Well the trains still won't run on time

I’ve been trying to complete a ton of projects…so please excuse my blogging absence. I’ll try and knock out an essay or two over the next few days.

I watched a very interesting talk that John Dean gave on C-SPAN while he was out shilling for his book. You need to be up very late or purchase that talk in order to view it. He did an interesting interview with Keith Olberman which includes the text of his interview. The MSNBC site notes:

"Are we on the road to fascism?" he [i.e., John Dean] writes. "Clearly, we are not on that road yet. But it would not take much more misguided authoritarian leadership, or thoughtless following of such leaders, to find ourselves there.

In many ways the face of US authoritarianism is also rooted in a desire to totally and completely dissolve the ability of government to check the power of US corporations. The current upstate hassles and complications in dealing with the desire of NYRI to run a powerline through our backyards are an example of this trend. Why should a corporation have to worry about some idiots engaged in NIMBY when there is money to be made? Well that is the Dick Cheney view of the universe and soon they'll start looking at more and more of the resources of Central New York. After all the Adirondacks are the playground of the wealthy and they provide water to NYC. So the lands adjacent to the Northway will not be touched - but out in desolate and dullish CNY we have nothing except cheap land, power and water. Soon we'll be home to even more landfill sites for NYC trash. I suspect that our power and water will also flow toward downstate. Meanwhile the delusion will continue that voting Republican will somehow stop this dumb show.

Plus, there seems to be a desire to create a situation in which our collective power as a people to do anything is checked. It is as if they want us to feel powerless to do anything – hence, the trash never gets picked up in New Orleans, the military is unable to get the job done in Iraq, etc.

IMO, the root of this is an attempt to infantilize the plebe, i.e., whilst reminding us to ignore the fella in the booth a la the Wizard of Oz. The result we become more dullish and dutifully fearful of life and fear itself.