Aldous Huxley on Barack Obama
Well, not really. For one thing, the interview was conducted in 1958, before Obama was born. But maybe you’ll see what I mean if you watch some of it:
As for Huxley, although I think Brave New World was a good book (and obviously a seminal classic), I happen to prefer Crome Yellow (also available in Kindle). But I don’t expect a whole lot of people to agree with me.
Huxley did have the same blinders that most midcentury intellectuals did. If you read his essay “Brave New World Revisited” he gets into the standard-issue liberal bogeymen: big business making people want stuff. He can’t imagine people actually choosing things that he himself doesn’t want, so it must be evil corporations making them do it. In effect, he’s one of the embryo-manipulating mandarins of his Brave New World, just with some disagreements with the other members of the ruling class.
”Children are quite clearly much more susceptible than the average grown up”
One really wouldn’t have to read Diana West’s The Death of the Grownup to know, just by a cursory survey of the culture around them, that the gulf between children and adults – as to their susceptibility to believe nonsense, ability to delay gratification, general temperament/deportment, and general sense of entitlement – is now no more than a stump jump.
Should we ever wish children outgrow childishness and become adults of the old-fashioned sort we might look into their schooling and instruction. If it’s grownups we’d like made of our children — make sure they don’t get a “proper” education in our public schools.
Good stuff, wolla dalbo, and all true. As they say, the truth is out there–and sometimes it’s further “out there” than we imagine.
Sidenote regarding Huxley: You can read Crome Yellow online (for those of us who don’t have Kindles yet).
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1447603
Heh, the clip starts out with what appears to be the end of a question and answer about soma, the social control/happy pills of Brave New World.
And for absolutely no reason whatsever, the word Obamacare popped into mind.
Obama , in Jimmy Carter’s own words:
“At the age of 68 she went off to be a Peace Corps volunteer. There’s a template, then, for an active old age, and he’s started to resemble her in other ways too. He was the first high-profile figure to call for Guanté¡namo to be closed. He has criticised President Obama for failing to live up to his promises, for backtracking on foreign affairs, for failing to keep his resolve on Israel. (“When he said no more settlements, that was a major step forward. But then he backed away from that, as he’s backed away from all of his other demands.”)”
http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&ct2=us%2F0_4_g_2_0_t&gid=INT&bvm=section&usg=AFQjCNHTgQWr2OKJhuP18QR6BH0HDM6AHA&did=29d357a81571a398&cid=17593942299305&ei=M-ZwTpD3HMXIgQe5m73GAg&rt=HOMEPAGE&vm=STANDARD&authuser=0&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.guardian.co.uk%2Fworld%2F2011%2Fsep%2F11%2Fpresident-jimmy-carter-interview
Yes, that’s right: even Jimmy Carter calls Obama a coward.
his book was a clue as to what was going on with is brother and those people and their plans (you know, one world government, communism, happy gulags, etc).
a warning regarded more as entertainment than a warning
Point Counter Point is Huxley’s most ambitious novel, a glittery roman a clef, and one of the seminal works of the halcyon Twenties. In there his intellectual strengths and emotional weaknesses are fully deployed; and the death of the boy will still twist your guts. Alas!, the great Huxley revival has never started, maybe in part because he died the same day as JFK.