G'day Hugh,
Agreed with your take on debt relief - a little orgiastic and very public
gesture of generosity now is not only good PR, but also helps obviate
massive across-the-board defaults not too long down the track. Doug tells
me Zimbabwe has been IMF-restructured to the point of bankruptcy, for
instance. Write off a few hundred billion now, and the suits might be able
to keep the African body alive long enough to squeeze a couple of billion
out of it in the medium term, eh?
But I tend to agree with Chris that everything that happens within
capitalism is very relevant. Anything that makes publicly thinkable an
identification between black and white, male and female, prol and 'reserve
army', prol and peasantry, prol and pb etc is of historical significance.
After all, systems do a lot of their transforming, indeed their
revolutioning, while we're not paying attention.
>It's plebeian and democratic and rebellious in a limited sense (against
>blue-rinse Lincoln-driving country-clubbing Republican zombies), and the
>democratic aspect, as usual in cases like this, is completely castrated. A
>vote is held, but the institution it's channelled by is rigged in advance.
>As John said, if voting could change society, it'd be banned.
Everything is part of the mix that rings inevitable change. The vote can
put Buchanan in the White House (already a realistic, if still unlikely,
scenario). In Oz, it can give the balance of formal power to the radical
right - in Switzerland and Austria this is all the more evident, after all.
And look at the polarisation Bob tells us of in your part of the world! The
vote matters, alright, Hugh. I agree with John it's a gesture within a
tendentiously closed and stasis-oriented system, but that system is never
closed nor complete. The vote is ever part of change. As is the brave
black personality who consciously contributes to the dissolution of the
racism that has survived the slavery system that spawned it by well over
over a century - or the visionary northerner who (perhaps unconsciously)
dissolves the 'gentlemen' v. 'players' dichotomy that survived the formal
aristocratic rule that spawned it by many decades. Charles and Trueman were
good examples, I thought.
> His special award should also be shared by the crowds in
>the West Indies and Oz, whose barracking liveliness galvanized the
>atmosphere of the game.
Not everything one hears on those boisterous terraces gladdens the heart,
Hugh. I'm all for playful nationalism (I've had a good time of it lately -
especially sticking it to South African and Kiwi list-mates - eh, Bill?),
but it ain't all playful and it ain't all devoid of racism. And don't get
me going on the gradual decay of things cricketerial! Our chanting gets
orchestrated, our behaviour gets regulated (kicking up the right degree of
boisterousness whilst directing and constraining its expression), our
pockets get poached, our patience gets decimated, our strategic sense
subverted by the manufactured moment, and meaning is transformed to
spectacle. The sway of Albion may have given us cricket, but that doesn't
mean it didn't have its wondrous virtues. Those virtues are being eroded
now - as is what cricket meant in and did for the steadily fading West
Indies ...
And anyway - how nice it is to respect, and take moral sustenence in the
salience of, a mainstream hero like Ali! Our heroes are surely a marker of
our shred values and aspirations? And how rare it is for lefties to share
modern day heroes with everybody else! Enjoy the moment, say I. And good
on Chris for bringing this little glimmer up.
Cheers,
Rob.
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