Current Reading

been reading the draft of Eric Olin Wright's new book about the nature of the USA

very sad reading indeed.....

makes me wish I lived in Europe....

but Wright, in what I've read thus far, doesn't talk about the sexual puritanism....

which produces a miserable sort of hypocrisy about touching in public and other matters.

But I've only read a couple of chapters so far....

I did get the idea that the conditions he describes (lack of social guarantees, markets for jobs)
do lead to the rather intense individualism of the u.s.a

I think there's a sort of hypocrisy here as well. You can hear it when people say of someone who
is relevantly similar to them: "Well, what s/he did is just wrong! No excuses. They had freedom of choice."

As if to say: I wouldn't do that bad thing. They did it; so, end of story. No question of sympathy, compassion
or understanding why they did it.

If the two people (the one lacking sympathy and the "wrong-doer") are, in effect, competing, this lack
of sympathy makes more sense....

Although I also think the insistence (oh she protests too much!) that I am not like them is, actually,
suspicious--too dangerous to think that I might do what they have done....

I put "wrong-doer" in quotes because the USA criminalizes activities which other countries treat as
social problems (drug use, prostitution)...