Tuesday 20 December 2011

the trend is towards the bourgeois-smug

With the fomenting of the delicate succession in North Korea and rampant speculation about the elections in Russia, politicians and reporters perhaps ought to be a bit more gracious in their commentary--not censored and restrained but on the contrary, using the voice and platform they have to speak for the oppressed and as well as admonishing their audience about their own tenuous state of affairs, how their ability to voice those opinions is under constant threat and due vigilance is never out of bounds.

Guarding against both writ-large and petty, creeping tyrannies is not something that's lulled or beaten out of the people with the tattoo of economic indicators and security, and given the state of politics in the Western powers, one might do well to acknowledge the diminishing margin for criticism, leisurely or otherwise. The "will" of the American people in next year's US presidential election, filtered through campaigns, slant, libel and lobbyists, potentially poses a bigger threat to the world than the not insignificant legacy of dictators. Reckoning among the influence peddlers in the banks, the military-industrial complex and the patent-holders, the average person is less at liberty, and some have gone so far to decry the United States for its leadership role towards martial law. The legal fictions of the theatre of war and trademark broadened beyond integrity are hardly the hallmarks of a free society that treasures those freedoms. It is insidious, thrown off-balance between macro-economic fears and bread-and-circuses satisfaction in miniature, to have one's liberties eroded and disappeared by regimes less transparent, despite secrets and isolation, than any dictatorship. In that hard slog to shore up the euro, Germany has won levels of confidence hardly before seen as a Wirtschaftswunder with noblesse oblige but has also forgotten a few things along the way. Clutching irony may be hard to escape from any critique, from press to press or from government to government, but German consumer satisfaction is (forgettably) to some degree a more expert and cunning application of the dirty-tricks and short-cuts that failed America and Americans, among others. Unemployment and other gauges of social complacency are low in part over wage-stagnation, glossy inflation (electronics get cheaper but staples, higher education and health care inches upward) and glossier quantitative-easing and dabbling in the dart arts of market alchemy and easy-credit. Such placations are very effective distractions and blind us to irony as much as first finding oppression and tyranny in others.