Words&Dirt

“Once the mechanics of the shock doctrine are deeply and collectively understood, whole communities become harder to take by surprise, more difficult to confuse––shock resistant.  The intensely violent brand of disaster capitalism that has dominated since September 11 emerged in part because lesser shocks––debt crises, currency crashes, the threat of being left behind ‘in history’––were already losing much of their potency, largely because of overuse.  Yet today, even the cataclysmic shocks of wars and natural disasters do not always provoke the level of disorientation required to impose unwanted economic shock therapy.  There are just too many people in the world who have had direct experience with the shock doctrine: they know how it works, have talked to other prisoners, passed notes between the bars; the crucial element of surprise is missing.”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 580

“This was it.  An uprising, just like the fables of their youth.  And Knox suddenly felt a dire kinship with those old ghosts, those ancestors of myth and lore.  Men and women had done this before––maybe for different reasons, with a less noble anger caught in their throats, but somewhen, on some level, there had been a march like this.  Similar boots on the same treads.  Maybe some of the same boots, just with new soles.  All with the jangle of mean machines in hands not afraid to use them.

It startled Knox, this sudden link to a mysterious past.  And it wasn’t that terribly long ago, was it?  Less than two hundred years?  He imagined, if someone lived as long as Jahns had, or McLain for that matter, that three long lives could span that distance.  Three handshakes to go from that uprising to this one.  And what of the years between?  That long peace sandwiched between two wars?

Knox lifted his boots from one step to another, thinking over these things.  Had he become the bad people he’d learned about in youth?  Or had he been lied to?  It hurt his head to consider, but here he was, leading a revolution.  And yet it felt so right.  So necessary.  What if that former clash had felt the same?  Had felt the same in the breasts of the men and women who’d waged it?”

––Wool (Omnibus Edition), by Hugh Howey, loc. 4488-95