Disappointment

posted by The Vidiot @ 7:34 AM Permalink

There we were, hoping to finally hear at least a sliver of sanity on Bill Moyers show on PBS this week. He was interviewing Mike Davis whose books Mr. Vidiot respects. So, I thought, great, finally, somebody is going to say something radical that will get people thinking. And what did they talk about? Socialism. And boy was it annoying.

For one thing, Mr. Davis seems to have sold out. How can someone who has chronicalled the ravages of capitalism on the poor even begin to speak the way he spoke during that interview? He was so completely conservative and so completely wrong on so many issues I can't even begin to pick it apart. They didn't even talk about socialism correctly.

When I first watched it, I saw it without Mr. Vidiot and I thought, "No. I must be interpreting this wrong. I have to be in idiot becuase I think he just said a lot of dumb stuff and he's Mike Davis! He can't be this dumb." So I made Mr. Vidiot watch it last night and he was as flummuxed as I.

According to Mr. Vidiot, they're using the term "socialism" all wrong. What's happening today is not a move towards socialism, it's a move towards post-capitalism. It's sort of a transition time between capitalism and post-capitalism that Mr. Vidiot calls "post traditional capitalism" wherein capitalism is kept afloat by the government. It's not true capitalism in that the corporations are not surviving on their own. They need the help of the government with bailouts and stimulus packages. According to Mr. Vidiot, it's a natural evolution of the system of capitalism that, hopefully, in the end, will benefit the majority of the world's population. Kind of like walking upright. (Feudalism was like walking on all fours. Capitalism is like walking on our knuckles.)

But Mr. Moyers and Mr. Davis got it all wrong. And frighteningly so. If Mr. Davis is supposed to be one of the great voices of the radical left, the radical left is dead meat.

Labels: politics, radicalism, sociolism, sociology