Rumsfieldstiltskin
Jun. 3rd, 2003 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lapsedmodernist What do you get when you combine graphomania with a will-to-power at its most literal? You get Rummygrams, the thousands of messages that Donald Rumsfield has been spamming the White House with, in his attempts to shape foreign policy, WHICH IS NOT HIS JOB. this kind of makes me appreciate my daily doses of SPAM that usually runs the gamut from "hot Russian brides XXX" (oh, the irony of me being the cyberdemographic for that one) to digital descrambling offers, although i do get an occasional interesting one, with the subject heading saying something like "how to kill your husband" which upon opening turns out to be less Diabolique and more mortgage refinancing. But back to Rummy, who obviously has an Althusserian/Fiskeian method to his madness, which is, superstructural discourse influences the material base, a.k.a. mainstream the fringes by acting as if they are already the mainstream, a.k.a. if Rummy writes enough memos about housing "low-level" Guantanamo Bay detainees in Afghan prisons at Afghan expense while allowing the US intelligence access to them at all times, and withdrawing US troops from South Korea, he will, in fact, become, the Foreign Policy Troll, and not in some definitional actions-determine-identity way, either, not the de facto/behind the scenes type, but a real live Foreign Policy Troll. Now, I say Troll, because what comes to mind is some subsize nasty malevolent, manipulative creature. like Rumpelstiltskin. you know how Rumpelstiltskin trojan-horses the princess into spinning gold yarn or whatever for her, and then blackmails her for her firstborn or whatever? So Rumsfield is like Rumpelstiltskin in reverse, of sorts, in the sense that instead of gold he spins shit, nobody ASKED him to, and he has conscripted more than one firstborn for his warhawk games. But you know how in the fairy tale the way that Rumpelstiltskin could be (and finally was) defeated was if the princess guessed his name? At first she was like, Tom, or Joe, or some black forest region equivalent thereof, but then, with some supernatural help (i think; it's been a while since I read it) she is like "It's Rumpilstiltskin!" and boom--he vanishes? I think it's pretty obvious that Rummy's real name is Rumsfieldstiltskin, and maybe, just maybe, if we use the powers of Althusser for good, instead of evil, and hail him, he will vanish, or shrink, or turn to dust, or something.
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Date: 2003-06-03 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-06 07:51 am (UTC)although i never really understood that...ritalin has always made me more hyper...and yet they give it to hyperactive kids...
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Date: 2003-06-03 07:53 pm (UTC)seltix
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Date: 2003-06-06 07:53 am (UTC)cuz then he'll come out of the mirror and kill you.
but you know, with the new technological advances, like TVs that turn on by themselves and machines that encrypt all data about any individual, pretty soon he'll be able to come out of the mirror and kill you anyway.
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Date: 2003-06-05 02:41 pm (UTC)i'm still on a semi-vacation after being laid off... i have lots of time to spam various government branches with my thoughts on various policies.
;)
Re: .
Date: 2003-06-06 07:51 am (UTC)apparently the Spam is not only being read, but is working, because Rumsfield's latest proposal, supposedly the one that caused BUSH (or whoever the puppetmaster is, prolly cheney) to go "DOWN, boy" is now being implimented. i am talking, of course, about the withdrawal of the US troops from the DMZ, which in other circumstances, under another administration, might be a constructive move, but i think it's pretty much a given that if Rumsfield pushes a policy, it's a horrible idea.