Fukuyama, Baby!
Who knew that end-of-history-guy turned repentant-ex-neocon, Francis Fukuyama, was secretly such a swingin’ party animal? An aficionado of Las Vegas?
I just stumbled upon  a great debate between Fukuyama and Bernard-Henri Levy where they mix it up over the deeper meaning of Vegas. And Fukuyama Rocks!
He chides BHL for scorning Vegas in his new book American Vertigo, which Garrison Keillor tore up and Christopher Hitchens defended. In the book, BHL said he found Sin City disappointing, vulgar, mediocre, low-brow and lacking in sufficient Sin.
But our home-boy Fukuyama laid the Real Deal on the Frenchman:
Now, I happen to know Las Vegas very well, not because I go to strip clubs or brothels, but because I’ve been going out there regularly with my family to visit relatives for the past 15 years. And that is precisely my problem with your account: You have this image of Las Vegas as “sin city”, and then you were disappointed with the poor quality of the sin.
But this view of Las Vegas is at least thirty years out of date. Las Vegas is a real city with real people, not just sex workers, in it. It has been on and off the fastest growing city in the fastest growing county in the United States, with an incredible amount of energy and entrepreneurship. Much of the new employment centers around the gaming industry, but Las Vegas is as economically diverse as other American cities. It is home to huge numbers of retirees, like my relatives; it is the location of Nellis Air Force Base, host to Red Flag exercises and a lot of defense contractors; it has a burgeoning high-tech industry that has escaped the high costs of California; and it has a large Latino population working mainly in low-skill service industries and manufacturing.
Go Francis, go!
Today the Bellagio, the Luxor and the MGM Grand are more like family-friendly theme parks than gambling halls. So it’s ersatz and safe, but it hasn’t pretended to be anything else for many years now. The Mormons, after all, are the religious group with the deepest roots throughout Nevada.
What you see when you stand in a buffet line in a Las Vegas casino is the real America: ordinary working- and middle-class Americans, with kids in tow, who want to be entertained. (You remark that you had a hard time finding America’s “fat epidemic”; try a buffet.) Many sophisticates from the East look upon all of this with horror, but it’s not Las Vegas they’re reacting to. What they find distasteful is the American demos itself, with all of its excess and energy.
Ditto. Ditto. BHL confessed he had probably gotten Vegas wrong but rejected any notion that he was sneering at the modern American sans culotte — or as they’re known in Vegas, les sans wallet. Whatever you think of these two chaps, their dialogue makes a very entertaining and worthy read.Â
When BHL was in L.A. in late 2004 researching his book, I spent a day showing him around Venice and Santa Monica. And what a scene. Generously underwritten by The Atlantic, he was bunkered into the Beverly Hills Hotel with a veritable entourage: a secretary, a documentary film-maker, a driver and a translator. Ma oui! (I might also add that BHL was provided with a stable of guides that day. First, yours truly in the morning and early afternoon; former L.A. Times books editor Steve Wasserman in the afternoon, and, yes, Sharon Stone later in the evening).
There was one great moment that day. We were out on the Venice Beach boardwalk and observing a beefed-up police presence. I explained to BHL that a gang incident the other day had brought out an extra load of cops. Now, your average European looks at the LAPD with the same sort of speechless awe that Iowans express when they first ogle the Eiffel Tower. BHL was no different.
Here, right before him, were the legendary heroes and villains of every American pop culture moment from Dragnet, to Adam-12, to the Rodney King beating. His long hair flowing in the wind, dressed in a sharp-cut designer black suit with a white silk shirt open literally to his navel, waving his notebook in front of him, BHL strode up to the alarmed cops leaning on their patrol car. No sooner had he gotten out the words, “Hallo, I’yam a Frensh jour-nal-iste…” did the LAPD squirm and scamper like they had seen a ghost. Or something worse, like a friggin’ FRENCH JOURNALIST!
The next day BHL & Co. were heading off for his reportorial Vegas weekend. Learning that I had written a book on same, I was graciously invited to pack along. The thought of shlepping around Vegas with the whole mad Froggy entourage, however, caused me to turn down the offer (I still haven’t forgiven the French for holding the line for only six weeks against the Nazis. I might have reconsidered, though, if Sharon Stone was also coming along — being that I’m a big fan of her, um, work in Casino). In retrospect, I probably should have gone. Might have been a gas. And maybe I could have shown BHL more of the kin and sin in Sin City.
