The Master's Tools and on another note

Reading Don Mitchell's Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction on the way in to work today and read one paragraph that I wanted to share (actually, I'd like to share much more of the book, but I'm too busy to type today)

"You can't dismantle the master's house using the master's tools." That has become almost a mantra of many of those who look at forms of resistance. Yet, Debord's point in The Society of the Spectacle is that we have no choice but to "use the master's tools" if we want to do any dismantling. We need to retake and reshape commodities — because "commodities are now all we see." We have to work within a form of history that is not of our own making and make it our own. We need to use that history — and especially that geography — to make a new "situation," to make, as the Industrial Workers of the World used to say, a new world "out of the shell of the old." Transgression is paramount. (Emphasis in original)

Mitchell goes on to talk about the relationship between transgression and resistance, but what struck me as noteworthy is the idea of challenging this idea that we don't live on the plantation. Nat Turner with a burner, yall.

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A friend of mine was watching the news with me a few years ago and turned to me during the commercial and said "Everything makes so much more sense if you substitute 'rich people' every time they say 'economy'." SO I was watching a clip of Couric's interview with Bush and found this exchange very interesting (Notice what he imagines as the biggest threat before cutting back to the official storyline):

I'm worried, Katie, strongly worried about a world if we – if – if we lose, you know, our confidence and don't help – defeat this ideology, I'm worried that 50 years from now they'll look back and say, "How come – Bush and everybody else didn't see the fact that these – this group of people would use oil to affect our economy?"

Or, "How come he didn't confront the Iranian threat and its nuclear ambitions?" Or, "Why didn't you support the moderate governments there in the region?" And – I – I truly believe this is the ideological struggle of the 21st century. And the consequences for not achieving success are – are dire.

On another note, why do liberals conflate the Taliban with invading Afghanistan? We didn't bomb Buffalo, New York and Kansas after McVeigh bombed the Federal building in '95. You browse the liberal blogs and they all attack, virulently, Bush for invading Iraq and ignoring Afghanistan. The country of Afghanistan didn't attack on 9-11 and the people there don't deserve to be under our bayonets anymore than the people of Iraq do. It's like decrying Saddam for being a tyrant and then bombing the Iraqis. Leave Afghanistan alone and leave Iraq alone. If they want to catch Bin Laden and put him on trial, fine, but liberals expose their own bloody desires when they lament which country Bush is invading rather than talking about why the constant bombing is a symptom and facet of the real problem. The real problem that incidentally led to 9-11: the unrestrained violence and total reach of American empire.