Missive #567

In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it “disaster capitalism.” Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic “shock treatment” losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman’s free market economic revolution.This book was published in 2007 but “disaster capitalism” has continued as evidenced by the hurricane and fire damage in the United States during the past 2-3 years. Which political party controls the presidency or the congress makes no difference the disaster capitalizing complex is in charge. Ukraine and Gaza are going to be the next ‘mother load’ for profit mining when the shooting stops. A recommended read. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement’s peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

This was not what the Bush administration intended for Iraq when it was selected as the model nation for the rest of the Arab world. The occupation had begun with cheerful talk of clean slates and fresh starts. It didn’t take long, however, for the quest for cleanliness to slip into talk of “pulling Islamism up from the root” in Sadr City or Najaf and removing “the cancer of radical Islam” from Fallujah and Ramadi—what was not clean would be scrubbed out by force.
That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people’s countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth—only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction.
The unanticipated violence that now engulfs Iraq is the creation of the lethally optimistic architects of the war—it was preordained in that original seemingly innocuous, even idealistic phrase: “a model for a new Middle East.” The disintegration of Iraq has its roots in the ideology that demanded a tabula rasa on which to write its new story. And when no such pristine tableau presented itself, the supporters of that ideology proceeded to blast and surge and blast again in the hope of reaching that promised land.

I went to the Adobe Cafe & Bakery for the last time this summer on Monday. Have been stopping there once or twice a month but the woman at the checkout knew exactly what I wanted to order. HA Then did some grocery gathering at Jake’s on my way back to the Park. I’ll make one more trip into town before leaving on my migration south toward warmer/hotter climes. For the past week we have been getting light showers, or brief heavy rain, almost every day with high temperatures in the 80s or upper 70s, lows have been in the 40s or lower 50s.

I finished the Western Tour & the Natchez trace conversions to Mapbox maps and WordPress pages, now available in the menu under Bicycle Tours. Will soon have completed the conversion of the last tour. Then have gone on to the Car Trips that I converted to WordPress pages many months ago but still linked to Google maps. Those I will be converting and also cleaning up the text and photo ‘styling’ to match what I have arrived at with the bicycle tour pages. That will leave all the teardrop trips still to be converted before I even think about all the other pages that I have in the Archives.

Chuck Norris has admitted to using a stunt doubles, but only for the crying parts.