The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/capitalism/page/4)
[Columnist Rhyd Wildermuth is one of our talented monthly columnist. If you enjoy reading his work, consider donating to our Wild Hunt Fall Fund Drive today. It is you that makes it all possible! Your donations go directly back to getting the important news out there. Donate today and help keep The Wild Hunt going for another year.
In the 2011 sci-fi film In Time, Justin Timberlake plays a factory worker in a dystopian future where each person is born with a set allotment of time-currency. The poor work to buy more time from their bosses, while paying their time to others for rent, or food, or other necessities, constantly checking their time-balance (a digital clock embedded into their flesh) to ensure they have enough to survive the next day. In the constructed world of the movie, when you are out of time, you die. Elsewhere in this future world, others have plenty of time–the wealthy hoard hours and days from the masses of the poor, living long and opulent lives. Their own days seem near infinite; their worries minor compared to the workers in other ‘Time Zones,’ who scramble constantly in time-debt trying to have enough minutes to feed their children.
“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.” – Herman Melville
I. Perception and Ideology
Standing on one corner of an intersection on a main drag in Eugene, Oregon, a young man with earbuds dances around while waving and twirling a “Little Caesars” sign in the shape of an arrow that’s pointing toward the restaurant. He stands out there most days from 9 to 5, and most likely makes $9.10 an hour, minimum wage in this state. One only has to stand and observe the dancing sign guy on the corner for a few minutes to notice the reaction to his presence is mostly positive. People wave from cars driving by; others honk,and some give a thumbs-up. The dancing sign man returns the energy as well as the friendly hand signals.
I celebrated Imbolc before a hearth-fire with a Christian. Not a ‘pure’ Christian, mind you. One learns in Druidry that purity isn’t something that can exist within Nature, let alone human belief. What’s purity anyway, except a violent stripping away of flesh and bone to get to the very ‘pure’ and perfect core of existence? And by then, all you’ve got is a pile of shredded skin and muscle and hair and no life left.
[To close out this American holiday weekend, we welcome our own columnist Rhyd Wildermuth to share a review of the book This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein.Tomorrow we return to our regular Wild Hunt schedule. ]
Review: This Changes Everything–Capitalism vs. The Climate,by Naomi Klein (Simon &Schuster, 2014, 566 pages)
Journalist and author Naomi Klein may be known to some of you through her previous works, including her creedal call against corporate branding No Logo and her ponderous and depressing book, The Shock Doctrine, which discusses the political games played by corporations and governments in order to ram through neo-Liberal, anti-democratic policies. In This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Klein has done something very few journalists, policy makers, or even environmentalists have been willing to do for the last few decades.