix of tragic and hilarious animation and multimedia and yet another page that has a selection of the many derisory satirical pictures all of which feature President Bush and members of his administration.