That said,among women, non-whites (especially Blacks and Hispanics), and young people (e.g. age < 40), workers are significantly overrepresented (compared to capitalists). Julio Huato
----------- These are mostly side notes. Significantly over represented by Democrats... Which leave the southern working class white guys in the neverland of the repugnants. Well same old story, those guys who fought on the wrong side in the civil war are still fighting on the wrong side of the civil war. And they are bullshitted by the same rich local establishment that lead the wrong side of the civil war, got them killed in large numbers, destoryed their lives and land, and left their towns in ruins. The great American historical wisdom was the damnned Yankees did it. Well, yeah backed up by the capitalist millionaires in banking, steel, railroads, mines, and construction. And, you all were fighting to keep the rich landowners in slave labor so they could keep making millions for themselves while you were scratching dirt for practically nothing and went broke borrowing to plant whatever. Maybe that's a way to get at this persistance of regional culture that only seems to trigger a white guy gene to become stupid. Or, some combination of ideology and identity trumps common sense and triggers everybodies stupid-gene. We could use Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Antonio Villaraigosa as the counter examples to the brain dead white guys. In a different direction... I happen to be reading Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss where Strauss critiques Schmitt with Hobbes. What was fascinating was the period itself: the collapse of Weimar 1928-1932. Almost the entire cultural elite disappeared as refugees, into camps, or underground, along with the Jewish intellectual elites and the whole of German culture was destoryed---a destruction from which it never recovered. The point is I am watching in my reader's mind the death of a whole culture. It was destoryed by all sorts of forces, but most of all by the manipulation of mass ideology and national identity myths which completely cancelled the common sense of just enough people to carry it off---all under the banner of Hope for a Bold New Tomorrow. Parallels? Yes in that US politics is almost entirely driven by manipulations of voter identities through the vast mass mythology machine of corporate media. The facts don't matter to us any more than the facts mattered in Weimar. In the high abstraction of political philosophy (according to Leo the Terrible) we are in a Schmitt-like life and dead struggle over Facts v. Values. There are dozens of cultural icons to illustrate that a threat that rarely gets much play among economists left or right, and that is culture as somekind of domain that while it has a material base, and is a material base at the same time that escapes being just a material base. I think in terms of painting and writing, which are very old fashioned but I am surrounded by them and depend on them. Well there were stories a year or so ago about remodeling the New York Public Library system ... But I found a better example. It's called the Warburg Library after Abby Warburg its original collector who was a rich Wilhelmian bourgeois. This particular library was the basis of Ernst Cassirer's masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He became its managing director when he was appointed Rector of the University of Hamburg. When the National Socialists came to power Cassirer was fired and left for Sweden where he had a very difficult time trying to save the Warburg. Through various well off intermediaries he and others got the University of London to pay the Nazis to buy the library and crate it to London. It was revived and took back its job as a cultural icon for European and World culture under various literati including Gombrich a once famous art historian and ironically an anti-Hegelian. Here is what may become of it: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/sep/01/save-the-warburg-library/ ``The library is designed not simply to make information rapidly accessible-as a search engine might-but to shape and channel scholarly investigations. Any sustained trip into the Warburg stacks will bring the reader not only to the books he or she is looking for, but also to their unexpected good neighbors. Magic and science, religion and philosophy, Christianity and Judaism appear in close proximity-and challenge the reader both to trace webs of unexpected connections and to find the points of radical disjunction. Look for the history of astronomy and you will find primary and secondary sources, learned treatises and popular almanacs-texts, tables, and images that range in origin from the ancient Near East to the present-and the vast literature of astronomy's unruly sister discipline, astrology, as well. On the shelves of the institute, the reader experiences the coincidence of opposites... ...A center of European culture and a repository of the Western tradition that escaped Hitler and survived the Blitz may finally be destroyed by British bean-counters. It is a picture, in the words of H.L. Mencken, to bemuse the vulgar and to give the judicious grief. Recent articles in the German and Swiss press have called attention to the Warburg's travails. If the University of London insists on following through with its plan, perhaps the German authorities can find the means to bring the Warburg back to its original home. That would certainly be preferable to watching as philistines demolish a great European institution.'' Why would I care? Because by cultural transportation from a few essays by Cassirer (and some anthropology classes) what's in the Warburg became a protracted life long interest. The basic ideas behind the Warburg had a great influence on me---a fucking nowhere kid in the wasteland of LA suburbs from fifty years ago. It's about the only treasure I own. It makes me feel rich tonight, just as it did long ago. I love the little snipe at Leo the Terrible: ``...outside allies have filled the distinguished journal that the Warburg produces in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute and the several series of books that it publishes with innovative studies of every aspect of the classical tradition-seen, as it should be, not as a single set of texts crafted by Greeks and inherited by the followers of Leo Strauss, but as a great Mississippi of texts, ideas, images, and objects, constantly intersecting with and transformed by other streams...'' The short form is simple. Capitalism eats everything under whatever economic-political nonsense it can beat into the society to justify itself. So when you hear about the loss of `an American Way of Life' you can add whatever was left of its cultural heritage. As for the Warburg, there were no follow up stories. It's probably stuck in court battles. 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