Exterminate the (soixante-huitard) brutes!
June 11, 2008
With music from your Melancholy Muse. And, yes, I am going to see him next month.
Long live the Front de libération du Québec!
Yesterday’s Liberation newspaper had an article by an activist, Alex Foti, who apparently organised something called Euromayday, and who was aged two in 1968 and presumably still in his pram.
Tuer 1968 au sens freudian, is the headline. And I suppose we ’68s can be grateful that it is only an Oedipal wish.
“We reject ‘leftwing caviar’ and the tendency to intellectual ’saturnism’,” he says. “We’re more ‘hereticals’ than them in relation to western modernity, more ‘punks’, more pirates, more ‘queer’, more radical in a practical way since we control the means of production thanks to computers and the internet.”
Radical?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Microsoft and Apple (not to mention eBay, Amazon, YouTube and MySpace, and of course, I suppose, WordPress) control the means of production!
Although it is true, as Alex says, the 1968 generation thought it had killed God once and for all, and now, post 7/11 and all that, religion and cultural identity have once again become central, is it not the case that having had one god, well actually two, that failed, he is erecting a third god-like figure?
At least he has sufficient sense of irony to make his slip into a freudian joke.
Whereas in the Observer magazine of June 1, in what was a piece, This Much I Know, of few words indeed, Naomi Klein manages twice — not once but twice — to have a swipe: “I think there’s nothing more unpleasant than a disaffected lefty … The thing I can’t stand the most is the ex-lefties.”
I suppose we know who she means, since her grandad was a red blacklisted from Hollywood, but isn’t there is something uncomfortable about such a Khmer Rouge view of other people?
And I must say I would try not to be so fatuous as is the acclaimed author of No Logo, now giving interviews to promote her latest blockbuster, by saying: “I do occasionally buy Starbucks but only in really desperate situations — for example, if I’m getting off an overnight flight and it’s the only coffee at the airport.”
