Monday, December 19, 2005

Snow crash can happen here

With the reissue of Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here and Harold Bloom's Democracy is Dead piece in the Guardian, you might get the feeling that some kind of authoritarian government is in the offing. I think this is the wrong model. A more appropriate literary model can be found in Snow Crash, where society has fragmented into subclasses that rarely interact and corporations have replaced or made redundant government function. While it is true that the Bush administration is to expand the state's military power and is alarmingly willing to use intelligence, it appears to be willing to let the rest of the state's responsibility wither. This takes the US not back to the authoritarian 30s, but to the 19th century when the American state limited itself to external affairs. The corporate cronyism sets the administration apart from the 19th cen and makes Snow Crash seem more prophetic.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have trouble with any model that delegates the State's responsibilities to companies. This thinking was very trendy in the 90s and I didn't buy it then either. The government may be leaving a lot of governance to the local authorities, but that is more indicative of a swing towards states rightsism than away from government authority, in my opinion.

nic

Tripp said...

Yesh, although I don't think the current gov is rightist in the state rights way so much as rolling back programs as much as possible

Anonymous said...

The question is whether there is a coherent policy or if decisions are made piecemeal.

nic