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Philip Roth explored this push and pull in his doppelganger novel Operation Shylock: “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,”5 he wrote of a duplicate Roth. That sentence has become my mantra during this uncanny period. Are the political movements Other Naomi helps lead ridiculous, unworthy of attention—or are they part of a serious shift in our world that needs our urgent reckoning? Should I be laughing or crying? Am I sitting still on this rock, or is everything moving very fast?
Because it means she represents a larger and more dangerous form of mirroring—a mimicking of beliefs and concerns that feeds off progressive failures and silences.
But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called “the predatory phase” of human development.
Why Socialism?
Ernest Haberkern
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