JL: You've characterized U.S. cities as work camps. This was always true, but how is it that a generation of students who, in the majority of them according to polls in the years surrounding 1970, went to college to "change the world," and they ended up mostly as Yuppies in the work camps?
Several reasons; each one as powerful as the next. Marx called it "Commodity Fetishism." A gloating love energized by - as we so openly proclaim (& love) materialism. We Americans cannot get over cars, for example. We - spiritually speaking, all but "lick" them! This is the sort of thing which crosses a vitally import- ant "line:" the one between enthusuasm and charlatanism. (Think Arthur Miller's "Salesman!") Or, any other of our strange, wonderful, but yet contradictory qualities. So religious, we are. Yet? So grotesquely CRASS!
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Finally, respecting student quietism presently. One always hopes. Yet.....as it is so beautifully put, ".....In these times?" I just hope there are not too many apolcalyptic-minded people, out there, in our former nation-state experiment in democracy; maybe there can be a real rebirth of politics here. Instead of the cancerous, and anti- political "growth" of corporate power. In Europe, everyone knows a corporate state is a fascist state. (The "3 forms, I call them: Nazism - Italy; Germany. Communism - USSR & "the 'East' mainly. And the third? Our rising "3rd Form: Commercial Totalitarianism," perhaps the worst form of tryanny of all forms in history - East & West. As one American, nowadays, might say: Only politics can save us! (In this world, that is.)
One last thing in the question of US students: Remember this: Privatization is decisively fascist movement, if there ever was one. Commercial Totalitarianism is upon us.
~ from Interview with Brad Cleaveland (part two) ~
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