MISCmedia by Clark Humphrey » Blog Archive WHAT I'VE BEEN READING

»
S
I
D
E
B
A
R
«

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING

April 3rd, 2008 by Clark Humphrey

A sad USA Today piece about a Denver-area subdivision increasingly abandoned to foreclosures.
A black college professor’s fascinating tale of why he founded a university-funded “museum of racist memorabilia.”
Sara Robinson’s similarly-themed essay in which she bemoans stereotyping and us-vs.-them dehumanization in America, then blames all of it on people who are different from her. No, she doesn’t get the irony.
A much more optimistic Rolling Stone profile of Sen. Obama’s campaign organization, showing the practical value of including everybody into the “us” group.
Naomi Klein’s weighty tome Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.Klein painstakingly traces the entirety of the global tragedy that is right-wing power-grabbing (coups, dictatorships, Iraq, even the response to Hurricane Katrina) back to Milton Friedman. You see, before Friedman ran the Federal Reserve Board (where he was credited/blamed for holding puppet strings on the entire U.S. economy), he ran the U. of Chicago’s school of economics, where “Chicago School” pundits and scholars produced long and ponderous statements offering complex reasoned arguments for letting big business do any damned thing it wanted to.
Klein’s own reasoning is lucid, and her documentation is voluminous. But it’s incomplete.

Economic theory is only one head of the Hydra-like monster that comprises power and privilege in this world. A more worthwhile look at the evils done in the name of America over the decades would look at the topic with more breadth, even if it meant less depth.