Up For Grabs

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Notes

1. This was not a wholly new phenomena however. In Mimesis Eric Auerbach describes a frequent trajectory in Europe between the World Wars, of ultra-leftists to the extreme right.

2. See The American Journal of Sociology, November 1958. Reprinted in C.Wright Mills and the Power Elite (Beacon Press: 1969). Essays collected by G. William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard.

3. In his essay in The Crisis of Democracy, Huntington, aghast at an excess of democracy, makes a plea for cultivating ‘discouragement and apathy’. He goes on to say ‘Democracy is only one way of constituting authority, and is not necessarily a universally applicable one. In many situations the claims of expertise, seniority, experience and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority’. And with the brazen cheek for which he is well known goes on to say—this when the budget for waging war on Vietnam was almost limitless—that ‘a government which lacks authority and which is committed to substantial domestic programmes will have little ability, short of a cataclysmic crisis, to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary to deal with foreign policy problems and defense’.

4. Don de Lillo has a fine passage in the Epilogue section of Underground on consciousness and technological outcome financed by the military. The protagonist is watching a weapons demonstration in free enterprise Russia. ‘Viktor asks me if I've ever witnessed a nuclear explosion. No. It is interesting, he says how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. The Soviets always wanted bigger yield, bigger stockpiles. They had to convince themselves they were a superpower. Throw-weight. What is throw-weight? We don't know exactly but we agree it sounds like hurled bulk, the hurled will of the collective. Soviet long-range missiles had greater throw-weight … And the USA, I say … It was the US, Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property.’

5. It could be argued that what McLuhan really provides is a vocabulary-led weltanschaung for what was emerging somewhat in the manner of William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, fiction that is also open to various interpretations.

6. Co-written with Andy Cameron.