A Day of Meetings, and a Democrat or Aristocrat?

金曜日午後、地元の「芸能プロダクション」と打ち合わせ。来月、当地に日本から来る歌手のステージ組み立てに通訳としてお付き合いすることになった。熱くてホコリの多い「現場仕事」は製鉄所で経験済み。どちらかというとそんな環境が好きだし、 何とかなるだろう。夕方は、「牛肉」資料の質問について打ち合わせ。

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The (“tough love”) rollback campaign on the social, economic, political, and ideological fronts exploits opportunities afforded by significant shifts of power in the past 20 years, into the hands of the masters. The intellectual level of prevailing discourse is beneath contempt, and the moral level grotesque. But the assessment of prospects that lies behind them is not unrealistic. That is, I think, the situation in which we now find ourselves, as we consider goals and visions.

As always in the past, one can choose to be a democrat in Jefferson’s sense, or an aristocrat. The latter path offers rich rewards, given the locus of wealth, privilege and power, and the ends it naturally seeks. The other path is one of struggle, often defeat, but also rewards that cannot be imagined by those who succumb to “the New Spirit of the Age: Gain Wealth, forgetting all but Self (ideals depicted and denounced by the working class press of the mid-19th century).”

Today’s world is far from that of Thomas Jefferson or mid-19th century workers. The choices it offers, however, have not changed in any fundamental way. (p. 209, Goals and Visions (1996), “Chomsky on Anarchism”)