On Monday's TV news McCain told his supporters (as I remember it): "They say those who ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it." Of course he doesn't want to offend Joe Sixpack by coming over as an east-coast, liberal elitist, so he used the folksy "they say", rather than "the Spanish philosopher Santayana said".
'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
Life of Reason, Reason in Common Sense, Scribner's, 1905, page 284"
Collecting and Editing the Works of George Santayana
http://www.iupui.edu/~santedit/
But, oh, the ironies - perhaps he only pretends he can't cope with emails and secretly he's been checking the blogosphere, but not really learning from it:
History Repeats: John McCain Channels the Ghost of Herbert Hoover
On October 25, 1929, the day after Black Thursday, one of the days signaling the start of the Great Depression, where the Dow Jones lost 9 percent of its value in a single day, Republican President Herbert Hoover announced to the American people: "The fundamental business of the country... is on a sound and prosperous basis."
Sound familiar?
In perhaps the biggest political gaffe since then, just three days ago on September 15, 2008- on the very day now being referred to as `Black Monday', where the Dow collapsed by over 500 points- John McCain, seemingly channeling the restless ghost of Herbert Hoover, declared: "I think still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong."
... And the wheels of irony don't stop churning there. September 15th wasn't the first Monday to earn the ghoulish title of `Black Monday'. In fact, that title originally belonged to October 19, 1987, where the Dow Jones collapsed, as it did three days ago, by over 500 points, which ended up signaling the start of a massive recession in the late 80's and early 90's.
... History has been very clear here: Every time Republican and conservative economic policies are implemented, the results are worse than disastrous: they're catastrophic.
... Even in the midst of a monumental economic collapse, John McCain has the naivete to announce that the fundamentals of the economy are still strong. Yes, well, the conservative principles which he extols are certainly still firmly in place. But is anyone honestly still being fooled? Those principles have been convincingly falsified by history again and again.
This time, let's remember history.
http://bryannelson.wordpress.com/2008/09/18/history-repeats
Dickens and financial crisis
But the relevant history isn't confined to the USA, and, by coincidence, one of the examples from UK history features in a new BBC series based on Dickens' "Little Dorrit". Andrew Davies is doing the adaptation, and says:
The world of Little Dorrit has many resonances with our own. Honest businessmen struggle while City financiers spin money out of nothing. The institutions of government, epitomised in the Office of Circumlocution, are complacent, incompetent, uncaring. Everyone's drowning in debt. Plenty to get our teeth into. We'll be searingly relevant.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/12/charlesdickens-television
Historian Tristram Hunt elaborates:
With characteristic brio, George Bernard Shaw claimed Little Dorrit was a more seditious text than Marx's Das Kapital. Even if the novel does not call for the 'expropriation of the expropriators', Shaw is right in celebrating it as one of the 19th-century's most unforgiving critiques of capitalism. Reborn in the deft BBC series, it is a rich text for our supremely troubled financial times.
... it is the way such widespread fraud percolates down which makes Little Dorrit feel such a contemporary indictment of runaway materialism. Behind the novel stand the words of Dickens's intellectual mentor, the sage Thomas Carlyle. 'This is not a Religious age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us,' he wrote in 1829, criticising the collapse of social bonds in the quest for riches. Consumption had taken the place of society. In 1843, he wrote: 'We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings.' Now, 165 years on, we are painfully relearning that lesson.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/12/charlesdickens
Carlyle's "Cash-payment" is strikingly similar to Marx's famous "cash nexus", but, when I checked, it's even closer, because Marx's doesn't actaully use "cash nexus", he uses the same phrase as Carlyle:
"The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his `natural superiors', and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous `cash payment'"
Manifesto of the Communist Party
One of the pleasures of Google is being able to check up on these surprising links. I had thought of Carlyle as very right-wing, as usual history is a bit more complicated than good guys and bad guys:
Carlyle evolved in the course of the 1840s into an out-and-out political reactionary. This evolution reflected the peculiar social and historical character of Carlyle's critique of emerging capitalist society. His early work expressed the "anti-capitalism" of a man who evoked nostalgically the values of a feudal and aristocratic society.[Cf Marx, above]
... When he wrote his first assessment of Carlyle's work in 1843, Engels was not yet a Marxist. Nor, we should point out, was Marx. But by the time Marx and Engels wrote again on the subject of Carlyle, in April 1850, they had worked out the essential foundations of the materialist conception of history. This entailed an extensive critique of various forms of petty-bourgeois and pre-Marxian socialism, including that of Carlyle.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/may2002/corr-m29.shtml
A further irony is that this TV adapatation of Little Dorrit is itself an example of the way the ideology behind the "cash payment" has increasingly taken over. As Davies notes, rather than a producer being enthusiastic about a book and initiating a project, decisions are taken at a higher level, based on the likely success of the "product" and a "deal" made. A series based on a classic is relatively safe, will be good for the BBC's status and its share of the audience, but won't do much for writers today:
18 MONTHS EARLIER E & O restaurant, London W11
I'm having dinner with the BBC's Jane Tranter. ... Bleak House has done very well, and Jane would like another Dickens. Which one? I suggest Dombey and Son or Little Dorrit, and Jane plumps for Little Dorrit. It's a deal, just like that. I never ask why she went for Dorrit rather than Dombey. Maybe because it's got a girl in the title?
... (Back in the old days the producer would have been there before me, initiated the product, and even commissioned it. Now the commissioning comes from on high, and the producer gets assigned to the project.)
ibid
These assigned producers are, of course, not very committed to the project, and open to the offer of higher "cash payments", which was demonstrated dramatically in this case:
So here I am on a sunny Friday lunchtime to have an inaugural lunch with my producer, Kate Bartlett, the executive producer, Sally Woodward, and the script editor, Surian Fletcher-Jones, who worked with me on Sense and Sensibility.
... We have a delightful lunch, and tell each other how much we're going to enjoy working together on this wonderful project, etc.
The following Monday I'm told that Sally Woodward and Kate Bartlett have both left the BBC, Kate Bartlett to ITV, Sally Woodward to the independent company Carnival. Surely they must have known this on Friday when we were all saying how much fun we were going to have together?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/oct/12/charlesdickens-television
Meanwhile, back in the USA, ironically another criticism of McCain for failing to learn from history:
John McCain may not know that if you don't learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it. The American people are tired of fighting the Vietnam ghosts of the 1960s and 1970s and the financial ghosts of the 1980s. They want someone who [is] looking forward, but also someone who knows where we've been. And that person isn't John McCain.
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/election08/344
Should McCain win, it will be, like W's wins (to adapt Marx on repetition in history), both tragedy and farce and not just for Americans.
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