Do we really want out?

[Mr. Tea]

I loved this bit:

A couple hours outside Jackson, I met Catharine O’Neill, whose family once owned these mountains. Her great-great-grandfather was John D. Rockefeller, and she worked in Trump’s State Department. Now, she was living in a modest little house outside of Casper, Wyoming, and was about to have her first child with a home appraiser she’d met after moving there. She isn’t hiding out exactly, but, like many Americans these days, she has a sense that things are cracking up.


“Election night we were talking, kind of joking,” she said. At the time she was living in DC. “I was afraid of being thrown into a concentration camp. I know that sounds crazy.”

The ability of wealthy, white, Christian conservatives to fantasize their own victimhood or impending destruction never fails to amaze me.

 

[version]

I enjoyed the bit where she said nobody represented her in American politics but that she would immediately move to DC, nine months pregnant, to work for Tucker Carlson, if he decided to run.

 

[Leo]

So basically they want all the advantages of globalism with none of the drawbacks.

exactly. I'd call it the story of America, but it's probably a global phenomenon. everyone want to have their cake and eat it too.

 

[version]

@as_a_worker
america is haunted by the inability to recognize, let alone reckon with, the incontrovertible fact that the relatively-broad prosperity of 1948-1973 was in fact a historical aberration and no set of economic or social policies will ever bring it back

@as_a_worker
this unique period becomes the benchmark for normative social structure, gender roles, household composition, cultural production, industrial relations, & even what liberatory social movements are supposed to look like even tho this era was vanishingly small in US/world history

@as_a_worker
each of those structures had a material base that simply can’t/won’t return: US capitalist hegemony and global rates of profit necessary to sustain that entire social world. arguing for a return to, say, the single-breadwinner family today cannot be anything but cynical moralism

@AndyinDC1
And yet the entirety of American politics and popular imagination is devoted to the notion that this era of prosperity was our birthright and our baseline, and that we can get back to it if we just wish it hard enough.

 

[Mr. Tea]

@as_a_worker
america is haunted by the inability to recognize, let alone reckon with, the incontrovertible fact that the relatively-broad prosperity of 1948-1973 was in fact a historical aberration and no set of economic or social policies will ever bring it back
@as_a_worker
this unique period becomes the benchmark for normative social structure, gender roles, household composition, cultural production, industrial relations, & even what liberatory social movements are supposed to look like even tho this era was vanishingly small in US/world history
@as_a_worker
each of those structures had a material base that simply can’t/won’t return: US capitalist hegemony and global rates of profit necessary to sustain that entire social world. arguing for a return to, say, the single-breadwinner family today cannot be anything but cynical moralism

@AndyinDC1
And yet the entirety of American politics and popular imagination is devoted to the notion that this era of prosperity was our birthright and our baseline, and that we can get back to it if we just wish it hard enough.

OK, I'm sure we can all agree it's never going to be 1960 again. But that's not a reason to accept that things just have to be as shitty as they are.

 

[version]

Right, I think things can be better than they are, but I also think there's something to what they're saying in that you can't go back, circumstances have changed, technologies have changed, resources are different and depleting, flaws have been shown in the previous structures.

 

[Leo]

my dad was a truck driver, never earned much but was able to buy a plot of land, build a house, and support a family with three kids. that's not possible now, even in the areas with the lowest real estate values and cost of living. nothing any politician or party can do will make that possible again, and it's not realistic to think they can. I hate to dismiss any entire segment of the population, but they're living in fantasy land. they aren't dumb, just searching for hope, so much so that they're willing to suspend logic.

and that's what makes Fox News so contemptible: they encourage the fantasy for purposes of ratings and profitability. they laugh all the way to the bank.

 

[version]

There's a theory that the "real world" in The Matrix, the one where Neo can manipulate the sentinels, is actually just another layer designed for those who rejected the first. That's increasingly how I view anything supposedly radical, theory etc. Another layer of the same thing for the people who think they've got it figured out. It doesn't matter to Amazon whether you're buying Marvel or Baudrillard, just that you're buying.

The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard

ISSN: 1705-6411 Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004) Translated by: Dr. Gary Genosko and Adam Bryx Note: Jean Baudrillard was interviewed for Le Nouvel Observateur (19-25 June 2003) by Aude Lancelin. The Editors of IJBS are grateful to Ruth Valentini and Le Nouvel Observateur for permission to...

baudrillardstudies.ubishops.ca