US Army Threatened by Loss in a Morass

This question is not simply metaphor or hyperbole. There is a real danger, as I noted over nine months ago that the US could literally lose its army in Iraq. This would occur were the army's supply lines to be cut and then surrounded by various forces that have a unified strategy to surround the army and kill it. ..

William S. Lind is now reiterating those concerns. For Lind, this potential for a devastating defeat and bloodbath would occur if the Iranians are either attacked by Israel/US or they take the initiative and press their strategic positions.

Lind lays out several scenarios for how such a debacle might occur. Unfortunately, as Lind notes, the thinking among the technocrats and the military is immune to these dangers.

Lind writes:

Perhaps the greatest danger lies in the fact that, just as the French high command refused to consider the possibility of a German attack through the Ardennes in 1940, Washington will not consider the possibility that an attack on Iran could cost us our army in Iraq. We have made one of the most common military mistakes—believing our own propaganda. Over and over, the U.S. military tells the world and itself, “No one can defeat us. No one can even fight us. We are the greatest military the world has ever seen!”

Unfortunately, like most propaganda, it’s bunk. The U.S. Armed Forces are technically well-trained, lavishly resourced Second-Generation militaries. They are today being fought and beaten by Fourth-Generation opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They can also be defeated by Third-Generation opponents who can react faster than America’s process-ridden, PowerPoint-enslaved military headquarters. They can be defeated by superior strategy, by trick, by surprise, and by preemption. Unbeatable militaries are like unsinkable ships: they are unsinkable until something sinks them.

If the U.S. were to lose the army it has in Iraq to Iraqi militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both, cutting our one line of supply and then encircling us, the world would change. It would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never recover. Nothing, not even Israel’s demands, should lead us to run this risk, which is inherent in any attack on Iran.

These points bode very ill for the US. If the Democrats continue to show the stoneless grit that they did before they won the last elections, they will have once again shown their craven kowtowing to Washington machinations and Israeli interests.

Related Links

• Moment of Indecision
  
• Joint Chiefs Advise Change In War Strategy

Read more!

The Bush Bull in the China Shop

Bush was warned before he went in to Iraq that if he broke it he owned it. Now the poop is really hitting the fan. Helena Cobban has a remark on Anthony Cordesman's op-ed that appears to say that the US has already lost in the region. ...

Strangely enough, the one most working to cobble together a coalition that might work is al-Sadr. Cobban reported this little bit of analysis that shows that Sadr is working behind the scenes with Shia, Sunni, and secular Iraqis to form a government that would head off complete descent into hell:

I mean, what is happening is that apparently Moqtada al-Sadr-- who was crudely caricatured on the Newsweek cover this week, and portrayed as some kind of near devil-incarnate-- is entering a coalition with Mutlak (a "Sooni") and Allawi (pretty much of a secularist and a fairly strongly Baath-style enforcer), and between them the three of them are also hoping to split Maliki's party and lure a sizeable chunk of its members over to their new Front....

Of course, that little bit of machiavellian maneuvering would be neutralized by any extra judicial solution (ie, assassination) that's being bruited about by the oh-so culturally sensitive neocon dogs of war. How stupid is that? in a culture that is based in many ways on the very real appreciation for martyrs and martyrdom?

Is it the preceding fact that is spurring the Saudis to threaten Bush with backing Sunni Iraqis? Are they trying to head off some kind of granda alliance that would bring the hope of peace to that tragic society? Have they bought into the Salvador Option that some think has actually given rise to the chaos in Iraq?

Questions perhaps to be unanswered given the secrecy fetish of the Bush admin and the Saudis.

Related Links

• Bush Is Loath to Budge
  
• A War Bush Wouldn't Pay For
  
• Moment of Indecision
  
• Report: Saudis Warn Against US Pullout
  
• Saudi Ambassador Abruptly Resigns, Leaves Washington
  
• Bush Delays Speech on Iraq Strategy

Read more!

le decider decidering to decider et couche avec les saudis ce soir

the great deciderer gives this little show this little marionette dance of death going from one office to another office:meeting with group after group:yet it is all wind and all sham and a farce that's make truman fart in his grave. ...

what's the deciderer decidering thou asks? nada zilch nugatory monkeys with their brains on display in the museum of human descent. the deciderer and his brain the roving gnome are putting on this little smoke and mirrors game so that the deciderers fanatical believers will be able to point like so many righteous prayer litanists and say:

