At 05:12 PM 9/14/99 -0700, Craven, Jim wrote: >Add to all of that and more that fully 50% of all children born in Africa >today are born HIV positive. I like to use the metaphor of imperialism as a >gigantic "reverse Hoover" vacuum "cleaner".( actually a vacuum plunderer and >dirtier) Whereas a normal vacuum cleaner takes out the dirt and leaves the >furniture and rooms in tact and in fact cleaner than before, imperialism >takes out the furniture (critical resources, talents, local capital, whole >populations, savings, etc) and leaves even more dirt (strip bars, whore >houses, tatoo parlors, orphanages full of unwanted mixed-race children, >Coca-Colanization, ultra-selfish/rat-race individualism, military bases, Funny you mention this. These were my exact thoughts a half-hour ago when I was viewing the opening-night reception for a show at the Metropolitan titled "Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids", courtesy of a ticket that my friend, the estimable Henry Liu, laid on me. Most of this art was not seen by their makers as art, but permanent icons that belonged in tombs in order to establish the immortality of the inhabitants. Created in the 3rd century BC, it has an incredible freshness and vitality. One in particular stands out. It is a sculpture of a male and female member of the royal family who stand as if posing for a Polaroid, with their arms wrapped around each other's shoulders.. You can almost imagine them saying "Cheese". It is truly astonishing art. But the museum in which it is displayed is a monument to inhumanity. It is funded by the imperialist bourgeoisie who are largely responsible for turning Egypt into what is today: a miserably poor third world country which requires US aid in order to survive. Instead of graceful sculptures, you have monuments to the quarter-pounder instead. Charts depicting the building of the pyramids leave no doubt that this was a very despotic society. If Egypt had been left to its own devices, perhaps there would have been the development of a strong, peasant class that could have asserted its own rights and challenged the various feudal monarchies. We'll never know. Egypt, like China and the Incan empire, got swallowed whole by the Hoover vacuum of imperialism. There is a very deep ambivalence and anxiety about these kinds of precapitalist social formations in European and American bourgeois society. While we organize exhibits of the loot we stole from them, in clear deference to the transcendent spirit which animated these societies, we still consider them savages. Martin Bernal, the author of "Black Athena", is under constant attack for alleging that Egyptian culture shaped Greek thought. In the latest New Yorker, there's an review of a new book by a Brown professor named Shepard Krech III. Titled "The Ecological Indian: Myth and History," it is a compendium of all the bullshit that we hear over and over. Krech has assembled all of the arguments about Indians driving bison over the cliffs, dying by "accident" because the Europeans didn't intend to infect them with smallpox, etc. and packaged them into a $27.95 book sold by Norton Press. It is a companion volume, obviously, to David Stoll's ignorant attack on Rigobertu Menchu. These precapitalist societies are a constant reminder of what Matt Forstater (after Marx) refers to as "horrors, theft, rape, plunder, slavery, murder". I am always reminded of that wonderful scene in the movie Poltergeist when the land underneath the modern housing development comes churning up, vomiting the graves of the violated bodies whose sacred ground has been violated. These ideologists like Krech and Stoll just want to keep them buried. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
