WHAT ROUGH BEAST? America sits of the edge

Please fix your links...they all go to the same one.

Done....thanks McG

Blatham -- I'd already read the first two (terrific) and will get to Didion in the actual NYRB sometime in the next couple of days between puppy poops.

We've been travelling so long towards the "edge" that I'm hesitant to consider this a new emergency. As long ago as 1980 when I was about to return (for a short time, I thought then) to the US, fellow Americans living overseas talked about the very symptoms we're all discussing now with such urgency -- symptoms so obvious and so awful that I almost didn't return, in spite of a very tempting "career opportunity."

That, in itself, is shocking: that Americans who'd lived in this country up to and including the '70's were so articulate, once outside of the US, about problems while Americans living here were - what? - ignoring deliberately? sliding through? determined not to notice? There were no political divisions in the blindness, liberals crying foul against conservative excesses. In fact it was my fellow liberals who utterly puzzled me when I first returned -- they were living very comfortably in a world which was so corrupt as to dazzle a returning American.

So the question becomes, Why did some of us notice the trouble and others not? What was the blindness all about? Why are there still so many who will say, Piffle, we're just fine!

That would be pure snowwhite selfishness, Tartarin. Uncut egoism.

Which is actually understandable in a convinced Darwinistic society as the US.

reading....

"With God on Our Side"
Bob Dylan
Title: With God on Our Side
Album: The Times They Are A-Changin'
by Bob Dylan

Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

In a many dark hour
I've been thinkin' about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can't think for you
You'll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.

Blatham,

Well I read the first two articles carefully. The third appeared to be an anti fundamentalist piece, but one that richly indulged in the rather weird textual obsessions of the very group it was examining. I let it go after a few pages.

OK Strauss had some ideas about elites, noble lies, and struggles for dominance. He also imbibed perhaps a bit too much of Plato's doctrine concerning the potential of the mass of mankind and the value of governance by elites. (Happily our Judaeo Christian traditions include far more from Aristotelian pragmatism than Plato's concepts). Machiavelli, who was incidently not a bad guy at all and who very realistically organized some practical and proven guides for behavior and strategy based on his own experiences among the city states of Early Renaissance Italy, is also cited in this analysis. The underlying presumption of the interview as recorded was that any deduction from any expression of Plato or his disciples must necessarily be the guiding principle of the Bush administration because some of its figures were among Strauss' students and even showed some attraction to at least some aspect of his ideas.

The references to the proclivity of "Straussian" members of the administration for "noble lies" in support of the struggles they advocate, and the accompanying suggestions that this represents something new in American governance (or the governance of any other country for that matter), utterly ignores the Preludes to the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, and the American participations in WWI and WWII. In every one of those cases the historical record establishes the deliberate deception by our government as to its intentions. No one now criticizes Woodrow Wilson for campaigning on a platform of "He kept us out of War", and soon after the election mobilizing a million American soldiers to be sent to the killing fields in France. Roosevelt's deceptions were of longer duration and much greater degree and subtlety. The election of 1939/40 was based on his promise to keep us out of the European war that all could see was coming, and which our Navy was also (secretly) already fighting. I doubt that one could find a country that has not frequently indulged in such things.

While all this is certainly suitable grist for the mill of an ambitious professor looking for opportunities to publish the odd article or two, it hardly constitutes meaningful analysis of the goals or policies of this administration. Moreover the basic proposition that anything remotely "Straussian" is necessarily the policy of the Administration is itself an enormous non-sequitur.

Of what use are these thinly based inferences against the known facts of the Administration's actions and its public statements of its goals.

My overall impression - a rather pedantic overanalysis of marginal inferences done by an ambitious university professor looking for an opportunity to publish.

The second article, written by a particularly partisan individual with a known bias and point of view, is an examination of the potential contradictions in the administrations treatment of 600 or so prisoners, held here and abroad, in the War on Terror.

The author makes a proper distinction between the laws governing prisoners under criminal jurisdiction, and prisoners of War. He argues that in general we should grant such prisoners the benefit of either model, whichever happens to be more favorable to the individual at the moment. He notes that the Administration has taken more or less the opposite tack and says that constitutes the justification of any action whatever in defense of the security of the United States. This remarkable leap is also a non-sequitur of major proportions.

He goes on to fault the judicial process inherent in the military tribunals which may be applied in some of these cases, but fails to note that these procedures are duly constituted by U.S. law and do meet the standards of Treaty law that we have signed. In effect he asserts that his interpretation of international law should prevail and not that duly made by authorized government agencies. That of course is his right, but it does not constitute a binding legal case.

Overall I would say that there is nothing at all in either article for the reader except some grist for the mills of those already convinced that there is a dark, evil conspiracy underway.

If instead one believes that the Western World is confronted with the backlash of some Islamist elements in the Moslem world who are reacting violently to modern political and economic structures, perhaps in frustration at the relative backwardness of their own societies, and recognizes that this process will take some time to play out during which we are, in effect, at war with the worst, best organized, and most violent elements of that disaffected group - then these considerations shrink enormously in both importance and in their relevance to the state of our political morality.


Overall - much ado about very little..

I've been working on these articles.......reading faster.

But I refuse to see gloom, until it's totally undeniable.........and we'll have to be a lot closer to the election than we are now before I give up all hope.

So there, Blatham. You're crying "The sky is falling the sky is falling" and here's the guy who thinks he's holding it in place.

Poor metaphor. The sky is not falling, and no one is holding it in place.

Bookmarking for a later comment...

"It's turles all the way down"

You'll have to tell the turtles joke, Blatham. Or no one will get this last comment, I fear.

Tell me the joke !

Let's see...........if I can remember it..............

Oh, I'm afraid I'll not get it exactly right..... Blatham tells a very good joke. And it's his joke.........so I'll have to let him tell it. But it's very funny.

He's passed out on the Cherry Garcia.

I believe he has...........up early, I understand. Well, believe it or not, my eyes are begining to close as well. And then tomorrow, or, today it is, I guess, he can tell us all whatever he wants to. Good night george.......sleep well.

Man! I'm about halfway through the Didion piece! She really does a job, doesn't she!

Is one really supposed to be respectful of people who lead their lives according a comic book series?

Well, we are a lonely few here.

george

Thank you for the courtesy of the reading. Now let me begin to do to your response what frequent bleaching did to my Aunt Nettie's hair.

First, you pass over Didion (and this article) both imprudently and impudently. There is no better political writer in your country, a contention I share with many. What you see as "weird textual obsessions of the very group examined" is very much to the point of what she is revealing in the work. That is, the relationship between this administration and a particular - and extreme - theology. What does it mean for the relationship between church and state for a President to be speaking of 'a crusade' at the commencement of a war against members of another faith? What does it mean for the intellectual and educational future of a nation's children where the President not only panders to a constituency who wish to remove Darwin from schools, but who himself thinks the same way? What are the consequences when a political party to becomes so dependent upon such a constituency? This is a shift, an extreme shift, in notions about reality and about the goals of governance. This is a shift, though one might argue to what extent it has moved in the direction, or how likely to succed, but it is a shift towards theocracy.

Later, I'll pick up on your Strauss comments.