You probably find many allies when you sink the slipper into poor ol' GO on this list. But I ain't one of 'em.
>They should be miserable! They have no
>right to be happy just because the bourgeoisie have fed them the
>lotus of nylon stockings!
Er, no, Brad. They ARE miserable. The Brookers are miserable. Their lodgers are more miserable. The miners spend their waking lives bent double in three-foot tunnels. They're more miserable still. The unemployed degenerate physically for want of nutrition. They're the most miserable of all. In return for this, the lucky ones can afford nylon stockings. To be happy with things like that IS to forget one's life is not to be measured so. It IS to be cruelly alienated.
What are stockings to having a life, Brad? And don't give me any of that 'they were the most fortunate working class to that date' shit. People at Bergen Belsen were luckier than those at Sobibor, too.
>Follow this road to its end, and you arrive
>at Sweezy's denunciation of rock and roll as music that would be
>unfit for a socialist society, at the suppression of the members of
>the Czech Jazz Section, at the bulldozing of modern art exhibitions
>in Moscow.
Well, Orwell asks a lot of big questions of those who speak in the name of socialism in the second half of the book. It's a depressingly compelling read for one such as I (ie someone who hangs on to the idea of socialism because he can't see anything else with human hope in it), it criticises petit-bourgeois socialists profoundly (he's awake to just the implicit lefty-classism you're on about)
>You don't want to say that people aren't *allowed* to
>dream of Michael Jordan while wearing their Nikes.
You do want to say that their lives shouldn't be made up of such hopeless and distracting dreams, though. Nor that their notion of self-worth should depend on the patterns on their footwear.
>But I don't want to say, either, that Nike's advertising and brand
>campaign is a glorious worldwide piece of performance art that is
>worthy every penny we have collectively paid for it.
Why not just say it isn't performance art? And that social wealth dedicated to perpetuating real misery through the conjuring of palliative dreaming is an absolutely obscene phenomenon?
>In short, I don't know what I think. But I do think that the issues
>are more complicated than Naomi Klein admits. (Which doesn't mean
>that her book isn't a very good book.)
Well, at the end of the day, we do have to make judgements about these things, doncha reckon?
Cheers, Rob.