Forum Replies Created
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Excellent list, ZN. I’ve read all of those except for Otsuka and Adichie. Should have named Faulkner in my list for the greatest prose stylists, too.
Riffing off of Garcia Marquez, I think people who haven’t read the “Boom” artists of Latin American, and Magic Realism in general, would greatly enjoy them. Jose Donoso, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Jose Maria Arguedas, for starters. Another cool thing is they also wrote great short stories, especially Borges, Fuentes, Cortazar and the Italian, Calvino. Strange, weird, beautiful, fantastical stories.
Also long those lines, Franz Kafka (Czech), Bruno Schulz (Pole) and Fernando Pessoa (Portuguese) — and a contemporary of ours, Haruki Murakami (Japanese). Kafka is, in my view, the most important writer of the 20th century. Not necessarily the best, though he was great. But the most important. Primarily because of how he seemed to capture what would become the zeitgeist, the political imaginary that hit so much of the world after Kafka escaped it in 1924. Less “magical,” but nearly as astute, I’m also a huge fan of the novels of Joseph Roth (Austrian). He wrote of the dying world of 19th and early 20th century Mitteleuropa. Central Europe, etc. They make a great pair: Roth and Kafka. Tribune of the past. Herald of the future. Pessoa seems all to himself with his Book of Unquiet and his many masks, his separate, invented biographies. Schulz died in the Holocaust, but left us brilliant fantasies and drawings.
Murakami’s best work, IMO, is his earlier stuff. Dance Dance Dance, Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood. But it’s all very good.
WV,
Hope you and yours are more than just okay. Just heard your state has had massive flooding, with loss of life, and nearly every county is considered a disaster area.
We were hit with heavy rains, lightning storms and flooding too, but not nearly like the other Virginia.
Again, hope all is well.
I think I’m the one that needs coffee Billy. What I meant was that the youngsters wanted to stay the oldsters wanted to leave. Which would make my earlier post about racism nonsensical.
No worries, Waterfield. It’s a very confusing world out there. To be really Zen about it all, we need to go with the flow and be confused and confusing ourselves. Something I’ve always been really good at . . . even before I discovered Zazen.
;>)
Waterfield, unless I misread you, I think you’re contradicting yourself.
It looks like you first said the older voters were more likely to want to stay, and then with the last comment, more likely to want to leave.
Then, again, I think I may need some more coffee. So I might be wrong.
:>)
WV,
As mentioned before, a focus on guns doesn’t prevent a focus on all kinds of other issues. We can deal with many things at the same time, and that’s the norm.
That said, to me, cars are quite different from guns, in a host of ways. But this one is key: They are designed to transport people safely from one place to another. They are not designed to kill, though they do sometimes. Guns, OTOH, have one purpose: to kill. They can’t take you to market. You can’t eat them. You can’t drink them. They’re designed to kill. Cars aren’t. And when people do kill others with their cars, it’s virtually always accidental. People intentionally use guns all the time to kill, or rape, or kidnap, or overthrow democratically elected leaders, etc. etc.
Also, whipping up a frenzy of fear and paranoia, so more and more people buy guns — the right’s speciality — helps corporate capitalism. A lot. Placing common sense, public safety regulations on guns would actually hurt their bottom lines. In a small way, it’s fighting corporate capitalism, while at the same time saving lives.
Btw, I’m in favor of reducing speed limits too. Not sure what the science tells us is the ideal. But, yeah. That’s an excellent idea.
I also think legally-mandated, NRA-led restrictions on research into gun violence represents this 1984-style weirdness.
I don’t buy for a second that government will take our guns away, but I already know a lobby group took our research away.
Agree with your edit, too.
IMO, government’s main client is Big Business. Always has been in America. It’s not going to hurt Big Business with a mass confiscation, ever. It will never, ever “go there,” at least as currently configured.
Ironically, the side of the debate in favor of violent revolution to topple “tyrannical government,” using guns, would most certainly engage in gun confiscation of its enemies. To me, anyone who believes they would remain consistent “gun rights” advocates, once in power, after a bloody revolution, is beyond naive.
Of course, they’re also beyond naive if they think they could topple the government by force in the first place.
My two cents: I’d strike a balance between the two extremes of the gun debate:
No guns
No restrictions on gunsTo me, this is the best way to balance the interests of gun owners and public safety, and it easily conforms with the 2nd amendment, even under Heller — which no longer has majority support on SCOTUS, btw.
I’d limit our guns to just those with internal chambers only. No detachable ammo containers of any kind, shape, name or type. No ability to modify guns to utilize them, ever, under any circumstance. No way. No how. Six bullets max. Must be hand loaded, and that’s key. That way, there isn’t any chance of getting lost in the weeds over gun jargon or semantics, so we don’t have to argue about what constitutes an “assault weapon,” etc. etc. It’s very straight forward and easy for anyone to understand.
