Saturday, January 31, 2004
(8:45 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Bush isn't our fault; let's go to Europe
Via a Gauche, this Washington Monthly article traces a disturbing trend:
But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I'm convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America's human capital and interconnectedness to the world--crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government's attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, "You don't belong here."
[...]
"Over the last few years, as the conservative movement in the U.S. has become more entrenched, many people I know are looking for better lives in Canada, Europe, and Australia," a noted entymologist at the University of Illinois emailed me recently. "From bloggers and programmers to members of the National Academy I have spoken with, all find the Zeitgeist alien and even threatening. My friend says it is like trying to research and do business in the 21st century in a culture that wants to live in the 19th, empires, bibles and all."
Count me among the bloggers who find the Zeitgeist alien and even threatening. Reading Spurious yesterday (a really wonderful site that I highly recommend -- again, found through a Gauche), I found this text from Deleuze and Guattari:
The children of May 68, you can run into them all over the place, even if they are not aware of who they are. Each country produces them in its own way. Their situation isn't so great. These are not young executives. These are strangely indifferent, and for this very reason are in the right frame of mind. They have stopped being demanding and narcissistic, but they know perfectly well that nothing today corresponds to their subjectivity, to their potential of energy. They even know that all current reforms are rather directed against them. They are determined to mind their own business as much as they can. They hold it open, hang on to something possible. It is Coppola who created their poetized portrait in Rusty James. The actor Mickey Rourke explained: "The character is at the end of his rope, on the edge. He's not the Hell's Angel type. He's got brains and he's got good sense. But he hasn't got any university degree. And it is this combination that makes him go crazy. He knows that there's no job for him because he is smarter than any guy willing to hire him" (Libération, February 15, 1984).
Lucky for me, I have a university degree.
To round out this link-and-blockquote fest, I have this gem from a book review by Cap'n Pete:
At one point she even says something about someone's words that seem to float into the blue sky. Into the blue sky? I was embarassed for her. Hasn't she ever read any Latin American literature. Their descriptions of a spool of yarn or a woman's smile are so unique and poetic, they should serve as a criteria, prohibiting any writer from ever describing the sky as blue. Not even Hemingway would put something so simple.
The whole review is worth reading, especially the final paragraph (I won't quote it, to increase the probability that some of you will go to the site of one of our most prolific commenters).
