all that, and I still didn't finish...

...so I'm sorry that I made any allusion to the left or right, and I will cease to talk about the bill in such terms. I think left-right language gets in the way when you look at developments, like this bill, that openly threaten civil liberties. Such language places the bill in a frame that stresses a political continuum capable of stretching to fit whatever strange ideas come up, capable of endowing those ideas with a ready-made constituency, of absorbing it into the already-existing coalitions of interests and generating a phantom reverse version of itself, which can be imagined to exist in the other camp (which, I think, is what the spectre of socialism is today in US politics: a kind of uncanny thought-form generated out of the nightmares of the business press, rather than any actual movement).

I think the bill should be framed instead as a political rupture - from the constitution, from past norms, from American ideals. Perhaps it could be explained as part of a latent tendency - that old quote about giving up freedom for present security sounds nicely neurotic. Perhaps it can be framed as a childish, uncontrolled impulse, like the "nanny state" used to describe Thatcher's, and later Blair's, Britain. Perhaps the accusation that it's unpatriotic could actually be given some legs. The most effective means of all for fighting it would be to link it somehow to pederastry. That would give it the kind of legitimacy it deserves.

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absorbing them... phantom reverse version of themselves (the ideas).
Sorry, I really must proofread more carefully. I'm off balance because of this business.

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