Peter McLaren

Petulant young politicians fresh from a strategy meeting about how to spin the government shutdown file past the continental breakfast table at the local Motel 6 snapping shut their Samonsite attaché cases wiping oat muffin crumbs from their seersucker suits while across the street at the local cemetery of dead dreams within the sprawling assemblage of contentious corpses, casualties of a full metal civilization the groundskeepers fresh from a blue-plate special are picking up refuse with nails driven into tips of old rake handles spearing with imperial vengeance plastic wrappings and paper cups agitated by irascible winds of change chasing them across great sweeps of marble-studded grass following them along the putrid streams of spongy gutters as they spill into […]

El ángel de la Historia ha perdido sus alas. Este ángel conduce ahora un coche fúnebre que transporta a los cielos toda la basura histórica acumulada desastre tras desastre, lo que llamamos progreso. El infierno ha bajado a la Tierra, de modo que ya no tenemos que temerlo como una consecuencia posible después de la muerte porque ya está aquí. La ciénaga de impotencia y desaliento en la que nosotros como humanos vivimos terriblemente angustiados debilita la verdadera esencia de nuestra humanidad. Hoy, el estado de vigilancia tiene como objetivo la identificación de aquellos ciudadanos que se oponen a sus políticas socieconómicas regresivas, a la eliminación de los programas nacionales de asistencia social, a que se señalen a aquellos ciudadanos […]

The Angel of History has lost her wings.  She now drives a hearse and uses it to transport to Heaven’s rubbish heap all of history’s disasters piled upon disasters—what we call progress. Hell has been unleashed upon the world; we do not need to fear it as a possible consequence of an afterlife. It’s already here.  The quagmire of impotence and despondency in which we as humans now excruciatingly anguish dilutes the very essence of our humanity. Today, the nightwatchman state has a goal of identifying those citizens who oppose its regressive socioeconomic policies, who oppose the destruction of the commons and domestic social aid programs, who oppose designating dissident citizens as security threats. Citizens of the nightwatchman state are […]

Mi corazón late todavía lo suficientemente fuerte como para seguir combatiendo a la sociedad política de hoy en día en sus entrañas junto con todos aquellos individuos, grupos e instituciones que han establecido un compromiso histórico con el capital. En esta lucha estoy destinado a encontrarme con extraños sujetos de todo tipo y condición, incluso con aquellos que denominan a sí mismos como «corporaciones” (término absurdo resultado de una decisión tomada en 1886 por la Corte Suprema contra el Ferrocarril del Pacífico Sur en el Condado de Santa Clara). Esta ridiculez de la personalidad corporativa es el producto de la integración profunda en la sociedad del modo capitalista de producción, que ha permitido a las empresas adquirir la condición de […]

My heart still beats steadily enough to try to confront in the bowels of today’s body politic all those individuals and groups and institutions and affiliations who have made an historical compromise with capital.  In this struggle I am destined to meet strangers of all type and stripe and strange kinds of people such as those who go by the name “corporation” (the absurd result of an 1886 Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad).  It is this corporate personhood  absurdity that has resulted from the deep integration into society of the capitalist mode of production that has enabled companies to acquire the status of legal personalities and to enjoy the same legal protections as actual people, that makes […]