Blogger digby draws attention to a fascinating article which basically is a sit-down conversation between author Thomas Frank ('What's The Matter With Kansas') and Lewis Lapham, an American writer and former editor of the U.S. monthly 'Harper's Magazine' for nearly 30 years.
Lapham comes from a true American blue-blood pedigree and has undoubtedly spent the vast majority of his living life hobnobbing among the country's 1% elites. Lewis Lapham has seen, in his 79 years of life, just how good those at the top of the economic strata have had it and how much better it continues to get for them - and all so at the expense of the rest of the citizenry and the health of the constitutional democracy that the founding fathers envisioned.
Lewis Lapham has a warning for his fellow American class nobles, and if he is accurate in his assessment, they should be shitting their fucking drawers in abject fear of the fate that awaits them in the not too distant future.
Observe Mr. Lapham's stark forewarning:
The American government, which I would call the American oligarchy, is afraid of the American people. And God forbid, they should have too many dangerous ideas wandering around loose in the streets. Thus, we have I don’t know how many hundred thousand surveillance cameras on the streets of New York. That’s only going to get worse in my view, because as we get more and more people and more and more people reduced to food stamps and poverty and as the resources of the planet are finite and the American dream assumes infinite growth which is a contradiction in terms with a finite planet. The divisions between rich and poor are going to become more and more well-defined and heavily patrolled.
I suspect that if any genuinely revolutionary change takes place it will be forced upon us by a collapse of some kind in the system. That’s another form of revolution that you find across time where the civilization or the ancient regime falls apart of its own dead weight. And in the ruins, the phoenix of a new idea or a new thought or a new system of value takes its place. But that’s not something that can be organized by a committee or preached from a column in the New York Times, or even by a four-day conference about American values sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.
There’s an old axiom of Trotsky’s: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” And you could say the same thing about revolution. So I don’t think we have to be concerned that we’re not parading around in the streets. It will come of its own accord sooner rather than later.http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/qotd-lewis-lapham.html
Wow! Just Fucking WOW!! The Gadfly never, in even the wildest sense, ever thought he would see the day arrive when a life-long, card carrying member of the American ruling class elite would ever come to their god-given senses to see the reality of what is going on in this country with such crystal clear clarity.
Lapham goes on to state:
But the idea is that a democratic society is interested in equality. That’s the way we deal with each other in a democratic society. That’s the way you deal with people 90 percent of your day. That’s the way you deal with people you know, that’s the way you deal with people you help across the street. The munificence, the generosity of the American spirit, of the democratic spirit, is in plain sight all day, every day.
A capitalist economy is not interested in equality. I mean, the whole idea of a capitalist economy is buy cheap and sell dear. Equality is an utterly alien notion to a bank. And the people who drew up the American Constitution tried to find a way of balancing those two impulses or whatever you want to call it — motions of the spirit and the heart — and the balance has fallen way out of line so that we now have, pretty much, a country being run by the monied interests. This has happened in history. Aristotle talks about it. The same thing. I can’t remember the exact sequence, but at some point an oligarchy becomes so stupid and self-serving that it’s like cheese and it turns rancid in the sun. And that’s what we have now. That’s what they had in the Ukraine. That’s what they had in Russia after coming down under the dispensation of Mr. Yeltsin. That’s what happened in the end to the ancient regime in France. It will happen here. But it’s not going to happen by the storming of the Bastille or a march on the Pentagon.
Read the whole astounding article at this link:
http://www.salon.com/2014/05/04/our_sad_mad_men_revolution_how_consumerism_co_opted_rebellion/
The Gadfly promises you dear readers - it will be the best thing you have read in a very, very long time and it should be a catalyst for those who have been sitting on the fence, to once and for all get off of that fence -- and plant their asses firmly on one side or the other of this critical debate about America's future.
As Lapham somberly intones - the next American revolution locomotive has left the train station folks, and there is no turning it back. And it truly is just a matter of time when it arrives at it's destination. Pity those who aren't paying attention to all of this shit or who are being willfully oblivious, for they are the ones, more than any, who are going to be devastatingly, and tragically unprepared for that which is sure to come.
Dontcha know
They’re talkin’ bout a revolution
It sounds like a whisper
Dontcha know
They’re talkin’ bout a revolution
It sounds like a whisper
While they`re standing in the welfare lines
Crying at the doorsteps of those armies of salvation
Wasting time in the unemployment lines
Sitting around waiting for a promotion
Don’t you know?
They’re talkin’ bout a revolution
It sounds like a whisper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
----TFG
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