The Crow's Eye: The Most Pernicious Idea in America

"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Oct 25, 2010

The Most Pernicious Idea in America

The rich "create" jobs.

(I know, not particularly profound.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: Dear Jack,

Notre Dame student here. our school will be graced by the presence of Thomas Friedman in a week to discuss "the Global Market Place and the Common Good." i was planning to attend, just for kicks. if you have a question you might want to put to him, ill take it into consideration when Q&A time comes (if it does).

Peace,

and yes this place drives me crazy; October 25, 2010 at 8:38 PM
Jack Crow said...: Anonymous,

You honor me beyond any measure I could possibly merit. Thank you.

What would I ask the Mustache of Understanding?

It wouldn't actually be something very useful or worthy of your time.

If I had a shot at Friedman, I would just ask him - for someone so well traveled, with such wide access to so many key players throughout the centers of power in Europe, Asia and the Americas - how come he never manages to see anything clearly. Right before his eyes, he can see the standardization of economic culture. It's homogenization, really. I would wager that almost anyone can see it.

So why does he, for all his celebration of globalization, still pretend that the connection of elites using new technologies represents a qualitative alteration of human society?

The rich almost always resemble each other, especially if they have contact with each other. A duke in medieval England didn't much differ from one in the Low Countries. A merchant prince in colonial Boston shared a fairly strong cultural and economic overlap with one in post-Hansa Lubeck.

How does he miss this, I guess would be my question.

Thank you, and respect to you,

Jack; October 25, 2010 at 9:19 PM

Post a Comment

This one took a while to put into words.

I don't kid myself that I've stumbled upon a unique insight and I have little doubt that someone has already written or said this better than I. Five minutes after I hit the "publish" button, I'll probably regret the choice of words more than I already do now - because it's difficult to get my head outside of English language usage, to comment on a problem with that usage, whilst using the English language to do so.

In the interest of not making more of an ass of myself than necessary, I've pared a very long thesis down to a paragraph:

I find it troubling that, using English, I have very limited choice in expressing how I relate to people with whom I have ongoing interaction. If I want to reference the nature of my relations with the woman who has challenged me to grow in ways I never imagined possible, the woman who howled with a primal, gorgeous, earth shattering, mother bear of a refrain, transcending pain and pleasure in act of creation to which I will never be immediate party, who has with her defiant and proud womanhood still intact forged a family out of disparate parts - I have to write "my wife." I have to reduce her to property. That really pisses me off. I don't own her. I don't fucking want the title or the claim. I don't want to express possession, simply to refer to her (without writing a discursive dissertation). I don't like one bit that the short hand for "association" in English is expressed in the possessive. I don't own my wife or my children. They're not mine.

So, fuck you Latin and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language group.

That is all.