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Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.
~Kurt Vonnegut
Sunday, November 14, 2004

Not Intended to Distract

from the discussion in the comments below, but to add some more thoughts to them,
The Market's Will be Done

"The spread of global capitalism creates the political and cultural volatility that calls forth neo-fundamentalism. I say "neo-" because this fundamentalism is symptomatic of the disappearance of the very certainties it asserts. Outside this country, neo-fundamentalists often resist globalization, which is partly why the World Trade Center was targeted. But in America, for some odd reason, evangelical Christians from Reagan to George W. Bush have also been market fundamentalists who've argued that globalization will make the world less volatile. ... According to market fundamentalist dogma, investors are rational and markets operate efficiently in a world where every risk can be hedged. This is a religious vision -- but a misguided one."


Puritanism of the Rich

...The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.

Ronan Bennett's excellent new novel, Havoc in its Third Year, about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable. An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush's America.

So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the US this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush's government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it's up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.
posted by Cyndy | link | | |
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