The Paris Principle—Politics are sooo hot.
STEPHEN DUNCOMBE
The Nation
October 29, 2007 issue
It's because we know that we need to care. This celebration of ersatz aristocracy, as paradoxical as it sounds, is genuinely popular culture. People is the most profitable magazine in the United States, and E! (the CNN of celebrity gossip) reaches more than 89 million homes. If progressives want their politics to appeal to a majority of the population--which they should in a democracy--they ignore or misunderstand the popularity of celebrity at their peril. What would it mean to create a politics that speak to this fascination? Instead of bemoaning the narcissism of young people who spend hours managing their public selves on Facebook, we need to see it for what it is: the desire to be someone in our mediated age. This popular desire for recognition demands a change in the way progressives do politics
Fascism in America: Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf?
http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/whos-afraid-of-naomi-wolf/2007/10/05/1191091363953.html
Who's afraid of Naomi Wolf?
Mark Coultan
October 6, 2007
She writes: "I am not comparing the United States in 2007 to Nazi Germany, or Bush to Hitler. There will not be a coup in America like Mussolini's March on Rome or a dramatic massacre like Hitler's Night of the Long Knives."But she does see historical echoes everywhere. Bush supporters burning Dixie Chicks CDs are comparable to the Nazis burning books. The Administration's creation of the Department of Homeland Security is compared to the Nazi use of the term Heimat, "the Homeland".The Administration embedded reporters in the military. The Nazis embedded reporters and camera crews with its armed forces. Vice-President Dick Cheney said America was on a war footing after September 11, 2001. Nazi leaders said that after the Reichstag fire Germany was on a permanent war footing. The Administration unloads coffins of dead American soldiers at night and forbids pictures being taken. The Nazis did the same.
And...
Wolf concedes that some of her critics are more comfortable with the term "authoritarian" than "fascist", and says some people even view authoritarianism as attractive in what they see as a time of national emergency.But she says that the difference between authoritarianism and a fascist shift is when state terror is directed against individuals.Before she wrote the book, she asked an accountant to comb through her tax, employment and other records to identify anything that could be used against her, or distorted."Those in the public eye who are afraid to be forceful in opposition because of a secret they want to keep had better talk to their families or their constituencies, or their lawyers and accountants, painful as that might be in the short term," she says.Is this paranoia, or just sensible precaution? She seems surprised that someone would question her decision to investigate herself. "No one I've talked to in America thinks this is an overstatement. We are really scared here. Really scared.
Wheatcroft: Who Made Hillary Queen?
HEIR APPARENT
Who Made Hillary Queen?
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Sunday, October 7, 2007; Page B01
We all, nations as well as individuals, have difficulty seeing ourselves as others see us. In this case, I doubt that Americans realize how extraordinary their country appears from the outside. In Europe, the supposed home of class privilege and heritable status, we have abandoned the hereditary principle (apart from the rather useful institution of constitutional monarchy), and the days are gone when Pitt the Elder was prime minister and then Pitt the Younger. But Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger.
RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists
RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists
Posted by arthur magazine staff
CONSPIRACIES OF DUNCES by Douglas Rushkoff (from Arthur No. 26)
And...9-11 theorists are unwittingly performing as the unpaid minions of the administration’s propaganda wing. (At least most of them are unpaid; no doubt, some of the loudest are working as contractors for the same agencies whose activities they pretend to deconstruct.) That’s why, instead of nodding along with their long-winded, preposterous yarns under the false belief that any critique is better than no critique, we—the informed, intelligent, and reasonable members of the war resistance—must instead disassociate ourselves from this drivel. In other words, we must draw the line between the kind of analysis done by Greg Palast and that done by Pilots for Truth. If we don’t apply discipline to our thinking, we risk falling into the trap that even some of our best intellectuals have—like Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, who on reading a bit too much 9-11 conspiracy, has concluded that it all has some merit.
And that’s where I suspect all this theorizing really takes us: to the heart of a racist jingoism worse even than the triumphalism justifying our foreign policy to begin with. They can’t bring themselves to accept that our big bad government can really be so swiftly outfoxed by a dozen relatively untrained Arab guys. And rather than go there, they’d prefer to maintain the myth of American hegemony. On a certain level, it feels better to believe that we are only vulnerable by our leaders’ sick choice—not by our adversarsies’ increasing strength and prowess.
KLINENBERG: Review of Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'
Naomi Klein looks at free-market fundamentalists and economic turmoil
BY ERIC KLINENBERG
The Shock Doctrine is a massive, courageous undertaking, and Klein’s impassioned critique of the violence that accompanies American economic imperialism is not merely necessary but urgent. At times, however, she overreaches, and her analysis falls short of her ambitions. The least developed idea is her boldest claim: that the practice of economic shock therapy not only partakes of the logic of physical torture but is also its moral equivalent. Klein persuasively shows that both Cameron and Friedman fantasized about their capacities to rebuild from clean slates and that neither adequately considered the human damage wrought by their shock therapies. But the two shock docs made scientific and political interventions that are strikingly dissimilar, and Klein’s argument would have been more compelling had she established a deeper connection between them.