Right, but Al Qaeda has grouped us "spoiled" workers at the heart of the Imperium together with the oligarchy. And their message for us is that we must go back to what we once were, a fundamentalist, superstitious feudal society. Back, past the Enlightenment, past the Renaissance and forget what we've become.
>And *I* mourn the hundreds of millions killed by neoliberalism, IMF
>austerity packages, and Wall Street's gutting of Latin American and SE
>Asia -- and then go out and do whatever I can to stop the fearsome
>violence of the total system.
>
>-- Dennis
As do I. The left is in a tough position, like the tattooed Danny Parker in The Salton Sea. But then how often hasn't this been the case?
Reading Stiglitz in this month's Atlantic and Krugman's Argentinian mea culpa which Cockburn noted in his column (while in effect complimenting Krugman's single-handed efforts on behalf of the passive Democrats), I felt like screaming "but Doug and others have been pointing these things out for years!" As Swedish rockers The Hives put it so euphoniously, "Hate to say I told you so!" Still, perhaps these things point to a shift.
I forget whether it's you or Ramsdell who's the big Adorno fan. Yesterday's New York Times reports that "In fact, no other figure has influenced American musicology more during the last 20 years. A major new collection, "Essays on Music" (University of California), scrupulously edited with commentary by Richard Leppert, a professor of cultural studies at the University of Minnesota, will codify that accomplishment further, by adding new translations by Susan H. Gillespie to essays spanning Adorno's career, from his 1929 examination of Berg's opera "Wozzeck" to essays written in the years before his death in 1969. The book seems a ready-made classroom text for the growing Adorno industry. Out of the scores of secondary-sources cited, nearly all come from the last two decades.
That growth is astounding...." etc. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/arts/music/14CONN.html
I don't know about Rothstein's conclusion though: "...There is even something heroic about his philosophical enterprise. But there is also something perverse. For while with one hand he caresses the 19th- and 20th-century art-music tradition, mourning its marginality and meticulously teasing out its meanings, with the other hand he tries, again and again, to sweep away the contentious, striving, bourgeois world that gave it birth." Any comments? Anybody?
Peter