March 14th, 2006 at 5:27 am
The manner in which BHL covered and reported activities in America are not very different from the way that journalists cover Iraq. Sloppy coverage should be condemned, no matter where it is or what motives are behind it.
March 14th, 2006 at 6:35 am
FYI BHL & FF, sex workers are ‘real people’, not Martians.
March 14th, 2006 at 6:59 am
Actually Woody, the way BHL covered America is the way your boy, fucking Ralph Peters, covered Iraq – from his vantage point in an American convoy. At least BHL spoke the language – but I’ll leave any more on this to the other thread.
To the topic at hand, it’s a good thing Garrison Keillor didn’t have the goods on BHL’s entourage. He would have ended up beating the poor guy not just bloody, but senseless.
March 14th, 2006 at 7:28 am
*I still haven’t forgiven the French for holding the line for only six weeks against the Nazis.*
Please stop using this line. Too many Americans use it seriously. This and many other interesting findings from European history.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:05 am
A Case Study in the Quote Out of Context and looking like an Idiot to anyone with a memory or the original text at hand :
Kiellor on BHL: He admires Warren Beatty, though he sees Beatty at a public event “among these rich and beautiful who, as always in America . . . form a masquerade of the living dead, each one more facelifted and mummified than the next, fierce, a little mutant-looking, inhuman, ultimately disappointing.” Lévy is quite comfortable with phrases like “as always in America.” Bombast comes naturally to him. Rain falls on the crowd gathered for the dedication of the Clinton library in Little Rock, and to Lévy, it signifies the demise of the Democratic Party. As always with French writers, Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions.
Hitchens on GK : “As always with French writers,” says Keillor, “Lévy is short on the facts, long on conclusions.” I would give about, oh, five cents to know which ones Keillor has in mind. Perhaps he has been boning up on his Foucault or Balibar or Derrida, in which case he modestly makes no show of his own learning. He cannot mean Albert Camus or Olivier Todd or Michel Houllebecq.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:07 am
“looking like an Idiot to anyone with a memory or the original text at hand :”
I forgot to add “or who understands satirical barbs”.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:14 am
Marc, since you’re momentarily dressing up your fascination for Las Vegas – a passion which stands on it’s own merits – with the musings of the elite intellectual set, check this out (you probably already have, of course):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18796
A couple of poker tomes examined in The New York Review of Books.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:20 am
You should have gone just for the comedy. Only holding the line for 6 days? Jeez that was a cheap shot.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:25 am
It’s called “parachute journalism.” But I wouldn’t say that’s what Iraq reporters are doing at all. They’re living in it, but due to the danger can’t get out very far. Surprising as that is with all the progress we’ve made there. Only Woody doesn’t want to hear the bad stuff so he blames the conspiracy of reporters. I mean that’s easier than thinking from the coward’s perch isn’t it?
March 14th, 2006 at 8:36 am
Robert Venturi, in his book ‘Learning from Los Vegas’, postulated that Los Vegas, not New York or San Francisco, was iconic America.
And he said it 35 years ago.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:50 am
Having been to Sin City only twice, I’d have to agree with Fukuyama, it is an ordinary city in most respects with an extraordinary draw that has an outdated image. Maybe they need to rename it Coopersville – The Last Honest City In America.
March 14th, 2006 at 9:03 am
That attitude you describe about the fun-seeking Americans is a very important facet of politics today. You find it lurking many places.
March 14th, 2006 at 9:03 am
Or possibly “Bennettown – Where Virtue Is Your Best Bet”
March 14th, 2006 at 9:43 am
reg, now THAT was funny.
March 14th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
If Gramsci were alive today, he’d be all over Francis Fukuyama, who’s best known as the inventor of the most transparent authority-bootlicking thesis since Papal infallibility. Fuku is wrong again here, unable to see that gambling still is the real business in Vegas, despite being draped in the chador of “family entertainment.” The pitch to kids is actually the most insidious part of it, an effort to turn the little suckers into marks as early as possible. Yes, its a theme park, but its a gambling theme park. FF is too shallow to see past the marketing facade.
March 14th, 2006 at 12:04 pm
“gambling still is the real business in Vegas”
Bullshit. The real money is in acrobats, Elvis impersonators and buffets.
March 14th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
“Froggy entourage?” Did it make it worse if there were a few dagos, wops, spics, podunks and huns in the crowd? If this was a stylistic thing, then it was quite vulgar. Other than Gore Vidal and the late Hunter Thompson, getting away with even mild racial slurs as part of the “character” of the writer does not work.
I hope BHL likes the new Altman film.
