
Pencil Leaners - apollinaire
https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/sparrow-pencil-leaners/
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monkeycantype
Jeff Sparrow is writing about the permanent changes the previous few weeks
have made to Australia, which at least at the time i am posting, is having a
gentler crisis that the US - I don't think we really know how big or permanent
those changes are yet.

His essay refers back to the time of the new deal, the depression and the
world wars. These are terrible times, but they are times that provoke
extraordinary responses, and afterwards the stories of those responses and
people that inspire or horrify become the landmarks on our mental map of the
political world. Communists, anarchists, nazis, confederates, (labor)
unionists, civil rights activists, feminists, groups of all political
orientations orient themselves against foundation myths of times of great
conflict, and the great figures and the great dynamism of those times.

No-one sane wants to be living in times of fear and terror, but you understand
the other half of it, the attraction to the myths of those times, the passion
to tear up the political map, to create new myths and reassemble it with a new
topology.

It seems all my life I've been hearing and half believing that we were
tumbling into the early first days of that new great chaos, but then I would
step outside, walk amongst people, feel sun and rain on my face, and slip into
the patterns of my daily responsibilities and it would seem like the crisis
was not going to come today.

But now I'm away from the city, my state is still easing out of lockdown, and
I'm viewing the world through the lens of twitter storms and subreddit rages.
I think many of us are feeling that as much as our previous daily routines,
and their casual social contact were an antidote against the whatever insanity
we encountered on the net that was close enough to our perspective on reality
that in could sneak its fingers, in through our personal Overton windows, they
were also a dead weight, that bound us to tradition and patterns, not because
we loved them, but because they had been negotiated long ago. I know we're not
freed from those patterns but now feels like that moment half waking from a
dream, where it not certain which reality has the strongest hold on you.

