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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (38999)	3/7/2004 12:56:30 PM
From: lurqer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 89467

A great resource is Book TV on C-SPAN. Yesterday, it was my good fortune to listen to Barry Lopez. He expressed an idea that stemmed from the quote below: "And I have recently reflected that, at least in the United States, the most forceful arguments against government and industry, which were raised by people like Rachel Carsen, are carried largely by this group of people who are called 'nature writers'. So if there is going to be a voice flying in the face of business and government in the States, this is where it is going to come from. "An interesting thing about Thoreau - and now this is just speculation - but it's worth looking at - I think Thoreau saw the end of American civilization. I think he intuited with the rise of capitalism in England in the 1830s and the development of the Industrial Revolution and the way it carried over in to the United States, that there was something essentially dysfunctional about the situation of a society in a place - in other words, the culture was poorly situated in the place. "Emerson said once about Thoreau, 'Oh he just wants to live among us as an Indian' - and I think what Emerson meant was that that Thoreau understood that the relationship between indigenous people in North America and place had been so well worked out that those societies had been stable for hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years. And of course those societies faced the same problems as we do with corruption or infidelity or prevarication, whatever it is, all the human ills. But they'd stabilized. "What Thoreau saw was that without another kind of mythology American civilization was going to collapse. And the mythology that he was trying to work out was a different kind of moral relationship between place and culture. from 12gauge.com The idea is that the 18th century philosophers that are the intellectual fathers of our democracy, formulated their ideas prior to the rise of modern capitalism. Hence, at a fundamental level, we have no protection against the anti-democratic corrosive influence of massive accumulated wealth. To protect the liberty of the people from this menace will require a paradigm shift in our constitutional government. Good stuff. I certainly don't have all the answers to what needs to be done, but a start would be sharply curtailing the legal powers of corporations - particularly their ability to influence the politics of the nation. We will never have decent health care as long as drug and insurance companies have their strangle hold. And the MIC companies will profligately spend both our blood and treasure. Corporatism über alles! JMO lurqer