you know, what bothers me isn't the partisanship per se, if that means, you know, advocating a particular position, perhaps kind of rigidly. what bothers me is the unanimity, the way each and every person on the same side says exactly the same thing in exactly the same words: "government takeover," "party of no" etc. "non-partisanship," by people of this degree of independence and intelligence, would be just one degree worse: absolutely everybody senselessly chanting the same words in a mesmeric trance. because very frankly at the end of the day there is a disconnect.

anyway, i don't see why they bother with the human bodies. what am i getting from robert gibbs that i couldn't get from a machine, besides the occasional 'um'' and the 'very frankly' tic that precedes each empty repetition? actually in a way gibbs isn't that egregious: "spokeman" is his job. (personally i'd rather be a professional shitlicker.) but how can senators just sit there echoing each other or repeating some memo?

this is true of the television pundits as well: you might hear the very same "thought" in the very same words dozens of times by various commentators, all recycling "the common wisdom" as if they just made it up or were discovering something.

i don't believe in collective consciousness, the great overwhelming myth/mistake of modernity. but i have to say that these people really, really try. the first requirement would be stop thinking, and just look around for what other people are saying and try to say it too, letting the simultaneous thinking and then the collective identity follow. they want to be one person, one thing, like mashed potatoes made from human bodies. it's important to see that in their devotion to that great ideal or in their desperation to be rid of the burden of individuality they have to start by trying to empty themselves into each other, destroy themselves as moral agents.

one problem is that when everyone's trying to think and speak the same, there's no center: there are actually no thoughts because there's no actual consciousness. or if there are, it is totalitarian structure in which the consciousness of one person is in fact directing everybody's bodies, operating their mouths like puppets. if there are any ideas, in other words, they have to be someone's ideas.