NAOMI KLEIN IS SHOCKING

I always have the best of intentions when placing events in my calendar, but when the day actually arrives, I tend to be rather lazy and plop down in front of the TV instead. On Saturday, however, I went against my nature and attended the Naomi Klein lecture at Victoria Hall in conjunction with the Santa Barbara Book & Author Festival. I have to say that Ms. Klein's talk was truly one of the most educational and powerful discussions I've heard in a long time, and I'm so happy that I went. For those of you who don't know, Naomi Klein is on tour right now to promote her new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. To be honest, I hadn't even heard of it before last night, but you can bet I'm going to run over to to the local book store and pick up a copy.

Those of us who who have made an attempt to keep informed on global and political affairs over the years were told many things in the lecture we've heard before: Bush used our fear after 9/11, for example, as an excuse to attack Iraq. Yep, knew it. But the amazing thing about Naomi Klein's work is her ability to put these kinds of events in a larger historical context. I'm almost afraid to attempt a summary of her speech for fear of leaving something out. But it's important, so I'll give it a shot. In a nutshell, I came away with these overarching themes:

1) When people are in shock (physical, emotional, and/or economical), they revert to a childlike state. In a sense, they lose their "story" or their "narrative."

2) Governments know this about humanity, so they take advantage of people in this state by giving them a new story. In other words, they can sort of "reboot" them.

3) This tactic can be used on individuals (i.e. torture) or whole societies.

4) Governments often use shock to push through the privatization of government functions and the chipping away of civil liberties. When people are in shock, they want someone to take care of them, so they don't question things they would normally have a problem with.

5) A perfect example of this phenomenon is 9/11. Americans as a whole were in shock after that event, so the government was able reboot us. The expressions "pre-9/11 thinking" and "everything you thought you knew before was wrong" came out of this mind-set. This is the new story they gave us. We were told that we had to let go of our rights as Americans, and being in this childlike state, we said okay.

6) This is nothing new; governments have been doing it for years. They can cause the shock or simply take advantage of it.

7) The king of neo-con economic thinking is Milton Friedman, and he has a famous expression that "you never have real changes unless you have a time of crisis." The extreme privatization of government functions in Iraq and New Orleans were allowed to occur as a direct result of our state of shock.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but better you just read the book. Or at the very least, watch the above short film made by Klein and Alfonso Cuarón (he directed Harry Potter boys and girls)!

In conclusion, I'd like to leave you with my favorite Naomi Klein quote ...

We lost [the battle of ideas] because we were crushed. Sometimes we were crushed by army tanks, and sometimes we were crushed by think tanks. And by think tanks I mean the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks.