"A book should be an axe to break up the frozen sea within."--Kafka
I am about a third of the way through The Shock Doctrine. It is an incredibly absorbing read. It is also very, very grim. I feel like I understand what Greek tragedy was all about it in a new way from reading Klein's book. The Greeks knew what happened to Agamemnon. They knew what happened to Oedipus. But they still wanted to watch the story dramatized. They wanted to stand at the nexus of the profound desire to avert catastrophe and the enormous limits on our ability to do so, and to let that shock them into another way of living. When we read Klein, we have at least some sense of what Pinochet was about. Suharto. Margeret Thatcher. Tiannamen Sqaure. Yeltsin. We know these stories do not end well. And yet there is something about the fatality of it, the apparent inevitability of it, as we watch the aspirations of whole peoples being pulverized by the imposition of Milton Friedman's fantasies of purity, that makes it impossible to look away from.
Even when I am not reading the book, it is as if there is a cloud of heaviness that follows me about through the day. The ruthlessness of these men. The cunning. The obsessive belief that too much free market shock is not enough. Not forceful enough. Not fast enough. Not enough.
For most of my life, I have felt pride in being an American. When I graduated from college in 1992, I had absorbed a lot of academic anti-American sentiment and the theory that underwrites it. But I went to live in Berlin, and this taught me to appreciate the comforts of home. Wryness, indie rock, downtown New York theater, Joan Didion, indie film. There were so many distinctly American things that I missed living in Germany. Our social safety net is vastly inferior to Germany's, but there is a bureaucratized quality to life there that we don't have here. I really came to appreciate that.
Politically, I knew that there was a lot wrong with American life and the American story, but I somehow still believed that we were a benign presence in the world.
This book, and the last year in American political life, has changed all that.
The sociopathic forces driving globalization frighten me. The short-sightedness. The lack of empathy. The determination to crush anything in their way. The indifference to the misery and grief inflicted on millions of people. The arrogant, self-congratulatory proclamations about liberalization and the lip service to democracy. The hubris. The vanity.
It makes all of this squabbling with Republicans about who is tougher on terrorism and fighting on healthcare reform seem like a game of tiddly-winks. Where is the new regulatory regime for Wall Street? Where is the recognition that government exists for people, not for corporations? Where is the new era of transparency and accountability in government? The end to the old Washington ways, to backroom deals and the colossal influence of lobbyists? To relentless warfare? The concern for the ecology of the planet?
Where is it?
We need it back.
Now.