Just wanted to post, belat­edly, a link to Ms. Dark’s excel­lent inter­view with Gopal Bal­akr­ish­nan in Lana Turner, since I have of late found myself non­plussed by the skep­ti­cism with which what seems an utterly uncon­tro­ver­sial, even triv­ial, claim is too often met—that cap­i­tal­ism will come to an end.

The fail­ure of this phase of cap­i­tal­ism, pre­sag­ing maybe wider prob­lems and fail­ures of cap­i­tal­ism, is that end [of his­tory], again, posing the ques­tion what it means for some­thing to come to an end. Cap­i­tal­ism, one is fairly sure, will not come to an end in the same way the Roman Empire did or Feu­dal­ism did or even the Soviet Union did. So we should be able to track the vec­tors of a declin­ing system in ways that allow us to grasp the speci­ficity of our own sit­u­a­tion, to gauge, as it were, the var­i­ous levels and dimen­sions at which a system can be con­tin­u­ing for­ward and then other levels at which it might be flat-​lining. And so I think we’ll have very com­plex prob­lems of both thought and polit­i­cal prac­tice in this coming period.

But I would encour­age every­body not to think about the his­tor­i­cal prob­lem of the future of our way of life: cap­i­tal­ism. Is it long for the world? How much longer? What might we do both to improve con­di­tions in the here and now and to think about alter­na­tives to it. Every­thing, as we know, all modes of social life, even­tu­ally come to an end and I think we’ve been a bit too accus­tomed in this period that we’re just coming out of to think that that truth, while cer­tainly true of every­thing that came before, might not be true of us. And if it were true of us, it might some­how be the case it would only matter in the very long term. And I think we might increas­ingly be con­fronted with evi­dence that that is not the case.

In Jef­frey Goldberg’s new “must-read” story about Israel and Iran, which I spent last night rant­ing about on Twit­ter, he con­cedes that “Israeli policy makers do not nec­es­sar­ily believe that Iran, should it acquire a nuclear device, would imme­di­ately launch it by mis­sile at Tel Aviv.” But he sug­gests that Israel might go ahead and bomb Iran anyway, and for three rea­sons. Prime min­is­ter Ben­jamin Netanyahu offers two of them:

“First, Iran’s mil­i­tant prox­ies would be able to fire rock­ets and engage in other terror activ­i­ties while enjoy­ing a nuclear umbrella. This raises the stakes of any con­fronta­tion that they’d force on Israel. Instead of being a local event, how­ever painful, it becomes a global one. Second, this devel­op­ment would embolden Islamic mil­i­tants far and wide, on many con­ti­nents, who would believe that this is a prov­i­den­tial sign, that this fanati­cism is on the ulti­mate road to triumph.”

The first reason seems at least min­i­mally defen­si­ble, even though it doesn’t take into account that deter­rence also affects con­ven­tional war­fare, since nei­ther side wants to see a minor scuf­fle get too far out of hand. The second reason, not so much: if mil­i­tant Muslim fanat­ics looked to the devel­op­ment of nuclear weapons as a sign from God to go more bat­shit bonkers than they already are—and that’s a big if—you would think they’d already found their clue in the com­ple­tion of Pakistan’s bomb. (And no, I don’t think the Shia/Sunni split helps the argument.)

But it’s the third reason Gold­berg cites that really caught my eye. It’s insane enough to need lengthy quo­ta­tion:

Just a note to say my first record review appears in this week’s Vil­lage Voice, which is espe­cially nifty for me, since it was Robert Christgau’s columns in that paper that first taught me what music crit­i­cism could be. Couldn’t've done it with­out you, DE.

“Great art, the pre­vail­ing theory on the sub­ject goes, forces the artists who follow it to think differently.” Oh yeah? Free DE coffee mug to anyone who can iden­tify the “theory” pre­vail­ing here. (I know, I know. But some­times those fish are so annoying!)