Reply #33: Good point

[Squeech]

The idea that the best security would be for America to act less insensitive and arbitrary should be obvious to everybody, but apparently it isn't.

Also the motivations of the criminal cabal running things-- saving their asses is possibly the best they can hope for by now. (And better than they deserve.)

Moreover, I want to amplify my earlier remarks (as well as kick a worthy thread) but I'm not quite sure how to say what I want to say, so please bear with me here.

I'm too well aware of the way conservatism emerges as the political expression of old-fart-ism or nostalgia. This is not (quite) what I think I'm feeling. It's like the old joke about the text "Kids these days, they don't respect their elders, and their music sounds like a bunch of noise!" Who was it that first wrote that? And the joke is, if you allow for a certain poetic license in translation, Plato. Wanting things to be like the good old days is something all of us of a certain age are subject to.

But as it happens, the last few novels I've read have been that species of chick-lit where the heroine, of a certain age, looks back at her life and at certain events and decisions which at the time seemed like big important declarations of independence, then came to be seen as mistakes, and finally in the warm and fuzzy wrap-up they simply became stepping stones in becoming the person she now accepts that she is. But what I've been most interested in in the books is the subtle indicators of social change. Being chick-lit, there's a lot of domestic chore stuff being discussed, and it's interesting to see how the girl of one era thinks nothing of chopping onions, boiling potatoes, peeling carrots, and all the other tasks necessary to make beef stew, which the woman she grows to be assumes that a frozen dinner in the microwave will simulate.

It's the beef stew that I want to conserve. (Do you know there's an organization called Slow Food, devoted to appreciating food prepared with craftsmanship and attention and care? And what they oppose is the unhealthy and slapdash but increasingly profitable concepts of fast food.)

And not simply the stew, and certainly not the social constraints that assumed that the housewife would always be available-- and expected-- to cook the stew, and bake a cake from scratch, and iron the shirts and darn the socks, et home ec cetera.

But I miss a world in which it isn't a problem to block out the time you need to do something like cook a stew. I miss a world in which it's not assumed that when you set out to cook a stew, you're supposed to be grateful for every little time-saving tweak, for which reason the supermarket will happily sell you your beef trimmed and pre-cubed for your convenience and hope you won't notice or care how much more it costs per pound than the brisket of your youth.

I think the simple version of what I'm trying to say is, I miss being something other than an economic unit in the vast majority of my interactions with the outside world.

I want to conserve what it's like to *not* be someone that marketeers target, slicing and dicing their demographic analyses ever finer until they think they have a handle on exactly what motivates me, in order to sell me stuff I don't need, or to "improve" the products I do need until they hit on the combination that convinces me to pay twice as much, so they can then take the original version out of production.

I want to conserve not being alienated from the sources of stuff. When I was a kid, my dad once took me to Hershey, Pennsylvania, where the candy company of the same name is based. Back then you could tour the plant, and see the big machines (called "conches," I forget why) where they blend the various extracts from the cacao plant back together to make chocolate as we know it. Later I returned as a grownup-- and got a substantially different tour, where I sat in a goofy little cart and watched a cartoon character on a video screen explain the process while the cart took me past an audioanimatronic simulation of a conch. I guess the lawyers convinced the company of the risks involved in letting little kids have any access to a working factory-- but to me it meant that kids these days never get to see the actual process. What do they learn of it now, the Willy Wonka version? And when they grow up, will they support equal rights for oompaloompas?

(On the other hand, the street lights in town are made to look like Hershey's Kisses. I miss that our corporate citizens never miss an opportunity for branding. Talk about a company town!)

What else have we lost? I remember cider mills, where you could watch a big wooden machine slowly contract to squeeze the juice out of several bushels of apples at once, and they told us that there were sheep out back who would be happy to eat the leftovers. Do kids still get to see this? I remember the ice cream parlor with the actual freezer they made the stuff in in the shop window, churning away happily while we munched on our hot fudge sundaes. Do kids still get to see this?

The end of the line for this particular idea is, not only does America not have an industrial base any more, but the American worker has practically no role in the production of actual goods for the American consumer, as if they were completely disjoint societies-- a far cry from Henry Ford's realization that his assembly line crews were likely to be his customers, which meant that he had to pay his workers enough to be able to afford the cars. Now the world of work means sitting in a cubicle staring at a computer screen and doing something to data. In extreme cases it means Enron-- figuring out how to use leverage (in both the economic and the psychological sense) to manipulate the flow of electrons in wires in order to squeeze out profits from unwitting customers you'll never have to meet.

I want to conserve a sense of society that understands that there's more to life than business.

I hope this make some sort of sense... :shrug: