Login / RegisterI hope the "Incognito" function in Google Chrome works...I'll clear all browsing history just to be sure.
John Steinbeck provided me with a Eureka moment months after Judith Butler talk
Novelist John Steinbeck had many deep insights.
In May, I had the privilege of moderating an audience question-and-answer session at the Vogue Theatre with renowned feminist scholar Judith Butler.
She had just delivered the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies spring lecture called "A Politics of the Street".
In her talk, she examined how people are reacting to their own "precarity" in the face of economic uncertainty and government repression.
As the moderator, I was permitted one question, so I asked why so many people seem unaware of their own precarity.
Nowadays, there is virtually no financial security when the Internet, globalization, and currency movements can obliterate entire industries and leave communities virtually broke.
I'm often baffled how so many people walk around in a state of semidelusion, ringing up huge debts, oblivious to the vicissitudes of the modern economy.
Butler gave a fairly lengthy response to my question, but I didn't feel she fully addressed the psychological state of denial that's on display across North America.
It was only when one of my colleagues, Doug Sarti, recently sent me a quote from U.S. author John Steinbeck that I was able to experience a Eureka moment.
“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat," Steinbeck explained, "but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Follow Charlie Smith on Twitter at twitter.com/csmithstraight.
Saving your schekles won't stop peak oil. And, most of us couldn't save enough of them to make much of a difference when the END TIMES come.
▪ As quoted in A Short History of Progress (2005) by Ronald Wright, p. 124; though this has since been cited as a direct quote by some, the remark may simply be a paraphrase, as no quotation marks appear around the statement and earlier publication of this phrasing have not been located.
▪ This is likely an incorrect quote from America & Americans, 1966:
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."