[Newspoetry] The Old of the News: HISTORY IS ENTIRELY SELF SIMILAR.

[DL Emerick]

BROWNBACK EXITS GOP NOMINATION CONTEST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/19/AR2007101901
934.html

Today's Hypothesis:
the contours of the 2008 Election will closely follow those of 1856.

(for the 1856 election, please consult the "amateur" source
http://www.multied.com/elections/1856.html.)

The claim is loosely established
in the universally valid argument below,
as to its major argumentative form,
Its major premise structure I give you.

Apologia, or Assignment of Responsibility:
I leave to you the minor premise,
the assertion of correlation in facts,
alleging the antecedence of precedents in the present presidents.

Finally, even a calculator can infer the conclusion -
so let us ignore such mechanical details.
**********************************

HISTORY IS ENTIRELY SELF-SIMILAR.

This fact arises from the autopoietic character of a State, q.v.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis.

The fact of its self-similarity is its self-repetition,
testimony upon which fact occurs in Santayana's often repeated expression,
http://www.google.com/search?q=history+repeats+itself,
which Google claims to hit 2*10**6 times.
(Google, by the way, only gives the first 10**3 hits, or so,
leaving its claim to truthiness in some doubt.)

Autopoiesis, though, for a living system,
or one that emulates life, whatever "life" may taken as being,
conceptually seems to limit itself to the middle of system time,
ignoring the two necessary catastrophes in every system's existence,
the ones at either end of time, of appearance and disappearance,
of origin in birth and dissolution in death.

((I've been heard to argue
the true political catastrophe is the thriving of the Same
in the middle phase, as for-itself and in-itself,
of how there is never a Difference that matters,
of a going out for-the-Other, being-for-the-Other,
nor could there be, absent some "revolution" of <<public>> affairs,
as such humane changes in the Slime are so repulsively named.

This could happen neither peacefully, nor yet otherwise violently.
THAT THE SYSTEM-IS-ALL IS ALL THAT WE KNOW OF THE SYSTEM -
Live with it, or die with it - the System does not care.))


((If I didn't believe in such Being as God,
as the ZeitGeist, the UberMind of World and its History,
such Hegelianism might make me believe in fatedness, anyway,
and lead me to the despair of Slavery to ill-perceived Destiny,
some ill perceived as destiny's dystopia, never any utopia.))

The deeper question is not why or how history repeats.
It is (rather) a matter of timing,
in these times of a system life,
of what are its cyclic processes
constituting and sustaining, i.e. defining,
the ever-enduring Qualitas of the Sameness of the Same.

Of the Sickness unto Death,
or those Born into Health,
the twin catastrophes bounding existence,
of these things as accidents or necessities,
let us not bother to speak, except poetically.