Against The Beast

When asked what he thought should replace the Christianity he so unfailingly attacked, Voltaire replied that since the beast was sucking the blood of his family, he most surely did not want to replace it. This is quoted in Curtis White’s two-part article in Orion on the nature of our destruction of our own lives that is the continued assault on the environment. Food for thought:
Part One: Idols of Environmentalism
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/233
Part Two: The Ecology of Work
www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/267/

White’s essay is excerpted in August’s Harper's, which also has a piece by Jonathan Kozol about the continuing effort to swap America’s public education system, a hallmark of democracy, for one based on profits. He introduces me to a term I hadn’t heard before, the EMOs, or “education management organizations” set on the thin edge of the pro-voucher wedge to become the HMOs of one of the last frontier of the public sphere, and hence our democracy. If nothing else, in the ruins of our antihealth care system, one can see the irony of the financiers deciding to use so similar a name for their attempted take-over.