After Mr. Ganesh’s eulogy for ‘Daft Punk’ of February 26, 2021:
Daft Punk and the virtues of mystery
Business and politics could learn from the French duo’s reluctance to ‘engage’
https://www.ft.com/content/54fdadfe-7ea5-4278-8e0c-daf7039caf6e
This duo in tharl to Star Wars and Tron, and its penchant for Futuristic Drag: Helmets. I watched their final video, that evoked something like Kubrick’s 2001 opening sequence, featuring a barren landscape. This video expressed in its way a kind of nihilism, as both of them blew themselves up. Fin, The End . How will they manage a possible Farewell Tour? Or form a Reunion Tour ? ‘Daft Punk’ is about the long forgotten Harold Rosenberg’s ‘The Tradition of the New’ , published in 1959. Action Painting and Techno are connected!?
Here Mr. Ganesh comments on a ‘political fact’
Headline: Joe Biden’s popular stimulus reveals a changed America
Sub-headline: In attitude, if not reality, the US has become a social democratic country
Its ‘as if’ The New Deal never happened: Eisenhower and the Interstate Highway System in 1956 and a Tax Rate of 90%. Or that Kennedy and Roger Blough had a ‘disagreement’? Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’, Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts have been elided for American History. Nixon’s EPA of 1970 and his Health Care Plan of 1974. More examples of America’s Social Democratic Tradition, present themselves, as I just recall what comes to my memory!
The rise and triumph of Neo- Liberalism, Reagan’s catch-phrase of ‘Government is the problem’ & ‘I believe in State’s Rights’ , Bush The Elder of ‘a thousand points of light’ and Lee Atwater’s contribution to these ‘lights’, Willie Horton, The New Democrats, Bill Clinton of the willful destruction of Welfare & Aid to Dependent Children, and the economic catastrophe of Gramm-Leach-Bliley, Bush The Younger who institutionalised Permanent War, built upon lies, and Obama and his adoption of Heritage Foundation Healthcare as his own, instead of Medicare for All. This is a partial history of the Neo-Liberal War against the Social Democratic Tradition, that now, in the face of The Pandemic, and its short and long term economic consequences, is reviving and remaking America, via one of its most valuable traditions.
One of the virtues of being Mr. Ganesh is that he needn’t worry about paying his rent, and the other imperatives, that bedevil tens of millions of Americans, in the face of The Pandemic: awaiting their $2,000 checks reduced to $1,400, Unemployment even after the ‘end’ of the pandemic, feeding themselves and their children, and awaiting vaccination, and the looming question of eviction or Foreclosure. Oh, I forgot School! All this while Mr. Ganesh address the hard problems!
Political Cynic
https://www.ft.com/content/ffb8988f-ac8c-49e6-8e2a-c8f75294d07b
