Monday, May 28, 2007

Ship of State

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007

Sitting down with a friend yesterday to just share time and conversation after watching a bad movie was a relief.

Since my computer literacy still has a very steep learning curve she helped me flatten part of that curve with suggestions about how to best use certain programs and applications.

As a fairly geeky person she communicates the solutions of cyberspeak easily and actually makes it kind of fun. Recently she decided she was going to try to spend less time online and watching TV to give herself some reflection space-time, so after she helped me solve my Quicken problems, we progressed eventually into talking about the world as it seems to be.

Her latest reading had been a book called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man written by John Perkins, and the book had made a deep impression on her. She loaned me the book and I've begun to read it and while nothing so far has surprised me, it made me wonder if Upton Sinclair's old EPIC political party might be worth trying to re-form. (For a short look at Sinclair's part in this movement http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/sinclair5.html)

I first read of this movement in Science-Fiction author Robert Heinlein's For Us the Living, his first and worst novel. The forward to the book mentions that Heinlein was an active member in EPIC (End Poverty In California) and an unsuccessful candidate for State Assembly. (For more about Robert Heinlein, his politics and his writing go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein) The novel is worth reading because it contains the seeds for literally everything he wrote later including his Future History series, but the storyline is very thin. The book is mostly an economic and political lecture giving chapter and verse about why the economies of the U.S. and actually, the world, were ultimately doomed to collapse. The book was written in 1939.

Now it is clear that whatever economy existed in 1939 and before was probably destroyed by the "Great Depression" and all the wars following. Political, economic and technological tools have been altered to prevent any precipitous collapse that might have occured prior to the world war. Those alterations have, I think, slowed a world economic collapse, however I am not sure they have prevented one. An economy based on increasing consumption of resources still exists and a little logic applied even on a simple level seems to indicate the impossibility of continued expansion. I am neither an economist nor a business owner so I would gladly welcome argument or comment to that statement; even my conservative friends say, and quite frequently, "not everyone can get in the boat."

Not everyone can get in the boat.

An interesting metaphor. It seems to infer that there is a vehicle which carries a few to prosperity and the size of the vehicle is limited or there is a reason why everyone can not be in the vehicle. Who then is to be left on the shore? These conservatives have also stated that resources are limited, which may indeed be why they call themselves conservative. In the current political atmosphere I do not hear very many voices calling for less consumption and I do not see how, constructed as it is, the present economy could bear the strain of diminishing activity.

There are any number of books available to anyone who wants to read about the economy of the "American" empire. I put quotation marks around empire's descriptor because I hesitantly suggest that the ongoing economic empire is more corporate or corporately transnational than American. I might go so far as to suggest that it is un-American. I do not see the values of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in the activities of these organizations, but then, I am also not a social scientist, a historian, a psychologist nor a policy wonk.

What I read and see is an acceleration of consumption promoted by transnational business interests with techniques as wide apart as mass media advertising and assassination. I have no sympathy for dictators of any stripe because they work actively to prevent the advance of wisdom. They are traitors to their species and bear more resemblance to cancers than humans, and to me they have confused competition with cannibalism.

Perhaps there is more room on the boat than we think.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Just short of 2 years later... I am catchign up on your "old" posts.. this is quite precognitive, my friend. Not that it wasn't obvious... but, I am sad to say: well-predicted. Here we are in 2009 with a new hope, and I daresay a bigger FAR more inclusive boat. Here's to a safe journey for us all.