WHAT ROUGH BEAST? America sits of the edge

perc,

When someone's incivility speaks for itself it's best to be silent. This is an ideal that I frequently forget, but at blatham's request I'd like to let it do so.

blatham,

I'm not sure you know what you are asking me to stop, I've not had a similar outburst. But I can sympathyze with you wanting "it", whatever it is, to stop so I'll try to comply.

tart

Yes, I agree that the attempts by this administration and the Pentagon to, once again, let loose the nuclear insanity points to the deeply under-appreciated (by folks like george or timber) reality of 1) what Eisenhower warned of, and 2) the equally under-appreciated awareness that the US is more correctly portrayed by Peter Sellers in "Doctor Strangelove" than by Bruce Willis in "Independance Day". It represents perhaps the worst of America.

But, no, I do not agree with you about what Craven is doing here. You know I love you, and that we agree on a zillion things held mutually to be of prime importance, but on this I think you are dead wrong.

Thankee.

To clarify, the "it" is a reference to the exchange, I wanted to clarify that as I think it could be misleading.

perc

The threat of an hour of long division hangs over you.

somewhere I once heard "when elephants fight only the grass suffers"

Bunny

Your post above this one was on target and the concerns of the world are fully justified but having said that I refer to your first sentence above :



Quite right and this is proof of how we see ourselves----as open and transparent---perfectly willing to admit our faults publicly. We want it that way because it somewhat justifies the obnoxious tendency for our freely admitted "holier than thou" attitude.

Hell I admit it-----we have our share of faults but I maintain that indictments of hubris, duplicity, and other genuinely vile characterics should not be voiced lightly, especially by other countries who may be guilty possessing the same characteristics.

Where??? ----Where???

Blatham are you now guilty of the "blame shift" game?

well, thank goodness y'all got that all out while I was sleeping..........

For once in my life, I'm lookin pure and innocent.

Lola

Good mornin to ya----I know you're "itchin" to enter the discussion and now that Craven has been bold enough to "clear the air" I would hope some really fruitful posts could be forthcoming.

Pure and innocent???????

perception,

Blatham's post about long division was just goodnatured riffing off your comment about him playing teacher.

Blatham -- We agree to disagree all the time!

craven

First, you know that I share a lot with Tartarin, particularly in our take on what constitutes a moral polity, and in the dynamics driving America in directions which are not morally justifiable. Also, I think, she and I share a correspondence of mind that's a bit inexplicable...the sort of character or aesthetic which leads some to the arts and others to an exciting career in accountancy. I'd guess she is as impractical in life as I have always been. I don't really fathom what grates between you two, and which leads you both to assume intentions on the part of the other (which I think mistaken) but I acknowledge something does. I also acknowledge that her post above is insulting, and unnecessarily so. And that you've done it to her. I am going to 'pull a george' here and not take a side. I am too fond of both of you. I recommend that, rather than continue as you two have been, that we all just jump on perc.

Now, to the other matter...

This may be tough for me to see properly. I can make some headway through recalling those brief periods when the viewpoints contrasting with my own seemed to be in dominance. Those periods were frustrating, no question, and the temptation to pack up my keyboard and head, sniffling, back to my mommy, or to anyone with the same gender of nipple, asserted itself.

My perception of the matter has a coloration, however. And that relates to two specific complaints.

First, that there is a style of rhetoric which has evolved in voices from the 'right' which is unique in its anti-intellectualism (the prime examples being Rush and Coulter). I've seen this style, and the cliches which attend it, arrive on abuzz and here (and in other boards and letters to editors) and it is carbon-copy stuff, and deeply unreflective, and uses fallacies with the zest of a pitbull. It's Rupert Murdoch, rather than Walter Cronkite. Though voices on the 'left' can do this too, I am certain that if one could devise some criteria for analysing text to measure this, my perception would be validated.

Second, I do think we are running up against what I and deb point to...a reluctance to investigate negatives about the US presence in the world. And a very deep polarization within America which more than a few smart and experienced polical observers describe as more pronounced than they have witnessed in their lifetimes. It's a critical time, and I think we all intuitively understand that.

That being said, we are left with the problem of how do we go about speaking with each other? And, why are we?