March 14th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Having read the debate, I can now say that Fukuyama is completely out to lunch
“. But the real virtue of America is not its Fords and Hustons; it is the opportunity it creates for the most ordinary of its citizen”
March 14th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
“The very artificiality of the city—its re-creation of Paris, Venice and Bellagio in the middle of the high desert—is testimony to a great American yearning and capacity for re-invention.”
This is the point where Fukuyama steps into a hole, IMHO. Fukuyama’s version of the “demos” is uncomfortably close to P.T. Barnum’s. And frankly, as insulting and indiscriminate as anything a member of the “Euro-elite” could ever invision.
March 14th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
ooops…”envision”
March 14th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
You guys are a barrel of laughs. Expecially Comrade Cummings up there in Canuckland. Having lived in Italy for three years, I much prefer Dagos over Frogs, any day of the week. Got a problem with that? You dont like the good humored language? then pull your hair shirt up over your eyes and tune the fug out. That’s the way I talk when Im around Frogs and they seem to take it with the affection intended. If there’s some other speech code you’d like me to comply with feel free to email it along. Im sure I will study it seriously.
And you would disagree that one of America’s virtues is at least the shot of upward mobility for the everyman? Would you be kind enough to point out another society that affords MORE economic opportunity for common people? That’s not to say that it is anywhere near maximized nor just or equal or fair or even likely — but do you think that the French or British or German working class has more upward mobility than its American counter-part? They certainly don’t. The former certainly have better health care, earlier retirement, more vacation, more job protection and those are crucial guarantees that are lacking here. The downside, however, is scarce social mobility in hidebound class-divided societies. You do know the difference dont you between Du and Sie, Tu and Lei etc etc. These aren’t accidents of grammar. In the U.S. it’s the inverse…almost no social guarantees but more opportunity to break out. I think I prefer the European model. But dont discount the point Fukuyama is making.
Reg.. u havent spent enough time in Vegas or in some rodeo bar. If u dont think it speaks to the ethos of the demos (to stay monolingual) then how do u explain it being the number one favorite destination of the demos? The forty million visitors a year arent all Froggy um er I mean continental reporters, you know. Doesnt mean it isnt Barnum-like. But the two thoughts are not mutually exlcusive.
Anyway, thanks for letting us know that you dont like Fukuyama. That’s a real shocker for me.
March 14th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
It’s not about not liking Fukuyama and it’s not about rodeo bars. In the circles he runs in, Fukuyama is pretty sane. It’s about Fukuyama’s comparison of the idiotic Disney-esque faux-Meccas to Americans’ capacity to reinvent themselves. Absolutely stupid reference. If Hitchens wants to go after “vulgarians” he’d do better to focus on Fukuyama than Garrison Keillor, for Christ sake. And, frankly, I doubt Fukuyama’s ever been in a rodeo bar – or to Branson, Missouri or Graceland for that matter. For my money he’s a panderer and a poseur when it comes to defending the “demos”. I love a democratic culture, but that doesn’t mean I can’t tell the difference between Bruce Springsteen and The Bellagio. Also, I agree that “Barnum-like” isn’t mutually exclusive with a conception of the “demos” that rises above exploitation and vulgarity – it’s all part of the enchilada, so to speak – and I’m aware that Walt Whitman’s dead. But Fukuyama’s being reductionist and really doesn’t seem to have much to offer beyond a not-too-surprising conflation of whatever the market will bear with the best that American mass culture has to offer. And you’re right that I haven’t spent much time in Vegas because it holds all the attraction for me of a meal at McDonalds.
March 14th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
Well I don’t care much for Vegas myself, or Disney World either for that matter. I prefer natural vacationlands to maunufactured fake worlds but it’s all part of fantasyland. Since I’m have frog myself and come from heavily frog area stretching to the Quebec border, it might be helpful to know just what derogatory ethnic slang tags are allowable? Dagos and frogs fine? Jigs, spics and hebs not? What are the ground rules for this type of discourse?
As far as the American concept marc talks about, I couldn’t agree more, and would like a better safety net.
March 14th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
“Half frog.” Sloppy sloppy. Before roper uses it for another straw man.
March 14th, 2006 at 5:06 pm
Aww shucks York, you beat me to it.
March 14th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
“A democracy needs both, imperatively and absolutely both—”realistic” intellectuals and “idealistic” intellectuals. Both types and the functions they embody have recognizable places inside society, even if some societies value one type more than the other. America needs intellectuals with a selfless concern for sense, complexity and truth. This is just as essential to its equilibrium (possibly even to its moral fiber and therefore to its good health) as the existence of universal suffrage or the separation of powers à la Montesquieu.â€
Bernard-Henri Levy is a wonderful writer.
