Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt is about the way my life would have gone if I had not woken up to the true nature of the men of the left, at least the kind I, like her, was attracted to. Luckily, I was kicked around so badly right away that I got the message young and stayed away from those manipulative bastards thereafter. Pollitt's scary thesis is that such men liked the idea of communes and social welfare because these would let them off the hook where dull old family responsibilities and day jobs were concerned.
Women can be very smart and successful and still be foolishly hooked on charming bounders. The one Pollitt loved and sacrificed most for was, as she says, "a world class womanizer," but she failed to notice that and apparently no one told her. He had it on with untold numbers of women, a lot of whom she knew and was friendly with in the very large social world of New York lefties. What a happy hunting ground for a cocksman and with a dear little woman at home taking care of things and even making her own living! What could be better? For him, it was the best of all worlds. For her it was Hell. I hope her book sells well. It's a cautionary tale that needs to be told.
Now for Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. OY VEY! She's an economist and journalist who has written a convincing history of Milton Friedman's Chicago school economists and the CIA, the theoretical and enforcement arms, respectively, of neo-Conservative U.S. foreign policy. Their first major action was the overthrow of Allende and the imposition of "free market reforms" on the hapless Chileans. Their current fiasco, Iraq War II, is a great success from their standpoint, but it really looks as if this is the last chance they are going to get to destroy a country and take all its resources.
However, I still wouldn't put it past Bush & Co. to invade Iran. We are looking at a myth, a religion. These are True Believers. They create the facts and we report on them! Their mantra is, "Make money your god." After the fall of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukiyama wrote The End of History, extolling the triumph of market capitalism.He has since recanted. Even he now understands that killing hundreds and thousands of people and immiserating millions in the name of market ideology is not such a great idea.
What I fear is that for lack of foreign adventures the disaster capitalists will turn their attention to their last big market, the American people. How about hyperinflation, bankruptcies, natural disasters, public health emergencies, terrorist attacks? Opportunities abound.
I'm not even 100 pages into Shock Doctrine, and already the scales have been lifted from mine eyes. It's meant for the general reader and clearly written but still not easy to read because of its content, especially the material on torture.
And now to the scary dream: for those who find other people's dreams boring, you may leave now.
I had two audiences with President Bush. I came right up to him and sat on his lap. (UGH!) I said, look, you have to understand that children get sick and sometimes families have problems paying medical bills. Don't you know how that is? His mother, Barb, was sitting there with a stupid smile on her face, taking it in but making no comments. He was pretending to care, but his mind was far away. UGH UGH UGH. He's invaded my imagination. He's like a Halloween horror monster. I'm still shuddering at the sheer awfulness of the idea of being in physical proximity to him. It felt like torture.
A lot of other people have this visceral loathing of him, too. It's a kind of shock. I wonder if they are thinking, "Is this a man or a ghoul? Maybe I should give up, if that's what we get for a leader." Brrr!! I'm still frightened.