It's an open board, which has a lot of positives, but negatives too. One big fat negative seems related to what you point towards...a minority voice can be relegated to a closet, while out in the main room, so many voices are yelling about such different subjects that careful investigation is hobbled by the chaos.

It's the human condition, you are right. Disorderly conduct, though most agreeable in love-making, is a dilemma in many human affairs.

I think we ought to finally get around to trying an experiment in some more formal structure. We can do this as an adjunct to everything else, rather than as a replacement. The thing is, for me personally, I'm on the edge of a significant change in life circumstances and will not have time to work this out for a month of two.

Now, have I avoided something more?

Craven

Can you give me a succinct, lucid, non -sarcastic explanation of how you arrived at that conclusion?

perc

I'd just threatened craven and tart with detentions. Then you went and shoved some pigtails in an inkwell.

Blatham

Ok----"teach" I'm riveted to my seat with wild anticipation for my next lesson in how to absolve the sins of my uneducated ugly American compatriots.

Seriously, you SEEM absolutely obsessed with finding a line of communication that will allow you to send signals to the corrupted brains of Americans (especially those who govern) that will suddenly illuminate that wonderful vision that you have. Your vision will then "show us the way" to enlightenment and force us to discard all our myths about ourselves. We will then be able to reject all of our hubris, our evil thoughts of world supremacy, hegemony, imperialism, and greed for all the worlds oil and material assets. We will then submit to the desires of the world to be a jovial sucker throwing money around to solve all the worlds social ills and at the same time open our borders to any looney who wants to send us to our heaven. In other words you would have us commit suicide so that the rest of the world can heave a sigh of relief that the evil satan is gone.

Am I correct or does it just "SEEM" that is your intent.

Perc, I think you hit the nail between the eyes!

Eh, looks like a bullet hole to the first metatarsal to me.

Do I detect a complete dislocation between visual perception and the end target in the brain?

Sounds to me like you need to re-boot your detector.

I wish I could tell you his name, but I heard him for only a few minutes in an NPR interview last week: the author of a new book on Washington and Jefferson and their persistent unwillingness to free their own slaves. None of us can claim moral perfection, but the greatest imperfection -- might even have to use the word "sin" here -- is to be yes-but about immorality once one knows about it. This gets even worse if you follow Washington's and Jefferson's examples and make speeches about the injustice and undesirability of slavery in America and about how important it was to get rid of it -- which they did even as they kept putting off the day in which they'd free their own slaves.

Count the decades between those fellows' earnest declarations that slavery was untenable and the date of the Emancipation Proclamation or, better, the date of school desegregation or lifting the ban on intermarriage in many states.

There are endless examples of this kind of immorality, duplicity, and venality in our history just as there are endless examples of astonishing progress. What history tells us is that we need to choose our heroes more carefully -- that our leaders are often more interesting and less attractive than we'd like to think.

We are blessed and cursed in 2003 by our ability to communicate and we're no less blessed and cursed by vast differences among us in experience, education, access to resources, and above all willingness to drop illusions and expand our knowledge. Those differences lead to real disagreement about whether we should avoid discussion of the issues raised by the author of the book on Washington and Jefferson because they run counter to our ideas of what our country stands for. Some of the divisions in the country right now are based on disagreement about "the whole truth."

Does it make sense to banish from consideration the fact that, much like Washington and Jefferson, America has a tradition of saying one thing and doing another, that we are very clever but imperfect, often immoral, certainly duplicitous? If we don't acknowledge who we really are -- if we won't (for example) talk about "The Founders" as they were, not as we'd like to think they were -- won't we be caught forever in a trap of our own making?

I'm at a loss to figure out what has made Craven decide to drop, as he has done several times now in the past couple of months, into vigorous but peaceable discussions and lay a trip on one or another participant. There's a personal aspect (the part I call sickening and embarrassing because I was sickened by it and embarrassed for him) which doesn't need airing here. To the extent to which these drop-ins dampen or narrow discussion, I find them sad and inexplicable. I think Blatham has been remarkably congenial about it. Where I would differ is in the importance given to whether we all like each other. There are a lot of enormously likeable people here, but for me the issue is trustworthiness, not likeability. I think the level of trust took a hit last night in this thread.