This is a comment on a comment, so I don't expect a lot to come out of it. Previously (I won't call it dialogue) I suggested that "today many Americans confront newly crappy conditions with too much of a dawning recognition." I said this because I thought it indicated something important about the present-day political imaginary, the one debunked in today's Weekly Watch. So here it is.

Public persuasion is hard. It's one thing to say "it's all bullsh*t," and another to show how. Nobody outside of the caucus99percent bubble cares about cool flag-waving apathy, just as we don't care about their flag-waving (D) or (R) hangups or their participation in bullsh*t political dramas. The outside world is like, I put a political sign in my front yard! Whatever. So if we want to change things and persuade people, "it's all bullsh*t" is a non-starter. In the "Desperate Escalations" video cited in today's Weekly Watch, Alastair Crooke talked about being "culturally blocked." That's a big problem with our political culture for sure.

But occasionally in the electronic media people can see dawning recognitions which identify a great absence, a gap or lacuna, within the perceived social drama appears, appearing as a great hole in the space-time fabric, like the wormhole in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. And so they can see a dawning recognition that something is somehow "different." Here's a solid definition: dawning recognition is the act of imagining that something that has been going on for some time is brand-new. On the map of bullsh*t politics, dawning recognition is about two degrees to the left of the usual ignorance. Dawning recognitions thus suggest other meanings to our politics than the usual ones. A dawning recognition might represent what used to be called a teachable moment, a moment in which a standard narrative can be revealed as bullsh*t. But usually dawning recognition merely comes and goes, nobody learns anything from it, and the social imaginary remains unaltered. This is where we step in as teachers, if we can hope to be such a thing.

Here are two examples of dawning recognition which might be of interest now.

Zelensky's claim: "I'm willing to give up land for peace."

Now, of course, Zelensky was promoting war against Russia for the past nearly three years or so, trying to get back some land within the borders of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's definition of "Ukraine" so he could give said land to BlackRock and the banking cartels. I guess he recognized at some point that throwing half-a-million Ukrainians on the war barbecue toward this end wasn't a good idea as regards his own survival. It's all still fake, of course: a real recognition of what might help him survive would result in Zelensky retiring to one of his homes somewhere in the world outside of Ukraine, and letting the West deal with Russia without his puppet-work and (hopefully) without the greater ambitions of global conquest which fed the Ukraine-Russia war in the first instance.

My second example is Bernie Sanders: There is no choice: we must defeat the oligarchs

Key paragraph:

"We just cannot sit back and accept candidates who are not prepared to stand up to Big Money interests and fight for the working class," Sanders said. "We cannot continue to do that. So, in one way or another, we have got to bring forth candidates who [will stand up to Big Money]."

Sanders, of course, spent the last four years telling us we needed to vote for the oligarchs, as long as said oligarchs had the sacred (D) next to their names. I guess he dawningly recognized, sometime last month, that such a ploy didn't work, and won't work. But since he's not recognizing any need for a political party _for_ the working class at this time, there he is again, advocating something else which also won't work.

At any rate, those are two shows, above, of dawning recognition. Make of them what you will. Maybe they can be teachable moments. Maybe they aren't. We can only hope.