04-05-2020, 04:53 AM
(04-04-2020, 07:44 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I would agree if Covid-19 were a real threat to the lives of many citizens. It's not, though. It's only a threat to the lives of old people, which category happens to include most of the economic and political elites.
How sure are we? The first country to experience a large number of cases, the People's Republic of China (PRC), botched the response when COVID-19 was a local crisis. The government of the PRC is a secretive regime whose official news sources are generally unreliable about events in China. China has only official sources -- state media -- and those are effectively under the thumb of an authoritarian political party.
It is arguable that the USA is handling the COVID-19 plague worse than about every other country. Some state governments have been far ahead of the President in their responses. But new cases are still rising at an exponential rate. Such reflects the quality of our top leadership, one that has a despotic style yet proves utterly incompetent and thus unable to force change. (Despotic style and an ability to control everything? That is China... so Americans need be careful about what they wish for. When it comes to economic relationship, power of ownership and management of business, and human rights it is a good thing that the Trump Administration is a gang that can't shoot straight!)
Quote:It's kind of like when the elites dupe the commoners into supporting war.
We at least have competing elites, but beware when the elites end up on the same side in any society unless to save the system from a foreign enemy such as Nazi Germany. Corporate America and the southern racist agrarian elite coalesced in the Republican Party about forty years ago. Now dominant, they have made America about as pure a plutocracy as it could be.
This Crisis could have had as its focus a War for Profits as American elites try to impose American plutocracy somewhere in which it is unwelcome. Such requires that news media be servile to the elites, and it is our good fortune that the media are anything but servile.
Quote:It could still be a regeneracy, except that I think a regeneracy has to reverse a concentration of power and wealth, and I don't see how this particular crisis does anything other than cause greater concentration of power and wealth.
A Regeneracy reshapes attitudes while ensuring that people are compelled to think of community instead of their worst intentions, reason instead of impulse, service instead of indulgence, culture instead of vacuous entertainment, and long-term and low-yield instead of the quick buck.
I am old enough to remember people who lived through the 1920's. I have never known any of them to wax nostalgic about those days except to recover their youth -- and they seem to have wished that they had done things differently. Even the Great Depression, harsh as it was, solved some problems and reshaped American life in positive ways. Such is the difference between the degenerate 1920's and the Regeneracy of the 1930's.
Quote:But in the general outlines, yes, the Covid-19 crisis is very much the kind of thing you'd expect in a Crisis period.
We are treating it as a Crisis. We will have to quit doing many things on the cheap -- and we know it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.