Oh, to be Illiterate!

I generally try to avoid reading whatever the latest "must-read" article happens to be because they generally seem part of the pageant of hand-wringing that every week forgets the article from last week in favor of the must-read du jour. But for some reason, I bit the bullet and read Anne Applebaum's much-too-long article in The Atlantic, "A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come." And boy I wish I hadn't.

Anne Applebaum, a "winner" under the former neo-liberal regime, is slowly waking to the fact that many people weren't winners, and that these "losers" are kind of mad about it. Worse yet, she's now even losing some faith in the fairness of neo-liberal meritocracy. What a sad world indeed! But don't despair, neo-liberalism can one day triumph again, it just won't be as easy as we once thought. So, she takes upon herself the solemn patriotic duty of warning her fellow Americans of her difficult epiphany, so that we can recommit ourselves to the struggle for a true neo-liberal utopia.

This article is part of a general genre that's emerged in the past couple of years, where we have to suffer through the "awakening" of a formerly deluded "winner," as they come to realize that the world isn't exactly as they thought. I'm waiting for one of these articles to end in any way other than by the author recommitting themselves to the same political and economic ideals that created this crisis in the first place, but I suspect I'll be waiting quite a while.

And, all of this reminds me of the way that so much of European literature was a product of the "better classes." We now read it with relish (although, despite my true love of literature, I just can't develop a taste for some of it), but I suspect it's only through the passage of time that a wider audience could enjoy the all-too-difficult lives of the better classes. It's hard for me to imagine the peasantry, suffering from hunger, dying in droves, and with their masters boot on their neck, reading this literature with much sympathy.

Luckily, their illiteracy spared them.