From cultural critic Mike Davis, RIP. One of his last essays, March 2022. [ after Russia's invasion]. I am esp taken with "nightmare edition of Great Men Make History".

[Charles Albert]

Hey, I'm totally blown away that you are on a first name basis.


love,

cfa

On Thu, Oct 27, 2022, 10:38 AM Darah Kehnemuyi via Pynchon-l <
pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:

>  That's Giambatista Vico ... sorry...              D.
>     On Thursday, October 27, 2022 at 10:36:13 AM EDT, Darah Kehnemuyi via
> Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:
>
>   Giambattista's cyclical theory of history: the Age of Gods, followed by
> the Age of Heroes, followed by the Age of Man, followed by Chaos, recorso
> back to the Age of Gods...
> I have tended to think with Enlightenment we entered the Age of Man
> looking forward toward Chaos.  But the point of view offered here is that
> perhaps we are in the Age of Heroes (Great Man History) looking toward the
> Age of Man ... maybe ... hopefully ...             D.
>     On Thursday, October 27, 2022 at 09:43:41 AM EDT, Mark Kohut <
> mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  (Let me note, however, the curious example of the speech that Thomas
> Piketty gave on 16 February at the Pentagon’s National Defense University.
> As part of a regular series of talks on ‘Responding to China’, the French
> economist argued that ‘the West’ must challenge Beijing’s rising hegemony
> by abandoning its ‘dated hyper-capitalist model’ and promoting instead a
> ‘new emancipatory egalitarian horizon on a global scale’. A strange venue
> and pretext, to say the least, for advocating democratic socialism.)
>
> Nature meanwhile is taking back the reins over history, making its own
> titanic compensations, at the expense of powers, especially over natural
> and engineered infrastructures, that empires once thought to control. In
> this light, the ‘Anthropocene’ with its hint of the promethean, seems
> especially ill-fitted to the reality of apocalyptic capitalism.
>
> As an objection to my pessimism, one might claim that China is
> clear-sighted where everyone else is blind. Certainly, its vast vision of a
> unified Eurasia, the Belt and Road project, is a grand design for the
> future, unequalled since the sun of the ‘American Century’ rose over a
> war-shattered world. But China’s genius, 1949-59 and 1979-2013, has been
> its neo-mandarin practice of collective leadership, centralized but
> plurivocal. Xi Jinping, in his ascent to Mao’s throne, is the worm in the
> apple. Although he has economically and militarily enhanced China’s clout,
> his reckless unleashing of ultra-nationalism could yet open a nuclear
> Pandora’s Box.
>
> We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History’.
> Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential
> cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the
> top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and
> Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power
> been put into so few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero graves
> of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem
> Schwarzbard.
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