Black and Gold

To: Retort
From: KA

Katherine Aaron sends two notes: 

(1) This video is worth watching/sharing:  <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6PLwOt0Bls>.  The "Rostock Reflections" (retort, Dec 10th) made me think of it - it's a quite clever little video put together by some people in Minneapolis, in anticipation of the RNC coming there in
2008.  It really approaches the Black Block with more humor and creativity than I've seen in ages.

(2) I don't know what you all think about Lessing, but her Nobel speech has some gems:

"We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few
decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and
women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world,
to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for
instance, computers. 

What has happened to us is an amazing invention - computers and the
internet and TV.  It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution
the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not
take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer,
transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we
accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: "What is going to
happen to us now, with this invention of print?" In the same way, we
never thought to ask, "How will our lives, our way of thinking, be
changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its
inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once
they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day
has passed in blogging etc?"

<http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2223780,00.html>


Katherine