>From your recent interview:
"I think "globalization" presumes a past, innocent, "localized" age when things were nicer."
"And it identifies the process of internationalization itself as the enemy ..."
I think there is decisive truth in both these statements. Certainly, there's nought particularly innocent about any moment in history. But that doesn't mean a lot of things weren't better in the past for a lotta people. And I reckon you actually put us on the right path with:
"Internationalism is something progressives should embrace. I thought we liked cosmopolitanism, and intercourse of all kinds among the people of the world."
The spectrum and quality of possible eating in Australia has improved immeasurably because of the intercourse bit - since the immigration policies of 1945-1980, real people have been mixing with real other people, and they've been feeding each other.
Unfortunately, most of that stuff ain't in the less than 5 dollars in less than 5 minutes category. In that important category (ever more important as time and money contract throughout society's poorer 50%), we have faster and lesser food dominating most metropolitan markets - and no intercourse other than the eternal
'would you like fries with that?' 'No, that's why I didn't order them, and if I had, I'd've asked for !#* CHIPS!'!'
McD, KFC, Pizza Hut and B-King are pure high capitalism - the capital alone is cosmopolitan (it comes from and mostly goes to somewhere else) - but capital looks the same, has the same raison d'etre, and relates in the same way, wherever it is ... so a regularised meaningless social experience (for both spott, uniformed, underpaid teenager from Bankstown and harried underpaid parent from Bankstown) and a regularised meaningless feed ensue.
If, as I think Yoshie and Steve are right in saying, 'tis mainly the poor and the harried who patronise these joints, then it is precisely they who are denied the brighter side of the 'internationalisation' of which you so lovingly speak.
Er, that's probably enough from me on this ...
Cheers, Rob.