Well, the time will tell, but before that time I have a word to say about the fear of the Greek tragedy contagion in Europe
For more than a century ago L. Frank Baum wrote the famous novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, which most people are familiar with through the 1939 film adaptation “The Wizard of OZ”. At the first glance the novel appears to be a children novel, but some readers, like Henry Littlefield, offered a political reading of the story, where the characters portrayed stand symbolically for genuine people and the political ideas and economic models which they promoted at the time. Quite understandingly for a writer, Baum never left reading instructions so the novel perhaps unintentionally got to live two lives – the childishly naïve one, and the political life stern and annoying in its insistence to wake us up to the true reality. The novel was perhaps destined to suffer from the split personality disorder.
Anyways, I don’t wish to revive the long ago buried discussion about the plausibility of the political interpretation of the novel, but the fact remains that the great Wizard of Oz in the contemporary political discourse on the left (the left ought to be taken in a very broad sense) is a very real figure. Continue reading