If postmodernist times believe in de-centralization, the local, small is beautiful, DIY/PUNK and Off-the-Grid , modernity * just as surely worships megaprojects and the idea that ever bigger is ever better.
Darrell Dexter's NDP government here in Nova Scotia isn't bad (ie isn't corrupt) and is giving us the kind of competent "modern" government we can only wish we had had in the 1970s and 1980s.
The problem is that we are living in the 21st century and in postmodernist times.
Mr Dexter's worship of the sort of large scale industrial projects his father worked at when Darrell was a child is almost admirable, in an act-of-filial-piety-sort-of-way , but it is not good for the long term overall economy of Nova Scotia - an economy that includes our friends the birds, bugs and bees as well as us.
Old fashioned open cage fish farms are a disaster - he knows that - but their proponent is promising a big factory building with 400 unionized jobs of the sort we haven't seen since Dexter's childhood in the Fifties and Sixties.
So he takes the bait ----- and the hook.
An older hook was cast by our PM, Stephen Harper : billions to build ships in Halifax.
Dexter staked his party's fate on getting that contract. Now it is being held up and any pip from Dexter on anything that might point fingers at Harper could delay and delay those shipbuilding megaproject jobs.
So when Harper cut the Confederation-promised rail link between Nova Scotia and "Canada" , don't expect Dexter to lead the charge to the Supreme Court to restore the rail link.
I call this a postmodernist era, because that is the academic consensus : but I personally see it more as a transitional period, post-hegemonic, where moderns (skygods) war it out with postmodernist commensalists ( earthlings).
Darrell Dexter's fiercest critics are within his own party, within the postmodernist section of it.
The battle between skygods vs earthlings could ultimately tear the NS NDP apart into two separate parties.
I doubt whether Dexter will be NS's last NDP premier but my bet is he could be the last Modernist NDP premier of this "small is beautiful" oriented province.
Remember Elizabeth May birthed the SMALL PARTY here 30 years ago ....
* modernity is pre-1945 style thinking ; postmodernity is post-1945 type thinking .....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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