March 14th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
“The former certainly have better health care, earlier retirement, more vacation, more job protection and those are crucial guarantees that are lacking here. The downside, however, is scarce social mobility in hidebound class-divided societies. You do know the difference dont you between Du and Sie, Tu and Lei etc etc. These aren’t accidents of grammar. In the U.S. it’s the inverse…almost no social guarantees but more opportunity to break out. I think I prefer the European model. But dont discount the point Fukuyama is making.”
I also prefer the European model–it is more civilized.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Okay Marc, if I’m going to go for pop sociology that draws deep meaning about America from the Las Vegas mythos – and at least rises somewhere close to the level of your sophisticated commentaries on the place – I’ll take this bit from that NYRB review I linked earlier over Fukuyama’s paen to the city’s faux fake landscapes (as opposed to the authentic fake landscapes). To tie things together, it even mentions de Tocqueville:
According to Alexis de Tocqueville, belief in luck was one of the fundamental characteristics that separated the closed hierarchical societies of Europe from the wide-open democracy of the New World, where class distinctions were fluid and the possibility of going from log cabin to White House wasn’t a foolish dream: “Those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations,” he wrote, “have always before their eyes the image of chance, and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part.”
Tocqueville was writing when poker was still a crude riverboat gambling game, but as it spread north up the Mississippi, then west with the gold rush and cowboys—stud poker got its name from horses—it gradually developed into a pastime that seemed to embody the frontier spirit. Like pioneering, poker thrived on great expectations and self-reliance, on risk-taking and opportunism as well as the willingness to fold a losing hand and move on. By the turn of the century it had become the national game, as intrinsic to the American psyche as chess is to the Russian, cricket to the English, and motor-racing to the Italian. “The game,” said Walter Matthau, “exemplifies the worst aspects of capitalism that have made our country so great.” Poker, he meant, is social Darwinism in its purest, most brutal form: the weak go under and the fittest survive through calculation, insight, self-control, deception, plus an unwavering determination never to give a sucker an even break.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
Reg..Whitman is dead? Christ. I dont really care if Fukuyama is a panderer or poseur or an Oscar-winning pimp. I was referring to the *idea* he was arguing about the *demos.*
Vegas sucks in multiple ways. The way that most things that a lot of people like a lot — like McDonalds.
And that stuff about poker: yeah I buy that analysis. Poker is pretty essential to the Americans ethos (or is it mythos). I know when I play I will do everything possible to dupe the other guy into giving me as much money as possible. With all joking aside, I often tell people that one of the attractions that table games have for me is the insight they lend into why the world is the way it is. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat at a Blackjack table watching the way some folks behave and muttering to myself (“Now I know why George Bush gets elected.”)
Sitting at a Texas hold-em game and getting sucked into betting your Aces-up against some guy’s slyly played Full House is, yes, pretty much the same sensation you have when you walk out of the car dealer’s holding an extended warranty that, in your heart, you knew was for suckers only.
No question that Neocon Fukuyama idealizes that free market savagery. I have no illusions about that. But the beating we take every day from being bought and sold as commodities makes some of us — certainly you Reg– some pretty tough cookies. The ruthlessness of the market forces us to be ever-sharp, aware, alert and yes, enterprising and even cunning. Perhaps those are not our best traits, but I dont think you can deny there are creative and even electric aspects to them. Exploitation can build character.
Most players lose at table games. And in poker, it’s the pros who, in the long run, scoop up all the chips. In the marketplace, likewise, the less powerful usually get screwed. But sometimes, you luck out. Or if it’s not luck, its a cunning use of your ability to push ahead and out and it’s sort of exhilirating.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:45 pm
Dead…and buried.
Does McDonalds represent some triumphant aspect of the American spirit ? Surely “Supersize Me!” is an example of the optimistic belief that bigger is better, or some such, in Fukuyama’s world.
I just thought his plucking deep meaning from the construction of some Potemkin villages for the RV set was a stretch.
March 14th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
It’s sort of a stretch for sure. And yes, in an odd and distateful way, McDonalds is a triumph of American spirit. I dont like the end result, for sure, but there is something undeniably democratic and classless(!) about a McD’s. Too bad it has to be like hell.
Also.. I’d check ur own point of reference on that stuff about “the RV set” and Vegas. First, ur just plain wrong. The appeal of the Potemkin Megacasinos goes way way way beyond the RVers and cuts deeply across class and cultural lines.
