The Doctor and The Lawyer
Meet the new boss,
same as the old boss.
This morning, the BBC reported on the normalization of relations between Cuba and Uncle Sam.
Interviews along the streets of Havana revealed that young people -- and many who are not so young -- are thrilled by the imminent arrival of MacDonald's and Coke.
Capitalism -- through the manipulation of sugar, salt, sex and shiny surfaces -- has mastered the art of manufacturing junk and making people passionate to buy it.
This passion is undeterred even if the production and consumption of junk means the destruction of native culture's vital center and creative power.
Since "revolutionary spirit" cannot last more than a generation -- and then only as a shadowy simulacrum imposed by pragmatic autocrats -- it is probably best to determine at the outset how to set one's political sights this side of "Utopian Ideals."
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Trappist monk, Father Thomas Merton
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