#eula biss

YOUR DAD NEVER STOPPED LOVING YOU, HE STOPPED SHOWING IT; ON FATHERS

Under feudalism, the English rehearsed a racial hierarchy based on blood and birth, and this was the first stage in the development of an economic system dependent on racism.

Later, Southern planters in the U.S. would imagine themselves as landed gentry and their slaves as feudal subjects. Capitalism here was built on slavery, and capitalism everywhere has depended on the idea that one group of people is entitled to extract profit from another, an idea that is often expressed in terms of us and them."

— Eula Biss, The Theft of the Commons

In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing. The soft colors of the rugs, the warm wood grains, the brass and glass of the lamps all seem to suggest that the stores are filled with beautiful things, but when I look at any one thing I don’t find it beautiful. “The desire to consume is a kind of lust,” Lewis Hyde writes. “But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.”