May Day, the right-left zig zag, LSD and this thing called post modernism...

      Another May Day. What can we say? In the United States, where memory seems short-lived when it comes to a date marking the assassination of striking textile workers, and where President George Bush has just achieved another record (for being the most unpopular president in modern American history), the day came with a handful of demonstrations by those choosen few who seemed to have recovered their link to the past.

    But another story seemed to be developing in Latin America, where Bush and company seem to see only what they want to. People not only protested: Venezuela announced nationalization of the powerful steel company, SIDOR, (of the Techint group), in Ecuador the government decided not to renew the contract with Mexican millionaire Carlos Slim’s "América Móvil," and in Bolivia President Evo Morales bought out the majority stock in the Andina, Chaco, Transredes and "Compañía Logística Hidrocarburifera Boliviana" and regained control of "ENTEL," telecomunications firm.

    That is, the naughty governments did just what post-modernism and capitalism and free marketism preach against. What? The State in control of natural resources? For God’s sake what has the world come to? (That is, taking an upsidedown, sideways or disjointed view of the official line, things seem to be a bit unsettling in the area for the advocates of Uncle Sam’s line).

     There were also those who, a bit whimsically, recalled the struggles on the streets of Paris during the 1968 upheavals--where protesters dared shout "power to imagination!" Memory! How the world has changed in three and a half decades! Oh. Remember LSD? The chemist who "invented" it, Albert Hofmann, died at 102 years of age. Please don’t take this fact to be an irony, and don’t think LSD had anything to do with his long life (after all, the guy also had the habit of eating eggs, unafraid of their effect on the blood stream) and, well, Hofmann was quite spiritual about his discovery, thinking it should be used for spiritual purposes--as he observed in indigenous communities in Mexico--rather than for short-lived ludic pleasure.