Our trip to Atlanta for a graduation turned out to be more fun than I anticipated. While Atlanta may not offer much of a destination for tourists, it appears to have a relatively high quality of life that we benefited from as visitors.
More by luck than anything else, we landed in a hotel within walking distance of the High Museum. We were surprised to see long lines and found out it was the final days of a big exhibit of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. So we braved the line -- which, as much else in Atlanta, was handled with great efficiency -- and went through the exhibit. I had seen the big Frida Kahlo exhibit here in Washington and actually visited the Casa Azul in Mexico City, but this exhibit had a number of her self-portraits as well as the less well-known still lifes. Other highlights were some early paintings by Rivera, showing how he cut his teeth as a painter by mimicking the cubist lights in Paris, and several photographs of the two of them which were works of art in themselves. We dashed through some of the standing collection and were impressed by the number of well-known contemporary artists.
On Sunday, we walked up Peachtree Street from our brunch and wandered into Piedmont Park, a wonderful urban playground that was being put to good use. Our goal was the Botanical Garden, simply because it was a beautiful spring day. To our surprise, we once again stumbled into a rare exhibit -- the first ever in this country of some monumental plant sculptures -- mosaiculture -- that were truly phenomenal. There were two large butterflies made up of various plants as we entered the grounds, which we thought was just some ornamentation. But then we ran into two monstrous cobras, and an ogre, and some bunny rabbits, and dancing berries and realized this was not an everyday occurrence. So we sought out the fabulous Earth Mother and the shaggy dog.
The garden itself was quite nice, with spring blooms. The hothouse was too crowded and, well, too hot to enjoy and the edible garden was in the very early stages after spring planting, but the canopy walk, the fountains and the well-placed benches made it a very enjoyable visit.
We also had great luck with the food and saw much in the department to explore if we ever do go back. You never know.
Thursday, May 16, 2013
Monday, May 6, 2013
The next American revolution?
I went to a talk at Politics & Prose yesterday with Gar Alperovitz, the historian and economist who teaches at Maryland, who was plugging his new book What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution.
I like Alperovitz and quoted him once in a column. He's a radical progressive and drew a crowd to P&P much like Howard Zinn did. Most of what he said made a lot of sense.
He says we're in the midst of a systemic crisis, not a political crisis, because things don't change regardless of which party is in power. This is enlightening because it is obviously true that Democrats Clinton and Obama have been no more successful in changing the Reagan juggernaut than the Bushes, who weren't trying to change it. It explains why the elections in 2014 and 2016 offer little hope of improvement.
Alperovitz says we need to "put a couple of decades on the table" to get the systemic change he thinks we need. There's no guarantee we will get the change, he says, and we could just continue on the road to decay that we have been on for three decades. In any case, a couple of decades sounds optimistic to me.
The system that is in crisis is corporate capitalism. Part of the problem is that many of us think that the period from the 40s to the 60s, when labor unions were an effective countervailing force against corporate power, is the norm, when in fact that was the temporary aberration. What we've had since then -- the untrammeled power of corporations to avoid taxes, enrich the wealthy and impoverish the middle class -- is the real norm for corporate capitalism.
Alperovitz says we are in a pre-history of transformation, like the pre-history that preceded the Great Depression, creating the bases for change. He says the revolution will be the democratization of wealth, and he sees the beginnings of it in coops and credit unions, worker-owned businesses in Cleveland and elsewhere, state banks in North Dakota and elsewhere, and so on. He did not talk about crowdfunding or other forms of locavesting but perhaps this is in his book.
He asked the audience to abandon their practice of looking in the rearview mirror to figure out what lies ahead and also to drop their cynicism and pessimism and figure out what they can do to contribute to this pre-history of the revolution.
It's a great challenge and applying it to myself I realized that my foray into self-publishing and my devotion to blogging are part of the democratization of wealth. At least a dozen times, Alperovitz said "you won't read about this in the press," and if I'd had more patience I would have been curious to ask him why thought that was so. But the answer is obvious, because the press is part of corporate capitalism and that goes for book publishing, too.
I bought his book, though I'm not sure there's much more in it than was in his talk. I found it all quite validating. My own feeling of liberation from being able to self-publish my novel and put my blogs out there I can now see as part of a more generalized movement. My immediate fascination with Amy Cortese's Locavesting and my efforts to get these kinds of stories in the short-lived Sustainable Money all fit into the pattern described by Alperovitz.
I like Alperovitz and quoted him once in a column. He's a radical progressive and drew a crowd to P&P much like Howard Zinn did. Most of what he said made a lot of sense.
He says we're in the midst of a systemic crisis, not a political crisis, because things don't change regardless of which party is in power. This is enlightening because it is obviously true that Democrats Clinton and Obama have been no more successful in changing the Reagan juggernaut than the Bushes, who weren't trying to change it. It explains why the elections in 2014 and 2016 offer little hope of improvement.
Alperovitz says we need to "put a couple of decades on the table" to get the systemic change he thinks we need. There's no guarantee we will get the change, he says, and we could just continue on the road to decay that we have been on for three decades. In any case, a couple of decades sounds optimistic to me.
The system that is in crisis is corporate capitalism. Part of the problem is that many of us think that the period from the 40s to the 60s, when labor unions were an effective countervailing force against corporate power, is the norm, when in fact that was the temporary aberration. What we've had since then -- the untrammeled power of corporations to avoid taxes, enrich the wealthy and impoverish the middle class -- is the real norm for corporate capitalism.
Alperovitz says we are in a pre-history of transformation, like the pre-history that preceded the Great Depression, creating the bases for change. He says the revolution will be the democratization of wealth, and he sees the beginnings of it in coops and credit unions, worker-owned businesses in Cleveland and elsewhere, state banks in North Dakota and elsewhere, and so on. He did not talk about crowdfunding or other forms of locavesting but perhaps this is in his book.
He asked the audience to abandon their practice of looking in the rearview mirror to figure out what lies ahead and also to drop their cynicism and pessimism and figure out what they can do to contribute to this pre-history of the revolution.
It's a great challenge and applying it to myself I realized that my foray into self-publishing and my devotion to blogging are part of the democratization of wealth. At least a dozen times, Alperovitz said "you won't read about this in the press," and if I'd had more patience I would have been curious to ask him why thought that was so. But the answer is obvious, because the press is part of corporate capitalism and that goes for book publishing, too.
I bought his book, though I'm not sure there's much more in it than was in his talk. I found it all quite validating. My own feeling of liberation from being able to self-publish my novel and put my blogs out there I can now see as part of a more generalized movement. My immediate fascination with Amy Cortese's Locavesting and my efforts to get these kinds of stories in the short-lived Sustainable Money all fit into the pattern described by Alperovitz.
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