And, in any case, isnt there something also very democratic about RVers? Dont u think that’s a sort of charming aspect of our culture? It’s not my idea of a good time… but a lot of those RVers are retired workers who –in this society– can done some jeans and flannel shirts and be on a permanent road trip. I think it’s kind of cool. and quite different, say, from the way the elderly in other cultures act after retirement. I know from first hand experience how the elderly Chilean portion of my own family reacts to that. They are mortified! It’s “improper” they say for old people to act out like that; they shouldnt be out gallivanting around but instead should don aprons and serve the grandchildren.
The problem of course, that the extreme democratization of American culture has a consequence a certain crassness and mediocrity. That’s why I like to go to Paris or Rome in the summmer and sit around in snobby cafes with people more like me… but after a while (3 weeks) you sort of yearn for some down-home authenticity and a waitress named Sally instead of some stuck-up twit named Pierre.
March 14th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
I was taking issue very specifically with Fukuyama’s invocation of what to me is the most empty of all of Las Vegas’ gestures, and that is the construction of fake city’s, i.e. Paris, Venice, etc. within the city. I don’t see that as having anything to do with Americans reinventing themselves. That’s all. It seemed to me that at that point Fukuyama was betraying a desperation to find “meaning” where it doesn’t exist. Casinos are fine…if you’re into losing money (most of us).
I agree with you on the rest of it. I’ve got nothing against the RV set. But they can do better exploring the country than theme parks and I’m sure most of them do. And I do love diners and and even the occasional dive. I hate places where the waiters come at you with the wine list like it’s the 10 Commandments and the servings are tiny. I’ve got a half dozen “ethnic” places to eat in East Oakland that I prefer to all but a couple of the buzz-worthy Bay Area “fine dining” experiences. Which says more to me about the achievements of our “democratic culture” than either the mass-produced mediocrity of Mickey D’s or the “gourmet ghetto” pretensions of Chez Panisse.
March 14th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
I hope Marc Cooper’s stand on upward mobility doesn’t come from the famously wrong Glenn Hubbard’s 1992 report or equally dubious 2001 Heritage Foundation article.
In his excellent article, Paul Krugman notes that “the myth of income mobility has always exceeded the reality… classic 1978 survey found that among adult men whose fathers were in the bottom 25 percent of the population as ranked by social and economic status, 23 percent had made it into the top 25 percent….the Business Week piece cites a new survey of today’s adult men, which finds that this number has dropped to only 10 percent. That is, over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically. ”
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040105&s=krugman
Please notice that the upward mobility in America has always been mostly about white men, not about women or ethnic minorities. Good education system and upward mobility appear almost always together.
March 14th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
Yes, upward mobility has fallen much in 25 yrs and. no, I am capable of reaching conclusions without the implantation of diodes from Heritage.
So, Kyosti… dont dodge my main point. Even with the decline in wages and mobility over the last 25 yrs, which country were you pointing to that offered more mobility than the U.S.? Just asking.
March 14th, 2006 at 11:46 pm
I’ve always found the contrast between Los Angeles and Las Vegas interesting: L.A. is this big Midwestern town trying to be Gomorrah and Las Vegas is a Gomorrah that wants to be a middle American town.
Right now Vegas is probably closer than anyplace else in the country to what L.A. was in the 60s, in terms of combining high potential earnings with a low cost of living. It’s interesting that no one has mentioned the most egalitarian thing about Vegas: Service sector jobs that are the equivalent of old style industrial jobs, unionized with decent pay and benefits. Part of the reason this is possible, of course, is that the punters pay a premium for everything.
Myself I wouldn’t live there primarily because I hate it when it’s hot as Hell all the time.
March 15th, 2006 at 2:39 am
Well, I was mainly thinking about this paper, which says that mobility is remarkably similar in the Scandinavian countries and in the United States. The data comes from the 80s and America’s mobility has gone backwards after that. However, marital status and labor market changes means more in the United States than in Sweden.
http://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/revinw/v48y2002i4p443-69.html
Another paper I was thinking of was this about USA/West-Germany. Again, no great distinctions:
http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5988.html
Talking about intergenerational mobility, everything is far clearer. “Mobility is lower in the U.S. than in the U.K., where it is lower again compared to the Nordic countries… The U.S. also differs from the Nordic countries in its very low likelihood that sons of the highest earners will show downward ’longdistance’ mobility into the lowest earnings quintile.”
says this:
http://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp1938.html
As Doug Henwood reminds us about the United States, “if people move, they move a notch. They don’t move four or five notches up the ladder”, here:
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_henwood.html
So. I can’t show you a country where upward mobility would be clearly greater than in the US except when talking about intergenerational mobility. However, the differences are small. On the other hand, some of the mobility perhaps comes from unemployment benefits being smaller in America.
