k-punk

‘It’s as if Brown reads your blog and wants to give you more material to work with!,’ writes a reader, of GB’s latest, typically creepy, ‘interactive’ initiative. A classic example of Brownite digital doublethink, since ‘Ask The PM’ actually amounts to ‘Listen To The PM’, the comments facility having been disabled. But what gave the impression that Brown was bending over backwards to conform my description of him was this ‘leaked’ story that he has been mooted as the star of ‘an Apprentice-style TV show for young politicians’ – bringing him ever closer to the android President in Dick’s Simulacra, who maintains power through the use of talent shows in the White House.
Meanwhile, Savonarola’s diagnosis of the Italian left’s malaise horribly parallels the situation in Britain, where New Labour’s abandonment of class antagonism has both allowed class politics to be displaced into race, and enabled the Far Right to claim that it is now the only authentic representative of working class resentment:

it is in losing its “duty to hate” (to quote Georges Labica’s formulation) and its capacity to mould and direct inchoate fear & negativity in emancipatory directions, that the Left has given up its terrain to the Right (Alleanza Nazionale leader La Russa noted at their most recent conference that with the radical Left gone from parliament only they, the fascists, would stand up for the workers… – this is also Alemanno’s line, and it seems to be working, nevermind the fact that they are in a coalition whose main effect will be to intensify “insecurity” in all its forms…).