Sandy Krolick's Blog, page 15

KUSI – TV Interview (Sandy on Good Morning San Diego)

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Filed under: cultural crisis

The Media is the Mirror

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by Roberto Prado

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

With the above lines, Guy Debord begins his brief, but seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle. He proceeds to describe the sum total of the efforts of Western Civilization as a progression of images, sounds and streams of video. When Debord penned those words in 1964, the spectacle was at a remove - something seen from a distance. Billboards, magazines, motion pictures, television, radio – all of these media were represented outside of the observer’s personal space, over there. In the intervening decades, the spectacle has closed the distance between the observed and the observer, to absorb the society completely. What was once at a remove now forms an integral part of the atmosphere in which human interaction occurs.

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Filed under: American Dream, Aristotle, Body-politic, body-subject, business, capitalism, censorship, Christianity, civilization, collapse, commodification, Corporate State, cultural crisis, democracy, earth, earthly-sensuous, education, freedom, geopolitics, global collapse, human nature, Image, language, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, polysemy, progress, rationality, religion, sexuality, soul, Spectacle, syllogism Tagged: capitalism, Christianity, Corporate State, DeBord, freedom, geopolitics, human nature, phenomenology, primitive, Reality, spectacle, thought police

Cellular Identity

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by Derek the Red

‘it’s difficult for one lone voice to speak up in today’s world, but here we go ladies and gentlemen.’

the somewhat educated have heard of Socrates, his student Plato, and then his student Aristotle; now i don’t claim to understand all of said philosophers BS, but i have some glimmering of what they talked about. Socrates insulted the Gods, or some such thing, and the good democratic citizens of Athens forced him to drink hemlock, so civilized.

Filed under: Aristotle, body-subject, capitalism, censorship, Christianity, civilization, collapse, commodification, Corporate State, cultural crisis, democracy, earth, entrepreneurship, Financial Crisis, geopolitics, global collapse, monetization, nature, Plato, progress, rationality, State Tagged: capitalism, Christianity, Corporate State, Empire, Financial Crisis, geopolitics, human nature, Plato, Reality

Rage and the Rape of Persephone

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by m.benoit

One sunny day, Persephone and her friends were playing in the fields of Eleusis, picking wild flowers. As Persephone reached down to pluck one of the beautiful blossoms, the Earth suddenly opened up beneath her feet, and Hades rode forth, in his golden chariot, and seized her, before any warning could be sounded. Persephone actually did cry out for help, before she vanished, but only two mortals heard her cries.

So opens the tale of the abduction and rape of  Persephone. Mere mortals, it seems, cannot intervene if the gods want their way. And 2 millennia later, abduction and rape are still the rage. Gang rape especially is getting lots of attention these days, from India to Ohio to Texas. The more the merrier, it seems,  and the more matter-of-fact.

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Filed under: American Dream, body-subject, capitalism, civilization, cultural crisis, earth, feminine, madness, rape, sexuality, State, terrorism, women Tagged: abuse, capitalism, control, feminine, human nature, rape

Вероника – Последние комментарии на русском языке

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Есть такие книги, которые стоит читать. Есть такие книги, которые западают в душу. Есть такие книги, о которых стоит писать.  Именно к этой категории относится роман американского автора Сэнди Кролика «Вероника. Сибирская сказка».

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Filed under: American Dream, capitalism, civilization, collapse, commodification, Corporate State, cultural crisis, earth, entrepreneurship, feral, freedom, geopolitics, global collapse, Karl Marx, monetization, Moscow, nature, primal humanity, progress, rationality, religion, Russia, sexuality, Siberia, social contract, Spectacle, Veronika Tagged: Reviews, Veronika

‘Teach Our Children Well’— On Deconstructing the Curriculum of the West

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The West is a vast testimony to childhood botched to serve its own purposes, where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men of action and men of thought to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity. (Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness,126)

The rapid globalization of commerce, communication, and community forces us now to question many of the assumptions underlying our social and cultural institutions, including entrenched pedagogical presuppositions and educational institutions. We are urgently required to address the challenge of education in an increasingly resource-constrained world characterized by escalating anomie and rising levels of violence, random as well as systemic and institutional.

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Filed under: Agriculture, American Dream, Aristotle, Body-politic, body-subject, capitalism, censorship, civilization, collapse, commodification, Corporate State, cultural crisis, earth, education, freedom, geopolitics, Heidegger, human nature, language, madness, Merleau-Ponty, nature, phenomenology, polysemy, primal humanity, private property, progress, rationality, religion, State, syllogism, time Tagged: capitalism, Corporate State, Empire, freedom, geopolitics, Heidegger, human nature, phenomenology, primitive, Reality, Shepard, syllogism

Yuri Ivanov’s caricature of Sandy!

Yuri Ivanov’s caricature of Sandy (me) on my 60th birthday. I am hard at work over the shashlick pit.

Filed under: cultural crisis

Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios

Please join me today, on my 60th birthday, in welcoming Karl North as our first guest post at kulturCritic. Karl obviously thinks more systematically than I do about the future.  He has also developed an interesting way of thinking about possible scenarios that may play-out as we move through the long energy descent we have already embarked upon.  I first heard the concept “carrying capacity” of the earth when I was a professor at the Colorado School of Mines back in the early 1980′s.  I have subsequently come to appreciate the full force of this concept as we have overshot that carrying capacity long ago.  And Karl is not shy about criticizing those “eco-cities movement’s [whose] current urban redesigns are characteristically overly complex and overly expensive, and are therefore aimed, like much organically grown food and most present ecovillages, at a gentrified market that will not survive the energy descent.” kC
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by Karl North

The vulnerability of cities and suburbs in the post-petroleum era has been the object of much debate because their present organization makes their operation so energy-intensive. The debate heretofore has tended to swing between two extremes. One claims that these forms of social organization on the land are so unsustainable that their populations will be forced to abandon them gradually as the energy descent progresses.[i]

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Filed under: Agriculture, American Dream, civilization, collapse, cultural crisis, earth, global collapse, privatization, progress Tagged: capitalism, Corporate State, Earth, geopolitics, Reality

The Moscow Times

American Book Author Sends Cautionary Message from Barnaul
24 January 2013 | Issue 5054
By Lena Smirnova





Sandy Krolick opted for a down-to-earth lifestyle in Barnaul after spending 18 years jetting around America.

