I was especially amused by the _Time's_ reviewer's sneering dismissal of Mamet's common-sense assessment of Karl Marx as an impecunious ne'er-do-well versus Sarah Palin as a hard-working, contributing member of society.
Even by his own economicist lights, Marx _was_ an impecunious ne'er-do-well!, whose long-suffering family would have been driven into the poorhouse had Engels not subsidized their existence in England.
One of the axioms of Marx's own theory of value, as expressed at the beginning of _Capital_, is that labor must have "use value" in order to add economic value to a good or service. Sitting in the British Museum for long hours (when the spirit took him; he often went for weeks and months without doing much of anything except indulging in petty vices on Engels' dime) gleaning economic factoids is a pleasant enough way to pass the time; heck, if I could find a wealthy patron willing to support me while I indulged my intellectual fancies, _I- would do it too! But it is not useful work as most people--Marx included, as noted above--would understand the term. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, has performed numerous useful functions: sports journalist, mother, partner (with her husband) in a fishing boat, and highly effective and hard-working mayor of a city and governor of a state. She has added value to society in a way Marx never did; and she never required a wealthy patron to subsidize her existence in that society.
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I was especially amused by the _Time's_ reviewer's sneering dismissal of Mamet's common-sense assessment of Karl Marx as an impecunious ne'er-do-well versus Sarah Palin as a hard-working, contributing member of society.
Even by his own economicist lights, Marx _was_ an impecunious ne'er-do-well!, whose long-suffering family would have been driven into the poorhouse had Engels not subsidized their existence in England.
One of the axioms of Marx's own theory of value, as expressed at the beginning of _Capital_, is that labor must have "use value" in order to add economic value to a good or service. Sitting in the British Museum for long hours (when the spirit took him; he often went for weeks and months without doing much of anything except indulging in petty vices on Engels' dime) gleaning economic factoids is a pleasant enough way to pass the time; heck, if I could find a wealthy patron willing to support me while I indulged my intellectual fancies, _I- would do it too! But it is not useful work as most people--Marx included, as noted above--would understand the term. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, has performed numerous useful functions: sports journalist, mother, partner (with her husband) in a fishing boat, and highly effective and hard-working mayor of a city and governor of a state. She has added value to society in a way Marx never did; and she never required a wealthy patron to subsidize her existence in that society.
The Times' reviewer did a nasty hatchet job, I thought. But, really, I expected nothing less.
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