Partial Readings: Wasilla-upon-Avon
Partial Readings: Wasilla-upon-Avon
Partial Readings: Wasilla-upon-Avon
The Missing Consumer
Many in Europe and the United States have begun to worry that as their economies weaken, the Chinese will surge ahead. Stephen S. Roach thinks such anxieties are, at least for the moment, unwarranted: “As tempting as it is to herald the demise of the West and the ascendancy of the East in this post-crisis era, that verdict…is probably premature. Until, or unless, developing Asia is able to shift its reliance from exports and external demand to private consumption and internal demand, it is not in a position to take the baton of global leadership from the developed world.”
Athenian Austerity
Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou faces a tricky task, especially as president of the Socialist International: cutting welfare spending in order to restore fiscal stability to a country rattled by a debt crisis and several general strikes. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Papandreou likens the violence in the streets of Athens to the effects of financial markets: “There was a moment of almost terror, being terrorized by the markets every day, being told by the Greek and international press, and all kinds of gurus on the economy, that you will lose your money, your euro, your savings, there will be catastrophe, and so on. So we had to steer through this psychology.” He also rebuts some conventional wisdom on the Greek fiscal situation, stressing that Greece “will be paying back these loans with a high interest rate, so these countries are going to gain money from us, if all goes well, and we hope all goes well…[Among] the European countries, we have the highest number of working hours–number one–in Europe. Not number two, number one. The highest number of working hours in Europe.”
The Mental Captivity of Our Time
Tony Judt muses on the foreignness of Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Minds to students today: “When I started out my challenge was to explain why people became disillusioned with Marxism; today, the insuperable hurdle one faces is explaining the illusion itself.” But there is a new form of intellectual delusion: “our contemporary faith in ‘the market.'”
But “the market”?like “dialectical materialism”?is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers?mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers?who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US especially have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see. Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.
Wasilla-upon-Avon
Sarah Palin has, in the last week, urged the Obamas and “peaceful Muslims” to “refudiate” an NAACP resolution and the proposed Ground Zero mosque, respectively. Challenged on the apparent conflation of refute and repudiate, Palin responded first by deleting the offending tweets and then by appealing to an unlikely authority: “English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!” This defense prompted David Heilbrunn to worry that a Palin administration might result in communiqués like the following: “Refresenting the will of the people is the job of President Palin, who finds it totally refrehensible and refulsive that the media continues to refroach her for pursuing innovative ideas. Liberals, refent, the end is nigh!”
