Monday, November 15, 2010

Monday Blues: Where Do We Go From Here?

NY TIMES: Is it time to awake from the American dream?

"Perhaps because they were making so much money out of it, Americans were slow to notice something peculiar about the American dream, and potentially divisive. The ideal of living “unhampered,” as Adams put it, by the barriers to social mobility erected in other countries is meaningful most of all to those familiar with other countries. The American dream is more evident to elites (including well-traveled historians like Adams) and to immigrants than it is to others. It is cosmopolitanism masquerading as American exceptionalism. When the billionaire Peter Peterson announced this year that he would join an initiative launched by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and use at least half his wealth for philanthropy, he referred to himself as “the son of poor Greek immigrants who has certainly lived the American dream.” Paradoxically, it is Peterson’s Greekness rather than his Americanness that gives him the bona fides to pronounce on the subject.

"Most of the time we do not realize that what we are dreaming is the American dream, any more than we realize that what we are speaking is prose. World travelers, politicians and self-made men are not wrong to see the promise of American life as a stirring and romantic tale. To the median, native-born American with no other frame of reference but his life’s span in this country, however, it is not a dream. It is simply the social contract. We are increasingly discovering that there are rational, nononeiric* ways to measure when that contract is being broken."

(*=non-dreamlike)
More here

NY POST: Why Middle Income Jobs Aren’t Coming Back (hint: the economy is working the way it is currently designed to work) here 

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Current Reading

  • Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War- Tony Horwitz
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  • Hitch-22: A Memoir - Christopher Hitchens
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  • Dead Funny: Humor in Nazi Germany - Rudolph Herzog
  • Exile on Main Street - Robert Greenfield
  • Among the Truthers - A Journey Among America's Growing Conspiracist Underworld - Jonathan Kay
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  • What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Thinking the Unthinkable - John Brockman
  • Notes from the Edge Times - Daniel Pinchbeck
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  • Un Juif pour l'exemple (translated as A Jew Must Die )- Jacques Cheesex
  • The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
  • Pale King - David Foster Wallce
  • David Bowie: Starman bio - Paul Trynka
  • Tobacco Stained Mountain Goat - Andrez Bergen
  • The Future of Nostalgia -Svetlana Boym
  • Living in the End Times - Slavoj ZIzek
  • FIrst as Tragedy Next as Farce - Slavoj Zizek
  • How to Survive a Robot Uprising - Daniel Wilson
  • Where is My Jet Pack? -Daniel Wilson
  • Day of the Oprichniks - Vladimir Sorokin
  • Ice Trilogy - Vladimir Sorokin
  • First Civilizations
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  • Charles Addams: An Evilution
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  • Violence - S. Zizek
  • Luba - a graphic novel by Gilbert Hernandez
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  • Nazi Culture - various authors
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  • Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt
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  • Gomorrah - Roberto Saviano - Mafia without the It-Am sugar coating. Brutal & disturbing
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  • The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menard
  • Coast of Utopia - Tom Stoppard
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  • Managing the Unexpected - Weick & Sutcliffe
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  • Howl - Allen Ginsberg
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  • The Palace Thief - Ethan Canin
  • John Adams - David McCullough
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  • Ghost Hunters -William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death - Deborah Blum
  • Dream -Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy - Stephen Duncombe
  • Love & Theft - Eric Lott
  • Exit Ghost - Philip Roth
  • Studio A - The Bob Dylan Reader

Current Listening

  • Alexi Murdoch Wait
  • Wilco Summer Teeth
  • Wilco The Album
  • Carmina Burana - Ray Manzarek (& Michael Riesmann)
  • Polyrock - Polyrock
  • 96 Tears - Garland Jeffries
  • Ghost of a Chance Garland Jeffries
  • Yellow Magic Orchestra
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  • John Lee Hooker
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  • DYLAN: 3 disc Greatest...
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  • Wild Palms - Soundtrack -Ryuichi Sakamoto
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  • Commander Cody& His Lost Planet Airmen Live at Armadillo