Joanna
Brad Mayer wrote:
> Not yet, but it will if the Left buys it enough time by supporting the
> Democrats, a party the plantation masters have clearly recaptured:
>
> ........
> It would be tempting, indeed, to regard the whole complex of political
> neuroses herein described as a regrettable but minor aberration in the
> national narrative: the great sweep of the popular idea of sovereignty
> and democratic self-government from Plymouth Rock, to Independence
> Hall, to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, to FDR's More Abundant Life;
> from Melville's Young America, to Whitman's Broad Democratic Vistas,
> to Sandburg's The People, Yes, The People. [I'd say this (Yankee)
> narrative is dead, dead, dead, as in reabsorbed into the "Southern" story]
>
> But there is another, competing narrative.[5] It begins in the London
> counting houses as an idea. It makes its way to the slave pens of
> Conakry, and jumps to the the Western Hemisphere via the cane
> plantations of Barbados. It makes continental landfall in Charleston,
> South Carolina; it drives through the Old South to the Rio Grande. It
> is a socio-economic idea composed of financier-driven "free trade;"
> resource exploitation consisting of vast, soil-depleting monocultures
> (plantations then, agribusiness and oil now); human labor as a cheap
> commodity[6]; and the culture of violence. This idea is responsible
> for the most nearly successful conspiracy (so far) to attempt the
> overthrow Constitutional government in the American Republic, taking
> 600,000 lives in the process.
>
> Is it too far fetched to say Jefferson Davis's dream of a great
> Southern plantation empire stretching through Mexico, the Caribbean,
> and Central America, an empire of compliant natives and lucrative
> resource extraction, was never definitively thwarted? Or did it merely
> slumber, like a serpent coiled in the national thicket, waiting for
> the right geopolitical circumstances and psychological tenor to
> re-emerge, in appearance different but in substance the same? Let us
> not forget that the reins of government are now held by two Texas oil
> patch millionaires; substituting for dreamy Veracruz, Havana,
> Cartagena, and Santo Domingo are the flintier but no less exotic
> Djibouti, Basra, Kirkuk, and the fabled Khyber Pass.
>
> Thus considered, Zell Miller's chief significance is as folksy bard of
> the new overseas plantation.
>
> Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I'm well aware Counterpunch is hated on LBO. Well, too bad. This
> article hits the zeitgeist nicely.
>
> Of course H.L. Mencken was an elitist asshole who hated the masses.
> But for that very reason he possesed penetrating insights into the
> real character of his fellow ruling class elitists.
>
> I don't know who Werther is, but his claim to be a "defense analyst"
> is interesting. http://counterpunch.com/
>
> Pilger has jumped on the Kolko line. There is a growing stream of
> non-Marxist intellectuals, generally but not necessarily left-leaning
> by various degrees, some like Todd quite anticommunist, who are
> fleeing America and its bankrupt "narrative" tout cort: Todd,
> Wallerstein, now Kolko, Jeremy Rifkin ("The European Dream"), Randall
> Robinson (who has actually physically fled in "Leaving America", but
> leaving here is clearly a metaphor), even Van Wolferon, who has
> suddenly switched to urging the Japanese to flee their vassal
> "security" arrangement with the Americans, the sooner the better.
>
> They see the writing on the wall. Too bad the American Left does not.
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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