Democracy, a Fire Sale

This interesting little exchange between Claude Levi-Strauss and his interlocutor Didier Eribon, p.110, “Conversations with Claude Levi-Strauss”, U. of Chicago Press, 1991:

DE: Perhaps The Savage Mind has had its widest influence beyond the circle of anthropological specialists. Your rehabilitation of the primitive mind has been included in every anthology of contemporary thought.

C. L-S: I wanted to show that there is no gap between the way so-called primitive people think and the way we do. When strange customs or beliefs that offended common sense were remarked upon in our own societies, they would be explained as vestiges or survivals of archaic ways of thinking. On the contrary, it seems to me that these ways of thinking are always present and alive among us…

Hence, populism explained, in a roundabout way, by Levi-Strauss who spent a good deal of time in the aboriginal territories of Australia. The Savage Mind, perhaps his influential book, is a study of what he called, “untamed thought”, mind in its untamed state as distinct from mind cultivated or domesticated for the purpose “of yielding a return.”

Living through the July 4th fireworks display last night in San Francisco (and well into the morning) all I could hear was a kind of continuous salute to a sort of warfare and triumph I deplore, one salute on top of another, as if a small neighboring country was being pummeled into submission by the US Marines. I had to listen to it, I had no choice! The whole project it seems to me, populist in its garb and bravado, is to make America so uncomfortable for anyone other than Christian/Republican'/Heritage Foundation et.al. donors to live in that the rest of us, what’s left of us that is, could cause us all the run south or north to the borders so that we may live in a more sensible country.

For this country is increasingly difficult to take, though it’s the greatest country in the world as we’re so often reminded (‘America, Love it or Leave It’. ‘What, and Live under American Foreign Policy?’)

Dear democracy, there doesn’t seem to be a back-up plan. Populism seems to be having its moment once again as a stampede of mis-informed people will soon be heading for the polls.