Sitting in Pitlochry’s Festival Theatre today (after seeing My Fair Lady last night) having coffee with Luke and reading The Scotsman; was treated to a sparkling interview with John Berger in the centre supplement.  Berger is like Michael Polanyi. One of those hugely influential writers to a generation of readers but who, for some reason, doesn’t leap to the next generation without a helping hand. A re-presentation is needed. Berger, an artist and art critic first, offers this:

“”Too many of today’s problems result from not seeing clearly”, Berger says. He talks about the “new financial order” which he describes as “economic fascism … where the virtual is more important than the real and the productive. It produces a growing opposition between the rich and the poor, and in all the thinking and the reasoning that goes on, the sense of what exists at ground level is absent.”

“He thumps the table quietly with both hands, as if to demonstrate its concreteness.

“”The situation with Dominique Strauss-Khan (the former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, charged with sexually assaulting a chambermaid in a high-class New York hotel), whatever else it’s about, it’s about not seeing, it’s losing that connection with the real. I don’t know exactly what happened, but what’s absolutely clear is that it was incredibly stupid of him. I mean – ach!” He almost spits with contempt. “It’s as though that kind of suite which costs £3,000 for 24 hours that he hired, that blinds the occupant to any real sense of what is on the ground.””

http://living.scotsman.com/features/Interview-John-Berger-author-.6779229.jp?articlepage=2