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<DIV>D. Hen wood wrote:"Latin America is in a state of political
effervescence, but only Have has mounted a serious challenge to the US. Contrast
that with the early 1970's when <BR>the US had just been kicked out of Vietnam
and there were serious <BR>challenges to bourgeois rule worldwide - and even at
home"</DIV>
<DIV>Comment:It is not just Venezuela, as John Mage well pointed out, but also
Ecuador where a native insurgence against the pillage of oil by US corps
prompted he cancellation of a $100 million WB loan,which was Woolf first action
as its new president. Similarly Bolivia's peasant revolt led by Eva Morale's
canceled sweet deals in natural gas and prompted the set up a new US military
bases in Paraguay.And lets not forget that president Bircher turned Argentina
into the first country to stand up to he IMF and the investors it
represents by repudiating its debt obligations. In addition, Central
America from Mexico to Nicaragua is back in a stage of political
agitation.</DIV>
<DIV>Also lets not forget that since Vietnam, wars are fought not just
militarily but symbolically and that the US hasn't recovered from the symbolic
defeat that 9/11 entailed .Perhaps it will never recover from it and will remain
a perennial loser in the eyes of the rest of the world. And as the US forces get
more and more stalled and humiliated by the resistance in Iraq, another
humiliating symbolic defeat is looming up.The ruling classes educated
by overrated Ivy League schools seem astonishingly incompetent to deal
with these symbolic losses.</DIV>
<DIV>Finally Dough states; "Manhattan as opposed to where? New Jersey?
Kansas?"</DIV>
<DIV>Why rate the provincialism of NYC in relation to other regions? Why not
evaluate Manhattan on its own merits?. I think most of its "sophistication"
consist in some people being able to distinguish Radar from Gucci or Blanc de
Blanc from Pinot Gringo or paying for $ 800 hair cuts at Okapi's. I've been
living in Manhattan for over 20 years and I can tell that even culturally it has
gone down. Last year I invited a "sophisticated " writer from an
"elite"magazine, one of those Ivy League graduates, to watch a performance by
Pima Bausch at BAM and I quickly realized the only Pima she knew of was Pima
Colada.</DIV>
<DIV>Actually, I think the only true cosmopolitan place left in NYC is Queens by
Roosevelt Ave. where about 4 different languages can be heard spoken on the
sidewalks and where you have the assurance people can tell the difference
between Caracas and Karachi.</DIV>
<DIV>Cristobal Senior<BR></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>