Lewis Lapham and Thomas Frank Forecast the Next American Revolution [View all]

[marmar]

via truthdig:





Harper’s Magazine associates Lewis Lapham and Thomas Frank have had their eyes on America and its moneyed rulers for a combined nine decades. In a conversation in late March at the Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt, the two talked about the current “Revolution” issue of Lapham’s Quarterly and named the forces conspiring to drive the nation into another age of upheaval. The discussion was featured in Frank’s column on Salon on Sunday under the title “Our Sad ‘Mad Men’ Revolution: How Consumerism Co-Opted Rebellion.”

To begin, Lapham, who says that as a journalist he has never been concerned with stoking revolution, describes the current issue of his Quarterly as taking on revolutions of various kinds—“political, scientific, technological.” To his mind, he says, those of us alive today are always in the midst of the revolution announced by Karl Marx in 1848, which is “the constant change in the means of production and the reducing of all human meaning and endeavor to a money transaction.”

Americans on both the right and left are anxious for drastic social change. Many are seeking to make it happen themselves. Lapham understands the evolution of civilizations, of which revolution is a part, to occur along lines determined by ongoing historical trends, including the breakdown of a society’s overextended parts in the manner that growing bubbles inevitably pop. “I suspect that if any genuinely revolutionary change takes place it will be forced upon us by a collapse of some kind in the system,” he told the bookstore audience. “That’s another form of revolution that you find across time where the civilization or the ancien regime falls apart of its own dead weight. And in the ruins, the phoenix of a new idea or a new thought or a new system of value takes its place. But that’s not something that can be organized by a committee or preached from a column in the New York Times, or even by a four-day conference about American values sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.”

“I don’t think we have to be concerned that we’re not parading around in the streets,” he added. “It will come of its own accord sooner rather than later.”

In a chilling story about the limited vitality available to the American counterculture, Lapham described “the death of the Beat Generation in San Francisco in 1959,” which he said he witnessed. He was at the scene’s “last holdout” bar on a Tuesday afternoon. Beat figures John Kerouac, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were long gone. Out of nowhere a Hollywood producer, “dreadful looking … gold chain, white shirt, paunch, slicked back hair,” walks in and tells all the young, somnolent patrons he wants to cast them as extras in a movie. The pay was $50 a day each, but the boys had to shave their faces and put on khaki pants and blue button-down shirts, and the girls, tweed skirts. “One of you can still look dark and sullen,” the guy said. “This is a movie for Americans.” Everyone ignored him. Then he finally stopped talking. .............................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/lewis_lapham_and_thomas_frank_talk_the_next_american_revolution_20140504