7 mar 2008

I've figured out why I don't like Hillary. She is a Republican. That Commander-in-chief remark did it for me, because that particular synechdoche is a purely Republican trope.

You see, the constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces, not of the nation. The president is not commander and chief of you or me or any else NOT in the military.

The Republican trope is to make one presidential duty represent the whole, as though the president gained more authority from being military. But the Constitution does not set up a military dictatorship; just the opposite. It's as though you went around calling Cheney "the president of the Senate." That's just one particular responsibility.

Furthermore, the point is not to put the most military person possible in that position, but to have CIVILIAN CONTROL OF THE MILITARY. If she's saying that McCain will be a better CIC than Obama, then McCain can always out-military her, out Republican her. A Republican in name only, like McCain supposedly is (another lie, by the way), will be able to beat an aspiring Republican in all but name. All he has to do is establish differences; she has to prove that she's virtually the same as him, if she sticks to Republican tropes.

I hate politics, by the way. And this is a good example of why. This is why I never blog about politics, because I hate it. It's not that I think it's unimportant, I just hate politics' guts. If politics were a person, I wouldn't be able to stay in the same room with him or her.

1 comentario:

Thomas dijo...

I hate politics too. Lately, I've been saying that the poem must extricate itself from history, i.e., the totality of political activity. A poem is written against politics (at least "against the background" of politics.) This means that the poet will be working under remarkably different conditions by this time next year. And there is actually a remarkably wide range this time from that perspective. The three candidates differ quite seriously in so far as their poetic impact can be predicted.