In his lovely and perceptive essay, American Imagination and the Civil War, Wendell Berry make the following observation: …old habits of mind and speech have continued in the babbled-to-nonsense polarity of conservative and liberal, and of red states and blue states. The problem is that there scan be no general or official or sectional or national imagination. The chief instrument of economic and political power now is commodified speech, wholly compatible with the old clichés, that can distinguish neither general from particular nor false from true…No place is free of the threat implied in such phrases as economic growth, job creation, natural resources, human capital, bringing in industry, even bringing in culture —as if every place is adequately identified as the environment and its people as readily replaceable parts of a machine. Devotion to any particular place now carries always the implication of heartbreak. I heartily recommend the whole essay, which is included in a book, Imagination in Place.
Posted on: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 02:03:43 +0000
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