From Joe Carducci's new history of the SST era:

"In the van Black Flag threw empty coffee cups and orange juice bottles down onto the rocker panels; when they stopped somewhere they simply kicked the garbage into the street. Trashing? Graffiti-ing? Postering? Pissing? Los Angeles seemed the fallen dream of generations of transplants; the locals, now acclimated to its harsh scape didn't see the point in taking care of it. It took care of itself. It just was. And this was quite unlike other cities. It was part of what make punks in the rest of the country feel like naïve goo-goo hippies when the L.A. bands rolled up."

civilization without money isn't civilization, it's fundamentalism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2243980,00.html

Guardian: "Inequality is closing down our concern to care for others"
Well, duh.
This kind of explains, more clearly, the sentiment of Michael Lind's in a piece from 2004 in the Prospect magazine UK, on Red States vs Blue States. i would summarize, but then you wouldn't read the article, would you? well, i'll give it a shot anyway:
- the middle classes (and the revelation is that this is in fact the middle classes who are feeling this way, or what's left of them anyway) may support collective wealth overall, but individually they will support neoliberal economic policies if it benefits them individually (which it almost always does). so there you have it.

(as an aside, i think that it is important not to be attached to ideology, economic or otherwise, one way or another. old-fashioned realism, i guess you could say, though it's an idea that's ready and ripe once again. but since i'm an intellectual, and Marxism still is the reigning mode of academic thought -- it's important that we can at least open ourselves up to, let us say, a pre-Marxist mode of economic thought, one in which a universe of economic possibilities presents itself to us. such as, let's say, mercantilism. right? i don't know anything.)

(but it's important that we recognize this as simply being a symptom, rather than a cause, of the age we live in and its deleterious effects on just about all of us...except those who profess otherwise, being perhaps the middle class alluded to above...though they only do so for their plain economic benefit and without knowledge of the harm done in the long run! this is the fate of those with something to lose, though not enough to keep them from doing so anyway.)

(as Lukacs said, anyway, is that what we are missing is simple: God. well, there it is, in a word, folks.)

--

EDIT: well, there is some intellectual inconsistency here. do the middle class really support neoliberalism? well, yes, probably. nevermind, then.

--

what this amounts to, then, may be a defense, perhaps, of neoliberalisme. why not? only in the particulars. my worldview is far more medieval and musty than that.

--

which makes me a neocon, lol.