March 15th, 2006 at 7:35 am
“Would you be kind enough to point out another society that affords MORE economic opportunity for common people?”
Canada, most of Scandinavia, Germany, New Zealand, France and Australia somewhat, even Great Britain.
March 15th, 2006 at 7:39 am
And further on the point that he was making – if you are extrapolating a Horatio Alger sort of thing out of what was said, fine. It is probably true that theoretically there are more individual cases of rags to riches. I don’t believe Fukuyama meant that to be the case, rather he was actually claiming that the US is a beacon of social justice.
March 15th, 2006 at 9:52 am
Canadian unemployment is higher and so are the taxes but at least there’s healthcare. I doubt it’s easier to be upwardly mobile. More staid is much more likely.
March 15th, 2006 at 10:07 am
“Scandinavia, Germany, New Zealand, France and Australia somewhat, even Great Britain.”
Cummings, you believe that these are places where the working class has more MOBILITY than the U.S.?
Um.. I think that knocks you out of serious contention.
Australia comes closest — the others dont even figure. Do some research and find out what kind of fines have been levied on lower class Germans who mistakenly used the second person informal instead of the formal case when addressing a social superior or someone in authority.
Your list is laughable.
The U.S. is a beacon of justice for a huge percentage of the world. Life in the U.S. is freer, more prosperous and more advantageous than it is comapred to where the overwhelming majority
of the world’s people live and they know it. Not only economically, but also in terms of rule of law and the development of rich and laterally democratic civil society. On that score, about a dozen other developed nations compete with and arguably surpass the United States.
None of this is meant as a pollyanish denial of the profound systemic inequities and prejudices that riddle our system. But if, for example, you think the American justice system sucks (which it does) see what it’s like to be standing before a French or Italian magistrate without the host of civil guarantees that we take for granted.
Mewanwhile, you Canadians have to get back to work for us and continue laboring under the brutal heel of American domination and imperialism. We know how u are suffering. But we enjoy it.
March 15th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Vegas does resemble our culture—there is mobility but very often it is illusionary; similar to everything else that his marketed and merchandised in our society.
The hope or belief that you can win, beat the house, succeed, become that great Horatio Alger of your day, it’s all part of that American economic mythology—if only I was more lucky, more cunning and more cut- throat I too would succeed, so as you see our American dream is based on the premise that if you don’t make it—it is all your own fault . What a delightful mix– in other words the biggest and luckiest scumbag takes it all.
How does the neo-conservative view poverty and the working poor! They arrogantly look at the poor and disdainfully feel it is their own fault.
These passionate conservatives with good Christian values actually look at the poor in utter disgust. A case in point is Rick Santorum’s book “It Takes a Family. “ Santorum believes that liberal values are immoral; feminism has destroyed traditional families; divorce and fatherless homes are a sin and also the reason for poverty.
But Santorum is not the lone heartless “blowhard†on the far right. The unfortunate fact is that he represents a predominant point of view
March 15th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
“That’s why I like to go to Paris or Rome in the summmer and sit around in snobby cafes with people more like me… but after a while (3 weeks) you sort of yearn for some down-home authenticity and a waitress named Sally instead of some stuck-up twit named Pierre.”
So the snobby people in the cafes–i.e., “stuck-up twits”–are more like you than the down-homers? That’s quite an open admission.
March 16th, 2006 at 7:42 am
It depends what you mean by mobility. Nothing you referred to (to which I agree – i.e. stupid formalities in Europe, etc.) contradicts the fact that the working class, public and private, makes more money/has more purchasing power – and has more social protection.
For obvious resons, Canada has had a huge growth of immigration , since 9/11, from the Arab world and South Asia, people who in the past would have gone to the States. I don’t think Arabs, South Asians and other Muslims look at the racial-profiling USA as a beacon of justice.
We are talking anyway of upward mobility. While the rich can get richer in the USA, there is more egalitarianism in the other countries I listed. I take that as more important than rags to riches mythology, which may have existed in the “golden age” of capitalism, but does not now.
March 17th, 2006 at 7:55 am
I found the BHL book almost unreadable. Allow me to submit a not atypical passage:
Got that?
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