Date: Fri, 10 Oct 1997 12:30:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Zizek on PKs




Rakesh, with characteristic good sense, writes of the Promise-Keepers: 


>I didn't call them proto-fascist because they will be
>goose-stepping but because they will--as ricardo has eloquetly argued--fail
>to develop the culture of their class which includes women and men.  This
>is a kind of mass gathering that only serves to further privatize and
>atomize people in their concerns and in their conduct while inculcating
>them into obedience to moralistic authoritarian figures.  

I remember reading, in the early '80s, a *Nation* piece by Kurt Vonnegut to
the effect that our celebrity culture had in essence created a two-tiered
system of "public worth".  There were the "celebrities"-- the talented, the
famous, the wealthy -- and then, there were those "who do not matter."  And
those "who do not matter" got sent to Vietnam, had their factories relocate
overseas, were denied adequate health, education and diet, and so on.

I am wondering if perhaps a lot of these misguided people -- these PKs --
are not heirs in some fashion to that sorry lot of which Vonnegut wrote.  A
good many of them seem formerly of the middle class, skilled or semi-skilled
workers and middle managers.  They no longer have the wherewithal to stir
themselves up to be serviceable in any meaningful fashion, other than to
abuse their spouses, or themselves, or both.  The vacuum into which they
have been swept remains, for them, unarticulated.  But, surely, the
spiritual swindle to which they are succumbing has, as Rakesh suggests, its
moral equivalent in socialist politics.

This is what we *really* should be talking about here.

Not Earl Browder.

Louis Godena 



     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---