Six shooters, max. Must be hand loaded, one bullet at a time. This provides for self-defense, target practice and hunting. But it will also radically reduce the likelihood of mass shootings, as has been the case in Australia. The gun that sparked the ban in Australia was the AR-15, and since it and similar guns were banned, no mass shootings have occurred there, and their total gun homicides have fallen by half.
My proposal will save lives. Actual, human lives. And that should be THE focus.
There are lots of other things we can do to reduce gun carnage in America. But that’s where I’d start.
A major theme that is missing most of the time is the idea of limited federal government. That is, that the Constitution in many ways was to set limits on what the federal government could do, but was hands off in regards to what the states could do (exception being the Bill of Rights, which the states also must follow).
That is one way to look at things. From my reading of the Constitution and the founders, and the Revolutionary War period and its aftermath, I draw quite different conclusions. I don’t see the new government as being formed with the intent to limit itself at all. Far from it. In fact, I see the shift from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution as one of the most radical increases in federal power in history, up to that time. One need merely look at Article One, Section Eight, and see the massive powers the founders gave to themselves to know this. The General Welfare clause, the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and all kinds of powers to tax and spend at will.
As for the states. The shift away from the Articles of Confederation was also a shift away from state power, and this was, perhaps, completed with the Civil War and the amendments that followed, which basically annihilated “states’ rights.” But even before that, the Constitution already had the Supremacy Clause, so it always trumped the states.
In short, personally, I think it’s a conservative myth that the founders ever intended to restrict their own powers, and quite the opposite was the case. It was a massive expansion of federal power, well beyond the British, in fact.
Not at all saying the above was (necessarily) good, or bad, or anything in particular. In many ways, such centralized power has been terrible. But our states don’t have a history of acting any better. So they’ve been every bit as “tyrannical” when that word actually applies.
I would rather see no political parties, no capitalism, no states, no ruling class (or any class divisions whatsoever) and no state apparatus . . . just small, local, democratic, left-anarchist communities, federated to one another, living under a Constitution created by the people, for the people — something we never got.
Instead, our Constitution was created by fewer than a dozen white slaveholders, with no input from millions and millions of Americans. We can do better. Much, much better, IMO.
And that kinda sums up the difference in the ‘gun-debate’
One trusts the gov. (on guns) One doesn’t.w
vBut is that really the difference? I don’t trust the government. And I don’t trust 2nd amendment absolutists — I’m trying to be nice with my terms. I don’t trust either of them. I also don’t believe that the rationale for having guns (put forward by those on the “gun rights” side) — they must have their AR-15s to defend against government tyranny — makes any sense. I see it as insane, to be honest. For a host of reasons. And from my encounters with those who hold these beliefs, they’re all too often the last people on earth I’d want to lead the revolution against a system I, too, want to replace. I just want to replace it non-violently, democratically.
To them, “tyranny” usually consists of things like raising tax rates on rich people, the existence of Medicare, small grazing fees on public lands, and the mere existence of public lands themselves. They also have more than their share of white supremacists in their midst. It’s pretty rare for blacks and minorities to hold those views, even though they really have far more reason to be angry about things than the “gun rights” crowd. They tend not to side with gun extremists, however.
To me, the debate can’t be divided that way, WV. Just my take, but I don’t think that’s an accurate way to describe differences.
Quick followup: Personally, I am opposed to BOTH visions for America. The GOP’s and the Dems’. I find them both despicable on balance. Though I see one as slightly less despicable overall.
I just find it beyond ironic that it is the Dems and Obama who are the real conservatives (with exceptions and room for nuance, etc), as that word has traditionally been defined . . . . at least since the French gave us the Left/Right split to talk about in the late 18th century.
To me, the Dems are the actual conservatives now, the true center-right party. And the GOP is well to the right of actual conservatism. I see them and much of their constituency as far-right radicals, not “conservative” as that word has traditionally been used.
Again, I detest both visions for America and the world and wish we could have true leftist alternatives. Anticapitalist, antiwar, against all empire, against hierarchy, against the class system entirely . . . . pro-environment, pro-human rights. Libertarian socialist, left-anarchist, in a nutshell. That would be my preference.
To make a long story short, I think too many people assume that “conservative” rulings must be an attempt to return us to our origins, or to “traditional” America. In reality — and this is not hyperbole — in the last three decades or so, American movement conservatives have engaged in the most radical reshaping of our judicial landscape in history. Again, this is not hyperbole. And this radical reshaping is “new,” as ZN mentions. It is the opposite of some return to a golden age . . . . though that’s what movement conservatives claim they’re doing. Taking us back.
In reality, they have been forging a brand new, quite radical and literally unprecedented conception of America. Ironically, it’s Obama and the Dems who have been trying to hold onto the past.