He has clambered to the top of the American business world, snatched up executive positions at large international firms, including Ernst & Young and General Electric, and collected over 2 million air miles.

But now, Sandy Krolick lives in the Siberian city of Barnaul, goes to banyas, grows vegetables on his garden plot and writes books.

And he prefers it that way. Krolick’s books openly criticize the rapid American consumerism and economic expansion that he was born into.

“I am fully Americanized. I was at the top of American business, and I am more a product of the Western curriculum than anybody else I know, yet I have taken a big step back and criticized it systematically,” Krolick said of his books and current lifestyle.

His most recent book, “Veronika: The Siberian’s Tale,” was released in Moscow at the end of this month and is available in English and Russian. It is a story about a young man from Altai Krai who is in love and graduating college. As he hungrily rushes to the heights of Russian capitalism and becomes a globe-trotting businessman, the young man ends up betraying his family and his land.

The main character’s story is meant to reflect Russia’s broader march to modernization and the dangers associated with it.

A successful businessman, Krolick sold everything he had and moved to Barnaul eight years ago after marrying a Russian woman from the area. He now writes books and a regular online blog on geopolitical issues and occasionally teaches in local language schools.

Krolick is also a staunch supporter of the more traditional lifestyle: gardening, fishing and hunting. It is these traditions that are in danger from the rapid modernization taking place in the country, the  author believes.

Krolick said that similar to residents of Moscow, people in Barnaul go into debt to buy opulent things such as luxury cars and jewelry, simply because they crave the image. And though Krolick’s books are critical of Western society, he said his acquaintances in the U.S. actually are more receptive to his message than the Siberian locals.

“They’ve seen the beast, and they understand that there are problems. The Russians, particularly the Siberians, don’t want to see it,” Krolick said. “During the Soviet period, basically a century, they could not participate in this wild economic expansion, this party. What they said is, ‘We don’t want to hear about anything. We finally got the goodies, and we’re going to have a good time.’”

This is one of the ideas Krolick tries to convey in ”Veronika,” and it is a development of the ideas featured in the author’s previous works.

In the first book he wrote in Russia, “The Recovery of Ecstasy,” Krolick talks of his first impressions of Siberia and reflects on his college upbringing, culminating in a critique of Western culture as compared with the more traditional Russian way of life.

His second work, “Apocalypse of the Barbarians,” which was also released in Russian, is a series of essays on geopolitical issues. Here Krolick argues that people from the West are starting to realize that their current system of consumerism and economic expansion is not sustainable, and they would welcome its collapse. But he warns that the developing nations — most notably India, China and Russia — will ardently resist such a collapse.

“They have been starved for what you folks have been playing with for a century, and they want it all and they want it now,” Krolick said. “And you’re going to have to rip it from their dying hands to close this thing down.”

“Veronika: The Siberian’s Tale” is available in English and Russian at three bookstores in Moscow: Moskva (8 Tverskaya Ulitsa), Biblio Globus (6/3 Myasnitskaya Ulitsa) and Dom Knigi (8 Ulitsa Novy Arbat).


The Moscow Times

Contact the author at e.smirnova@imedia.ru

Filed under: Agriculture, American Dream, Anarchy, Austerity, Body-politic, business, capitalism, collapse, commodification, cultural crisis, entrepreneurship, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, global collapse, monetization, Moscow, private property, Siberia, Spectacle Tagged: capitalism, Corporate State, Financial Crisis, freedom, geopolitics, human nature, Noscow, Siberia

Five Little Monkeys… Or Is That Three?

Dear friends, readers:  It is now two years since I began this blog. 200,000 page views, 455 followers, 150 countries logged-on, and lots of discussion.  I have been posting a story each week, for a total of 112 posts and 8,000 comments.  Well.  I need to change the story now.  It is time.  I will keep the blog, but I will no longer post each week (life demands more of me).  But here is what I propose we do: I am making an open “call for guest posts.” If anyone feels they would like to place an essay on kulturCritic, I will post it. You all know the general direction of the blog, so please keep your proposals in that spirit.  I hope to hear from you soon, so we may keep this thing going.  I will try to post my own ideas at least once a month.  Nobody is excluded… the offer is open to all.  Just email your article to me at: sandy@kulturcritic.com.  
Faithfully yours, Sandy

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The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way… But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. (Chris Hedges)

Filed under: Agriculture, American Dream, Anarchy, Austerity, Body-politic, body-subject, business, capitalism, censorship, Christianity, civilization, collapse, commodification, Corporate State, cultural crisis, democracy, earth, earthly-sensuous, feral, Financial Crisis, freedom, genocide, geopolitics, global collapse, GMO foods, Hedges, homeland security, human nature, monetization, Moscow, nature, Obama, Occupy Wall Street, primal humanity, private property, privatization, progress, Putin, rationality, religion, Russia, Siberia, social contract, soul, Spectacle, State, terrorism Tagged: capitalism, Christianity, Colonialism, Corporate State, Earth, freedom, geopolitics, human nature, Reality, religion