The systemic drive
of capitalism
produces
cheapening labor
(reduce input costs)
expanding markets
(new venues for profit)
economic growth
constant innovation in production
ushering in a new order
of economic reason,
of governing rationality.

Thus
capital itself,
gives shape to human worlds,
the power of world making.

Capital
dominates the human beings,
and human worlds it organizes.

– Excerpt, Undoing the Demos – Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown p. 75-76

Back to to home base.  It feels good to return home.  Return means a resumption of the work, the long standing concerns, the objects of pursuit that have compelled my mind and heart for the years, months that constitute my life in the present.  My daughter commented that reading about Galena was more agreeable than the words I’ve written on politics.  I do understand.  Words about our inheritance from our predecessors, and about the beauty that surrounds us are more agreeable to compose, than those about a way of thinking and piling up wealth that seem in some respects inhuman, alien.  Cruelty is alien.  It’s an extremity of human behavior, of one human subsisting upon the demise of another.  Love on the other hand (the other extreme) is profoundly and intentionally human.  Love is the nurturing of life, a reciprocal sharing, of the élan vital, the vital force of life.  Ask any mother, and she can explain the impulse to you.

Finally to offset the grim quotation from Wendy Brown’s fine book, I offer a magnificent anthem composed  by Paul Simon, a panegyric to the imagination.  Yes, we are “educated” to be worker-bees in the great hive of our capitalist enterprise.  Yet, the imagination always beckons.  The full spectrum colors of life experienced, tasted, felt, visually lush is more inspiring than experience mediated, served up on screens, with the objective of extracting profit, (a black and white logic, you win or you lose) from the passive observer.

So, enjoy this song written by Paul Simon, Kodachrome, that makes the point in lyric and tune better than I ever will accomplish.  The youtube of a live concert in Central Park includes a second song, Maybellene, which you will want to enjoy.  Lyrics follow the video.

Kodachrome

When I think back on all the crap I’ve learned in highschool
It’s a wonder I can think at all
Though my lack of education hasn’t hurt me much
I can read the writings on the walls

[Chorus:]
Kodachrome, they give us those nice bright colours
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
Brought ’em all together for one night
I know they’d never match my sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white

[Chorus]

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away, mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

Mama don’t take my Kodachrome, mama don’t take my Kodachrome
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome and leave your boy so far from home
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome, whew whew, mama don’t take my Kodachrome away