3 June
12
Who
said, "History is what happened, but literature is what people thought
about it"? Anyway, it's true. Reading Dos Passos' letters in the
hammock under sifting leaves, a swollen blue spring sky; feeling
connected not only to the world but to its history, through the
time-capsule of Dos' missives.
At this
point he's reporting for Life Magazine from Europe in the aftermath
of World War II, and from his writing you get a real insider's feel
for the subtleties and contradictions in the struggle between
Socialism and Capitalism. Dos was perfectly on the side of the
working man and Labor up through the Thirties. But what he and many,
Orwell especially, saw in the Spanish Civil War was the divisive
Communist Russian effort to put down any revolutionary elements in
the fight against Franco. And later, when post-war Europe became a
testing ground for “monolithic bureaucracy”, as Dos called it
derisively, he grew wary of the Russian's designs on the rest of the
continent. He was always for individual liberty and loathed any
restriction put on it, whether by Capitalist monopolies or the one
party systems claiming ground in eastern Europe.
Nowadays
it's mostly conservatives on Fox News who do the clamoring for
liberty. But the left has always been concerned about the matter,
only from a different angle. The
right's fear of Big Brother is so restricted to Big Government that
it can't see how corporations have gotten a strangle-hold on our
society. It won't even consider how government might be our only
chance, through elections and civic participation, to have some say
in the matter. (Other than doing all we can to buy local and avoid
corporate production lines.) To the right, Government is just more
oppressive bureaucracy, a hangover from twentieth-century Europe,
while Business is the golden embodiment of Free Will trotting over
the level playing field of the Free Market to deliver bounty to the
masses.
But
both gov and biz are just systems, intrinsically neutral until profit
motives and human frailty are introduced. These days I'd sooner take
my chances with a government of the people, one that must at least
consider the results of the ballot box, than a massive corporate
structure that feeds on profits and stock market value at all costs.
What kind of “freedom” do we have when your choice in food stuff
is a decision between CrackDonald's and Maulmart, when the radio
plays an elevator music medley of classic rock and jingoistic
country, when the only way out of your suburban coldesac is a drive
and then an onramp and an offramp into another suburban culdusac, or
when the only option politically is a right of center Republican and
slightly less than right of center Democrat, both in the sway of
industry interests. The few “freedoms” we see manifested these
days are typically coming out of the left, alternatives to the
“monolithic bureaucracy” of the corporate model in the form of
non-profit and public radio, a return to small-scale organic farming,
efforts to improve mass transit and healthy communities through
bicycle facilities, etc. I point out the obvious only because I'm
tired of the right's constant claim to protectorate of individual
liberty when they're the ones in the driver's seats of the SUV
caravan rolling over the little guys out front scouting for new paths
out of this mess.
Now I'm
beginning to rant, and make bad metaphors, and ruining a serene swing
in the hammock. I don't know if the far right and far left can ever
unite in their fight for “individual liberty.” But a
mis-portrayal of the labor movement as merely the villain in the Cold
War isn't helping. (See public sector scape-goating from Minnesota to
Idahota.) Socialism was around long before the Cold War and what the
Communist Party did under its banner, long before it became Reagan's
whipping boy. A good read of the thinkers of the past century
certainly does help one's view, though, and spirit. Twain said,
History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. But, may I add, only if
we're listening for its verses. And those tunes surely aren't being
played on the corporate air waves.
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