February 14, 2009, 4:03PM
If you wanted to express the full
meaning of the present situation in tight lipped, grim fashion, this
might be it. The new director of America's national intelligence,
Dennis C. Blair, expressed concern about long-term
harm to America's reputation. The crisis that began in American markets
has already "increased questioning of U.S. stewardship of the global
economy"
Since
the end of the Second World War the United States has been the
guarantor of the world's market economy, which since the fall of the
Soviet Union is the only "world economy". Almost
all, if not all, of the world's raw materials are priced in dollars
which only the United States can print. This has meant, roughly, that
the United States could go into the world's "supermarket" and pay with IOUs, redeemable with... more IOUs.
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February 10, 2009, 2:58PM
People learn quickly. As Lenin recognized: they can learn in 20 days what they forgot in 20 years. Richard Gott - Guardian
When
Confucius was asked what the first thing he would do if he were named
Emperor was, he replied, "I would clarify the language".
The longer I hang around on this planet, the more sense Confucian "clarification of language makes" to me.Contemporary
American English is especially treacherous in this regard. In the USA a
lover may be known as a "significant other" or even as a "partner": as
if all the rumpypumpy was happening in a law office or a hardware
store. In this slippery dialect problems aren't called problems, they
are called "issues" and child molestation is called "inappropriate
behavior"... it goes on and on.In
the world of politics, the horror of plain speech, the effort to
verbally cloud, obfuscate and confuse goes to truly Orwellian lengths.
Thus, the world wide, historical and universal color of revolutionary
socialism: red, is used in America to denominate reaction... as in "red
state". So in contemporary American English a "red state" is not Cuba
or Vietnam, it is Texas or Oklahoma. In Texas the song isn't "The East
is Red", it's "The East is Blue".So
naturally, in the USA, this Alice-less wonderland, Marx, instead of
being associated with the struggles of the working class, is much more
likely to be associated with white wine and Camembert cheese: "elitism"
is of course the word used to describe political agitation in favor the
less fortunate. Thus certain otherwise extremely useful terms
associated with Marx may sound a trifle exotic, indeed dangerous to
most American ears.
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