Here’s a link to an audio version of my latest piece. (That sonorous voice is decisively not mine.) Here’s the text. And take the time to check out the rest of the website. It’s a new venue that just opened up this week.
Here’s a link to an audio version of my latest piece. (That sonorous voice is decisively not mine.) Here’s the text. And take the time to check out the rest of the website. It’s a new venue that just opened up this week.
In honor of Gore Vidal’s passing, let’s propose something at once radical, democratic, and republican. Let’s talk about SORTITION. As Vidal and most others have already taken note, our “democracy” is a crock. And I’m afraid campaign finance reform, with or without rulings like Citizens United, isn’t going to do the trick. Such tweaking always proves too faint a check on the moneyed (oops: deserving and meritocratic) elite. If our class system — which grows more insidious every passing minute, thanks in large part to our educational apparatus — has any hope of being challenged, we need to start committing to long-haul demands, on par with the civil rights and abolition movements of yore. On the heels of the financial and economic meltdown, and…
Tagged: A Citizen Legislature, Athenian Democracy, Athens, Blade Runner, Boston Review, Capitalism, Daniela Cammack, Dark Ages America, Democracy, Democratic Culture, Ecotopia, Edward Gibbon, Ernest Callenbach, George Scialabba, Gore Vidal, Imperialism, James Madison, Libertarian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mark Twain, Meritocracy, Michael Phillips, Michiko Kakutani, Morris Berman, N + 1, New York Magazine, Occupy, Populist, Radical, Republican, Socialism, Sortition, Tea Party, The New York Times, The Twilight of American Culture, Why America Failed, William F. Buckley
This seems about right, and bears some relevance (and challenge) to my own thinking: To end by rephrasing the question posed earlier: the left in the capitalist heartland has still to confront the fact that the astonishing—statistically unprecedented, mind-boggling—great leap forward in all measures of raw social and economic inequality over the past forty years has led most polities, especially lately, to the right. The present form of the politics of ressentiment—the egalitarianism of our time—is the Tea Party. In what framework, then, could inequality and injustice be made again the object of a politics? This is a question that, seriously posed, brings on vertigo. Maybe the beginning of an answer is to think of inequality and injustice, as Moses Wall seemed to, as…
Despite the header, which owes an obvious debt to Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, this post is not an attempt at high theory. While I’m sure, in what follows, there is plenty of opportunity for the “meta,” I’m equally confident cleverer types have already tread that ground. What I’m interested in doing is more immediate, mainly turning to my own tour in Afghanistan as a means of reflection on the 16 dead. Contradiction #1: The Mission Versus the Missionary Culture Let’s begin with the most obvious contradiction — that between our official counterinsurgency mission and the state of our military culture on the ground. As anyone who has spent considerable time in Afghanistan can attest, specifically at and around the smaller patrol…
