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Monday, December 13, 2010

Reasons To Be Cheerful

Now that I have given in, and am more or less hoping for American crapitalism to collapse in time for the rest of the world to save us from ourselves, I find that what seems actually to be happening and what I want to be happening are, possibly for the first time in my life, curiously congenially conjoined. Interesting feeling. A bit like being under gas at the Dentist's office.

3 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

Here's a juxtaposition that is going to do your head in. The newly elected conservative party here in the United Kingdom (where I live) has abandonned their campaign promise to raise the estate tax threshold. Presumably to placate their coalition partners and to help reduce the deficit.

The Party of Thatcher is so far to the left of the Democrats that if they were to close that gap it would take them two full years travelling at the speed of light to do it.

However what's happening in Detroits community gardens is inspiring as heck. I know a lot of people on this side of the Atlantic who have been blown away by it. Something similar happened in Cuba and the USSR when the USSR collapsed. There's a silver lining to the collapse of suburbia.

Dale Carrico said...

Oh, I know. The problem with the GOP is that they've been captured by their Movement Republican faction, which has always been close enough to fascist in orientation that one cannot really talk about it truthfully without seeming like a crank. I'm somewhere between a social democrat and a democratic socialist in political orientation, and so there is no variation of the GOP that has any appeal for me, but I can still distinguish where they are in terms of batshit crazy from where they have been and what conservatism is in comparatively saner precincts. It really does seem to me that social democracy should be the center in the aftermath of WW2. It was white racism (which limited the reach of the New Deal and then stopped single payer in its tracks at the most propitious moment for their implementation here and made the democratic left in the US too center-right to hold on to our limited accomplishments even with the Great Society amendments) coupled with the embrace of the USA's military-industrial complex and its need for Empire as our disavowed economic planning (which was our reckless alternative to social democratic good sense and also depended in no small part on white racism) that defined our destiny from the beginning. If demographic diversification works the trick in time finally to marginalize white racism and make Movement Conservatism a neo-confederate rump (although in my view the time for that was the mid-terms, and it didn't happen and so we're well and truly screwed), I have no doubt at all that in the name of survival as a going nation-scale concern the GOP would come to resemble Euro-conservative parties in fifteen years' time at most.

Dale Carrico said...

About urban gardening in Detroit -- I am sometimes amused at the thought that when the petro-bubble that has for so long been mistaken for the Triumphal Ascendancy Unto Infinity of Western Civilization finally does burst -- it will be organic farmers and hippy artisans and eco-villagers and other folks long derided as fools and throwbacks by the gas-guzzling go-getter bully narcissists of Randoidal neoliberalism who alone will have all the skills without which neither flourishing nor even survival is possible.