What the USA needs, however, is a "reverse Pol Pot" strategy: moving people from countryside (= suburbs & exurbs) to cities (like Akron, Detroit, Flint, & Youngstown).
Wojtek added to DP:
>I think this concept is linked to Voltaire - the intellectual protagonists
>of _Candide_ end up doing gardening work.
Ah, _Candide_, written by the most celebrated wit of all Salon intellectuals!
Eli Moskowitz posted:
>And now there is more work than ever in the fields and when we have
>cleared the last stand of marabu we will not have men enough to
>plant all the land that we have available, and never again will
>there be a slack season in our Fatherland!
>
>Fidel Castro, 1961 speech
And much as I love the charming bearded revolutionary, I'd have to point out that he was a lawyer & then a professional revolutionary; and he has been a _head_ of state (a concretizing metaphor here) for a long time. With the exception of guerrilla warfare, he has lived mainly _a life of mental labor_.
Manual labor looks more glorious to intellectuals who are mainly devoted to mental labor & feel "guilty" about it -- such as a _large majority_ of left-wing e-list posters -- than to manual laborers like my parents (my dad = steelworker; my mom = pink-collar ghetto denizen), my grandparents (farmers) who knew the difference between farming & "gardening," etc.
***** Why is it that the communists always say they're for the workingman, and as soon as they set up a country, you got guys singing to tractors? They're singing about how they love the factory. That's where I couldn't buy communism. It's the intellectuals' utopia, not mine. I cannot picture myself singing to a tractor, I just can't. (Laughs.) Or singing to steel. (Singsongs.) Oh whoop-dee-doo, I'm at the bonderizer, oh how I love this heavy steel. No thanks. Never hoppen.
(Mike LeFevre, a steelworker, whose oral history is collected in Studs Turkel, _Working_, NY: Ballantine Books, 1972, pp. 5-6) *****
Manual laborers in general don't go for workerism & socialist realism. They love, however, Oscar Wilde & effete intellectuals, _especially since nowadays effete intellectuals are their sons & daughters, nephews & nieces, grandsons & grandchildren_.
towards a decadent socialist modernism,
Yoshie