|
i keep reading through the thread and still cant figure out how to play this game because the point of erasing the states (the moment at which it happens in the scenario that begins the thread) does not seem to me workable.
again, by 1945, the americans had already made significant shifts into a cold war framework, starting with the series of delays in invading europe to take pressure off the soviets (harry truman's famous statement "let them bleed each other white" comes to mind)---by 1945, bretton woods was already in place, and with it much of the logic of the postwar economic order--i would think that you would have to back up to make it work, maybe from the spring of 1944. i could see extending the logic of a prewar us--more isolationist, suspicious of international organizations (the league of nations), less obviously interested in empire....what it seems that you would erase is more the post-1945 economic and social orders, what is called fordism--which is generally understood as a remodelling of capitalism around versions of the american model--from the assimilation of trade unions into the status quo through collective bargaining to the extension of the welfare state, to the logic of higher-wage working class jobs to the transformation of consumer credit and ultimate co-optation of traditional working-class politics through the opening up of property ownership as an option.
it gets pretty complicated once you set this kind of thing in motion.
it seems, however, that the logic at the outset was simply to present a coldwar scenario and then erase the states. i do not understand what the objective behind it is--maybe a kind of demonstration of how wonderful the world is now thanks to the fabulousness that is the american system (o yes, look around, how could anything be better than this, the best of all possible worlds?)
which seems without particular interest. the counterfactual game, pointless though it is at certain levels, is more serious than this in consideration of premises. hell, most time-travel stories are as well. in the end, the exercize is about thinking historical causality in a way that does not bring up problems of causality in itself (as category imported from natural sciences into thinking history)
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|