U.S. Back to the Future

Madonna will sing at the half-time concert of the Super Bowl. Shortly after, Billy Crystal will host Oscars. As someone pointed out, America is experiencing a space-time anomaly that seems to have brought it back twenty years ago. Especially since Newt Gingrich – the paleocon Speaker of the House in the 90s – is the current improbable leader in the pools of the Republican presidential race. Now, all we need is for the Euro to crumble to complete the global flashback-effect. By the way, if the National Defense Authorization Act, just passed by the Senate, became law, this would be a further serious recoil. The anti-terrorism package makes permanent the “emergency” measures enacted by Bush for the “war on terror” in the post-9/11: Pretrial detention, secret jails, military tribunals – i.e. the world according to Guantanamo, where the Arab Spring has never existed and the leading edge of U.S. foreign policy is the pursuit of conflict against Iran (the package also includes new more severe economic sanctions). A regime of “domestic security” that (unless a virtuous veto of Obama) would bring back the clock hands of civil rights directly to the times of the total surveillance and the suppression of dissent. If this would not bring back until McCarthyism era, therefore until the era of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO.