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Entry: Norman's Conquests Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/normans_conquests#10110 Post contents: The un-indicted co-conspirators in the largest mis-allocation of Resources in the history of the planet, aka the American Development Paradigm is a triumvirate: 1. Private Industry 2. An easily bamboozled and woefully incurious American Public that thinks indolent gluttony a birthright. 3. American Government, at all levels and in particular, local Zoning Regulation Several decades of the cheap fuel "get sumpthin fer nuthin" M.O. has insured that we have made a commitment to a way of life that we want to think is normal but is in fact, a tad septic on many levels, not the least of which is rampant ugliness and a kind of zero sum monotony that knows no bounds. It does not matter whether there have been good intentions or bad. Leaving it up to big business to build well is just as big a fools errand as it is to leave it to our besotted government to regulate design and in the end, the American Public has so abdicated both citizenship and independent thought that it cannot be trusted to come to any cogent decision either. Simply put, we have a three-way clusterboink. We have turned both intellectualism and labor into a pejorative, leaving behind a great thicket of popular idiocy that creates the perfect consumer for the Homogenized Monolithic Corporation. Conventional Wisdom is nothing so much as a warden in a luxurious jail of Popular Culture. Fiat Money has bought itself a Fiat Culture. We are not so much innovative in our dysfunction as much as we are ruthlessly jingoistic about it, like a drunk, telling all comers to "watch as I kick my own ass". The teat of antebellum factionalism we are gleefully attached to but again must be overcome so that we can return to a critical conversation about reclaiming meaning in a world where meaning seems to come more and more from the bombay doors of a jet fighter or the roadside bomb or a cash register. Sure, Taki's friend Norman made mistakes and was complicated and frequently contradictory but he remained a skeptic to the end and contributed to the larger conversation in his own way, full of bluster and cockiness. His self-characterization as a Left-Conservative is not as quixotic as it sounds. All labels today are suspect, given the cognitive dissonance that prevails. 200 years before we began to see inside the brain with modern technology, the Founders developed a Political System of Checks and Balances that was uniquely suited to and , in fact.... it possessed a predisposition to the potentials of the human brain. America was then and still is more an intellectual construct than a geographic location (go ahead, order me to tell this to the indians and mexicans and Phillapinos and Vietnamese and Iraqis and Cubans etc etc) . The American, an individual conceived in liberty has decided to let his Republic lapse and be a good addict for a failed paradigm. The real surprise is how long it took. There are many many people capable of pulling this former Republic back from the abyss but given the ongoing counterintuitive approach to life, its a 50-50 bet at best. Relying on either the marketplace or government will not work until we can begin again to rely on ourselves, as was intended and empowered by the work resulting from arguments between the Founders. Schopenhauer said "Life is a business that fails to meet expenses" . This being the case, it is up to us, not government, not business... to make the best of it and so we desperately need to dismount from our sacred little factionalist hobby horses and have a spirited conversation about authenticity in a relativistic world. In other words, we have to doff the ass hat and identify ourselves as the idiot we are, sans "higher power" and get to work building a better world immune from the Imperial Cartesian Vampires of the NeoCon persuasion and those who think the hidden hand of Adam Smith should be alowed to wear a boxing glove. To do this, we'll have to rely more on our brains than our spleen ....or at the very least, use both, like Taki's friend Norman did with admirable human imperfection. Sent at: 2008 07 06