Megan West(erby)

"If you could live in any fictional world,” I asked my audience, “What world would you live in?” And a surprising percentage of people replied, eagerly, “Star Wars!” “Now, wait a minute,” I said. “You’re not guaranteed to be a Jedi.” That’s humanity, I suppose; given a fictional future, we blithely assume that we’ll be the movers and shakers. Those peasants and slaves, scrabbling in the dust on Tattooine? They’re the extras. This is our life, and as the stars we’re going to be on top. It’s why I have a problem with libertarians. I’m reading Bill Bryson’s At Home: The Short History Of Private Life, which largely focuses on the Victorian Era — appropriate, given that one of the hallmarks of the Victorian Era is the rise of the middle class and the technology required to get the middle class some homebound niceties. The Victorian Era, it must be said, is pretty much a libertarian’s wet dream. No taxes for the supremely rich. Practically none of those pesky “laws” to get in the way of business operations. (Clearly, a world where you can employ eight-year-old kids to fix the gears on your weaving looms isn’t going to whip a whole lot of regulations on folks.) Anyone who can come up with a good invention can patent it, then make a fortune by dint of cleverness and gumption alone. …and people went fucking broke all the damn time."

~

The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett’s Journal - Designing For Jedi (via chialynn)

The long narrative stories we tell each other, books and plays then movies, have traditionally been about the privileged: pharaohs, kings, queens, knights, princes, princesses, troubadours; members of the court or the church, the recognizable institutions, not the peasants or the servants. Dickens drives me up a wall sometimes (PAID BY THE WORD) but he made the people on the street interesting (in no small part thanks to revolutions and class tensions).

Anyway — great post, thank you Chia for linking! This line is particularly amazing: The assumption that we’ve somehow become more moral than the Victorians strikes me as being ludicrously silly.

(via chialynn)

26 October 2010 ·