A Green State of Mind

By Carl Arnold:

All commentators, from mass media pundits to the call-ins on WBAI, are using the word historic to describe yesterday’s election of Barack Obama. Indeed they should. For all the reasons repeated incessantly, everyone should feel profound respect for the watershed nature of this extraordinary event.

And yet — it is not too soon to look beyond.

What does this mean for alternative parties, and especially for us in the Green Party? There appears, at first blush, to be more wiggle room for popular pressure now than yesterday, when the Bush administration simply did what it wanted and ignored what it didn’t like.

Consider what needs to be accomplished: a realistic, wide-ranging and immediate response to climate change, single-payer healthcare reform, an enormous shift in foreign policy, rearranging the US electoral system to wrest control from the moneyed puppeteers to establish a democracy in which every vote counts and is counted, is genuinely inclusive of all legitimate points of view, and in which presidential candidates are not barred from participating in a presidential debate (or threatened with arrest for attempting to merely sit in the audience — Nader in 2000).

The list is of course, far longer.
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Much has been said and explained concerning the novel “1984”. However, hardly anything has been commented on with regards to the book within a book that happens inside of the plot. It is my belief that “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchial Collectivism”, the book found by the main character Winston, holds the instructions to understanding George Orwell’s work as a whole. The primary context for this book is the novel “1984”, which is the environment that this book exists in. The book is a treatise by Emmanuel Goldstein, one of the founders of the ruling Party who has become an enemy of the same Party years later. Later on in the novel we learn that the book was fabricated by the Party in order to lure those who would rebel either in thought or deed out into the open. The irony is that though a falsehood, the book is actually a window of truth about the Party and explains how the Party works to continue its reign. This is the world of “1984”, placed like a diagram before the reader and the characters in the novel, where reality and lies coexist.

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The following can be seen as an experiment in that it will employ the oscillation between various historical moments and events to illustrate various philosophical concepts. Since the event as a singularity that has a universal reach disrupts structures of meaning and makes everything apparent, then it would also be a great chance to portray theory in a way that can be easily grasped. Before these events were subsumed by the linear order of history, they were considered a sudden intrusion of reality that was not expected. At the point of these events, philosophy as a practice can deal directly with reality. In comparison, within the order of history, the philosophical analysis of reality is obscured by the mediation of structures. Though humans are always within structures and only understand reality through these structures, the event offers a small window in which to at least have a sense that there is more than the structural mediation of the experience of reality.

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