Partial Readings: Of Fictions Conspiratorial, Economic, Scientific, and Apocalyptic
Partial Readings: Of Fictions Conspiratorial, Economic, Scientific, and Apocalyptic
Partial Readings: Multiple Fictions
Immiseration of the Proletariat
“Just 50 years ago, in the 1950s, America was a great place…It was safe. It was decent. Children got good educations in the public schools. Even blue-collar fathers brought home middle-class incomes,” writes William Lind in the latest issue of Whistleblower magazine. “”Where did it all go?…It didn’t just ‘happen.'” This special issue, entitled “STEALTH ATTACK,” tells us the story as it is: America has been destroyed by the Left. The real culprits are displayed in serpentine fashion on the magazine’s cover, where besides Obama, noted enemies of the American worker such as Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Saul Alinsky make an appearance. The editors have closed the issue with a practical, instructional guide: “It’s a civil war: What we do now.”
Euro-Skepticism
Jule Treneer on the “euro-skeptical” fund-managers and pundits, who’ve preeminently declared the end of the EU, even after the successful German-Greek agreement, in order to short the euro and promote privatization and the abolition of welfare programs: ?[E]uro-skeptical fund managers continue to press their bets, and commentators peddle their ideological agendas as necessary reforms, as if the unprecedented nature of the euro were evidence enough of its ultimate failure?The fact that the EU has now effectively ring-fenced the PIGS (the financial community?s shorthand for Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) seems not to matter. But the market is a myopic, panic-prone indicator; over the short run, it creates its own reality. What?s doubly odd is how many still haven?t shaken the habit of attributing wisdom to it.?
The Future is Now
In the Threepenny Review, Wendy Lesser sketches the world of Isaac Asimov?s 1955 novel The End of Eternity, a world eerily like our own: “[W]eekly newsmagazines, printed on paper in columns of type, are considered primitive and profoundly obsolescent?an entire bookshelf of bound volumes can be stored in a gadget the size of a fingertip? a mechanical device that is only about four inches long and a fraction of an inch thick can record whatever we like, play it back to us through a tiny earpiece, and rest comfortably in a pocket when not in use? space flight has been invented but is rarely used by humans, who have lost interest in it after the initial decades of excitement?hand-held or easily portable computers are a commonplace item? literature can hardly be distinguished from film in the public mind?[and] some members of society long fruitlessly for a past era when all such developments were unknown and almost inconceivable.?
Extraterrestrials and the Eschaton
Jeff Shartlet on Christian fundamentalism and the cold war: ?But World War II had changed the steady plod of Christian futurism, quickened it. Fundamentalism had at times raced toward apocalypse before, but never with such technology at its disposal?no rockets, no bombers, no nuclear missiles. The stakes are higher, the enemy stronger. In 1950, American fundamentalism responds with great imagination, not just following the popular trend of spotting flying saucers and aliens among us, but driving it into the future, old time religion resurrecting as the cyborg doctrine?part faith, part technology?that hums and blinks and winks from the same screen on which you are reading this transmission from fundamentalism?s past.?
