The U.S. and Europe Have Propped Up So Many Corrupt "Democracies" That the Word Is Losing Meaning

By TOP THIRD WORLD AUTHORESS, ARUNDHATI ROY

What's next in a world where democracy has been so hollowed out?

While we're still arguing about whether there's life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after
democracy? What sort of life will it be? By "democracy" I don't mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the
working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So, is there life after democracy? 

Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat
prickly, combative defense of democracy. It's flawed, we say. It isn't perfect, but it's better than everything else that's on offer.
Inevitably, someone in the room will say: "Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia... is that what you would prefer?"

Whether democracy should be the utopia that all "developing" societies aspire to is a separate question altogether. (I think it
should. The early, idealistic phase can be quite heady.) The question about life after democracy is addressed to those of us who
already live in democracies, or in countries that pretend to be democracies. It isn't meant to suggest that we lapse into older,
discredited models of totalitarian or authoritarian governance. It's meant to suggest that the system of representative democracy
-- too much representation, too little democracy -- needs some structural adjustment.

The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy
has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has
metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single
predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

Is it possible to reverse this process? Can something that has mutated go back to being what it used to be? What we need
today, for the sake of the survival of this planet, is long-term vision. Can governments whose very survival depends on
immediate, extractive, short-term gain provide this? Could it be that democracy, the sacred answer to our short-term hopes
and prayers, the protector of our individual freedoms and nurturer of our avaricious dreams, will turn out to be the endgame for
the human race? Could it be that democracy is such a hit with modern humans precisely because it mirrors our greatest folly --
our nearsightedness?

Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future,
makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our
instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable
thing that we have lost. It would be conceit to pretend I have the answers to any of these questions. But it does look as if the
beacon could be failing and democracy can perhaps no longer be relied upon to deliver the justice and stability we once
dreamed it would. 

As a writer, a fiction writer, (best Indian woman, writer ever!) I have
often wondered whether the attempt to always be precise, to try and get
it all factually right somehow reduces the epic scale of what is really
going on. Does it eventually mask a larger truth? I worry that I am
allowing myself to be railroaded into offering prosaic, factual
precision when maybe what we need is a feral howl, or the transformative
power and real precision of poetry.

Something about the cunning, Brahmanical, intricate, bureaucratic,
file-bound, "apply-through-proper-channels" nature of governance and
subjugation in India seems to have made a clerk out of me. My only
excuse is to say that it takes odd tools to uncover the maze of
subterfuge and hypocrisy that cloaks the callousness and the cold,
calculated violence of the world's favorite new superpower. Repression
"through proper channels" sometimes engenders resistance "through proper
channels." As resistance goes this isn't enough, I know. But for now,
it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for
poetry and for the feral howl.

Today, words like "progress" and "development" have become
interchangeable with economic "reforms," "deregulation," and
"privatization." Freedom has come to mean choice. It has less to do with
the human spirit than with different brands of deodorant. Market no
longer means a place where you buy provisions. The "market" is a
de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business,
including buying and selling "futures." Justice has come to mean human
rights (and of those, as they say, "a few will do").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arundhati_Roy

Our 'POSTER-BLOGGER' is ANITA SANDS HERNANDEZ, Los Angeles Writer, Researcher,  mother of 4,  career Astrologer. Catch up with her websites TRUTHS GOV WILL HIDE & NEVER TELL YOU, also The  FUTURE, WHAT'S COMIN' AT YA! FRUGAL LIFE STYLE TIPS,  HOW TO SURVIVE the COMING GREAT DEPRESSION, and Secrets of Nature, HOLISTIC, AFFORDABLE HEALING. Also ARTISANRY FOR EXPORT, EARN EUROS. Anita is at astrology@earthlink.net ). Get a 35$  natal horoscope "my money/future life" reading now + copy horoscope as a Gif file graphic! No smarter reading out there anywhere near that price.

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