Re: <nettime> Fw: Enemies of the Future

[Dan Wang <danwang@mindspring.com>]

Wow, a nettimer from Flint? I grew up in Saginaw, just up the freeway, another
Midwestern post-industrial heap of a city, up in rust after a glorious two and
a half decades of General Motors fueled growth. . . I have a hard time
explaining to people not from Michigan what it was like there in the late
seventies and early eighties, how the bottom fell out so quickly for so many,
after thinking they might live phat and good forever.

What really blows me away, though, is how a lot of the folks who witnessed and
perhaps even experienced the layoffs from that time and place still do not
think in terms of historical patterns and lessons, hardly even on a basic level
as in your analogy. It makes me think that there is something fundamentally
cultural and peculiarly American about the absence of historical consciousness,
that a lot of Americans just aren't interested in and/or haven't been taught to
consider social and economic systems over time. Even an informed quasi-lefty
like famous Flint guy Michael Moore, who does more than his share of educating
the public, almost never puts the downturn he lived through in any kind of
historical context beyond the Reagan years. It is a remarkable and unfortunate
blockage in the realm of public discourse.

Without people being willing and able to think through these patterns and
cycles from even recent decades (without Moore, just think how many more
Americans would simply forget the Eighties, or just never think of that period
as being relevant to the economics of today?), we can hardly expect such cycles
to end, and should probably anticipate an increasing extremity of social trauma
with each downturn--the response to which, of course, will likely be increased
authoritarianisms. In his new book One Market Under God, the review of which
stared this whole thread, Tom Frank pushes the history angle pretty well for
being a (self-identified) journalist. For that reason alone, this is a
noteworthy book.

dan w.

----------
>From: Eric Miller <eric@OAKTREE.com>
>To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
>Subject: RE: <nettime> Fw: Enemies of the Future
>Date: Tue, Dec 5, 2000, 12:14 PM
>

> the analogy I keep coming back to is that of the auto manufacturers and the
> postwar "car society" in the US.
< ... >

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