> An extract from Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
> by Martin Amis
> Tuesday September 3, 2002
> The Guardian
>
> There has never been a regime quite like it, not anywhere in the
> history of the universe. To have its subjects simultaneously quaking
> with terror, with hypothermia, with hunger - and with laughter.
Campesinos in Brazil, gauchos in Argentina, and colonial peoples during the pre-Bandung era all experienced the same, only from relatively more abstracted and disembodied market forces as opposed to an identifiable machinery of state accumulation.
All this Cold War retro stuff is nostalgia for the US Empire, of course. Push the phantasm of the Man of Steel to its limit, and you start to see steel mills, burly workers, and Eisenhower, General of the Peoples, issuing the latest ukase on the greatness of the Realm. Mirror, mirror, on the wall/ whose hegemony do you see fall?
-- Dennis