Norbert and the Nukes

[MonteDavis]

That's the best Pavlovian response I've seen since Dog Vanya passed on.
FWIW, Corporate Communications is me: a freelance writer for the last 25
years, freelance journalist for the first ten of those. That would make
your "might cost you your job" sound silly -- if it weren't unthinkable
for the Scourge of the Multinationals to sound silly.

My point in referring to other power sources -- a point you missed in
lunging for what you thought was the jugular -- was that any new source
of power is two-edged. Newcomen and Watt empowered the dark Satanic
mills. They also ensured that the miners of Wigan, hard as their lives
were, lived better and longer than had the slaves digging silver at
Laureion (which financed Periclean Athens).
 
Hell, go to Potosi' in Bolivia, where the tin miners (most of the silver
is gone now) are *still* damn near slaves. Enlighten them about the sins
of Alfred Nobel, and take away that accursed dynamite; turn off the
ventilating fans, which use the technology of that capitalist magnate
Tom Edison. I'm sure they'll know what to do with their picks.

But back to Wigan -- which, of course, brings us to Orwell. You've cited
him from time to time, although you seem to have absorbed much more of
his admirably snarky independence than of his self-knowledge or
imaginative sympathy. I commend to your attention his essay/reviews of
James Burnham's books. They're the clearest foreshadowings of 1984 in
all his non-fiction; they bring out the limits of Burnham's assumptions
about corporatism (any WWII flavor) and the role of the
technological/managerial elite.

And yet -- my second point, which you also missed -- they reveal to a
1990s eye that Orwell, every bit as much as Wiener, was constrained by
some broader, harder-to-see assumptions of the 1940s. Should he be
savaged for that?

Not by me, because one of the many things Orwell learned slowly, and
helped me to learn (as Pynchon has), was that righteous indignation is
seductive and addictive. Cf. Roger Mexico's genuinely inspiring and
genuinely silly assault on Twelfth House, coming up on p. 632
(Viking/Penguin).   
 
It supplies a sense of crusading purpose *so* much more satisfying than
anything available to those glozing neuters, the academics (and
corporate mouthpieces) of the world.

It's the best fuel for eloquence -- always valuable to a writer,
especially when the woodpile is that damp Sitka spruce.

And it makes for such a nice clear demarcation between Them and Us --
even (or especially) if you're wrong.

- Monte <votre frere, votre semblable>

***

[attaching this to the Wiener thread, a valuable and rather more
P-list-related one, where I think it belongs]