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Saturday, December 1, 2018

" Alienation " is the word


Before reading this NOT fake news I had to listen on TV morning news to a less than inspiring eulogy of ex-president George H.W. Bush - great hero of the OLD MONEY American ruling class.

I do expect the neo-liberals to slobber over his just passed away life ( we are ALL mortal after all ) just as they do slobber over his CIA and FBI in the Kakaesque Mueller Russia " collusion " investigation .

" Under capitalism, the working class is entirely excluded from the decision-making process. The political establishment makes nothing available to help the victims of factory closures and deindustrialization, leaving them to die " ( World Socialist Web Site, Eric London ) .

How many retired working class Americans-now in poor health- will live to age 94 ? How many homeless Americans will get past middle age ? I see some of these " living dead " every day in Kennedy Plaza, Providence, Rhode Island. One is reminded of the warning at Dante's " Inferno " : " Abandon all hope all who enter here ! " .

              Why do so many young people feel the need to stupefy themselves with drugs so soon in life ? If life makes some sense, if you have some sane purpose in life, if life is not MEANINGLESS to you - and the adults around you - how can this happen to you ?

               How many mostly UNREAD books have been written about ALIENATION under capitalism ? The young Marx explained  ALIENATION  very well. Other thinkers -like the French writers Camus and Sartre - described 20th century alienation after two world wars and the Holocaust.

                The so called Beat Generation also produced colorful and interesting writers. How could many sensitive souls not feel BEAT even today ? I am about to read " Junkie .
         Book review excerpt :

[ It is Burroughs' own denial of the nature of his addiction that makes this book [ " Junkie " ] capable of being read as a fiendish parable of modern alienation. For, in describing addiction as "a way of life", Burroughs makes of the hypodermic a microscope, through which he can examine the soul of man under late 20th-century capitalism. His descriptions of the "junk territories" his alter ego inhabits are, in fact, depictions of urban alienation itself. And just as in these areas junk is "a ghost in daylight on a crowded street", so his junkie characters - who are invariably described as "invisible", "dematerialized" and "boneless" - are, like the pseudonymous "William Lee" himself, the sentient residue left behind when the soul has been cooked up and injected into ]




Image result for Beat Generation, " Junkie "

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Ron