The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
what hooked me

I had to purchase the latest Threepenny Review when I picked it up, opened it and my eye fell on the following passage, from David Mamet's "Workers and Managers." I was convinced for approx. 20 minutes thereafter that the passage was just about the most brilliant capsule summary of a current sociopoliticoeconomic moment in the USA that I'd ever read:

The Bush Administration is the American corporation run wild.

Management has broken the union (the union, here, is the electorate), and the workers, as happens periodically, have got to sit down, do the math, and recognize that our health, safety, and finances can only be protected through collective action.

I thought that the passage contained the perfect metaphor to perform just about every task, because it contained within itself an almost irresistably convincing explanation for how the USA's current administration views "its" public; of the fate of the concept of "citizenship" when its every attribute is privatized and redefined in relation to corporate(ist?) power and consumption rather than "state" power and production; and how the logic of certain trends that took root a generation ago, underappreciated at the time, spread to engulf everyone, even those who may have considered themselves uninvolved.

I then read the rest of the piece and saw where the passage fits into Mamet's (as distinct from my) current knots of interest. While my intellectual crush on the above passage faded, I thought the essay remained quite spiffy.

I also discovered that I could have read the whole essay for free, online. D'oh!

posted by TiR at 7:03 AM