[color=blue]see the deciderer doth decidererer.
ho deciderer thou art indeed just and fair and doth seek the judgment of the god that inspiriteth our heart.
oh deciderer thou art great.
oh deciderer thou art wise.
oh deciderer thou art the wrath of god.
oh deciderer thou dost bed the great whore and expose her head upon the pylons of the holy house thou callest home.[/color]

the sacred drama doth indeed quell the waters of chaos. the deluge doth subside. the blood of the mighty doth slicker the floors. the unwilling diseased poor who are god's despised doth line the highways and byways with their entrails bedecking the xmas riots.

for now that the rivers of chaos doth recede the bounty doth begin to flow and fill the tables of god's chosen. and the deciderer is afoot in the land decidering how to keep the dogs of war at bay in the slums of the world and away from our side of the tracks.

chorus of the dead:

pitiful man with a ring in his nose
knows not what he does and takes
hundreds of thousands of innocents
with him over the cliff in his insane
despair that lies to itself and finds
the devil in the mirror for the sleep
of the righteous brings peace
but this wraith's dreams wake
into the light and bring ruin
and wrack to anyone who finds
his footstep across their door jamb

for the terrorist state hast little but brute nastiness to espouse for brilliance. methinks tis a dull light beaconing to the rest of the world:the bright glow that will betoken the mideast shouldest the deciderer let go with a loud fart and loose from his bowels the nuclear waste that rumblest in his gut.

for the magnet of instability with its nuclear option threatens neighbors like a bully with a machete in a shantytown:and now it gets into bed with saudi royals to further wreak terror and rain pain upon the region that it seeks only to keep off kilter so it doesn't have to worry about facing its own apartheid next door.

lies and lies and lies originate in the brain of shrinking souls
when the dead want to glow in the dark they read at the schul
for reading their end in every jot and tittle declines to dusk
until the morning star rises to light the decline of all dreams
all ends all means all love boats except the decline of words
that can express no doubt but only joy that the end is nigh. Read more!

Call For Submissions: Kierkegaard Carnival II

The second edition of the Kierkegaard Carnival will focus on Kierkegaard's social, ethical, and political thought. The main texts for Kierkegaard's political thought include The Present Age, Works of Love, and Practice in Christianity. ...

Other works, however, have also been interpreted as relating to politics, especially The Sickness Unto Death. All of his journalism related to the Attack on Christendom can also be seen as political in nature.

If there are enough quality articles that cover other topics, they will be considered for includion in this edition.

If you decide to include your post in Kierkegaard Carnival II, please see the announcement and submission form for the Carnival. Read more!

Confession in Search of a Dialog (2)

In response to a comment on my previous posting at eteraz.org, I replied with the following:

Katie, I am sorry for responding so late to your comment. I wanted to find the time to thank you in the appropriate terms that your comment requires.

I agree with you that there is this silver lining, as you put it, in my daughter's behavior. Indeed, I am somewhat proud that she ended the relationship in the way that she did and did not simply hang on to it as some might. I think this shows a sense of character and self-awareness that I had hoped she'd develop in this odyssey that she finds herself on. ...

Some on the list may find this irresponsible of me as a parent. While I always advised her not to engage in this behavior until she was older, I did not overreact to the news that she had begun earlier than I would have wished. I've always stressed a healthy relationship in our discussions of this issue, and I did not think that a teenager could do that. So, I fought her insistence that she was more mature than I was giving her credit for.

Yet, I knew that she would have to find her way in these matters as she must in her search for self-knowledge. This is the larger issue that I tried to raise in my original diary entry. That is, as parents trying to instill a sense of ethics and responsibility in children, how do we do that? And for a religious person, doesn't this mean making the children abide by the rules and guidelines set out by the sacred scripture?

The traditional way of looking at this is to instill in one's children a sense of the religion by strict adherence to the practices and doctrines of the religion. In this way, traditions and customs have grown up that explain how and why children should behave so that they become good people religiously and socially.

Perhaps that is best. Perhaps not. What I have suggested is that the objective of parenting must be the development of the child's spirit so that they can become open to religion, should they decide to do that. Since I believe that religious belief must be free and not coerced, this can only happen when a child or young adult is capable of understanding themselves to the point that they also wish to respond to the need of believing in something higher than themselves or society.

This is what I have called the education of life. Perhaps it is best to allow our children to be educated by life so that they then develop the social and biological aspects of their selves. Should they then decide that standing before a higher power is something they need and want, then they will do so as human beings who have grown as far as they can within the given social and cultural contexts provided by time and history.

As a parent, of course, this is a time of trial and fear and trembling. Just as one fears when children go off on their own and engage in things without your oversight and care, so the idea that giving them this freedom to risk failure is a sign of love and perhaps as much a religious undertaking as educating them in the faith.

Thanks Katie for understanding the side with the light on it. I will take your comment as a sign that things will indeed work out for my daughter's betterment, as I hope and pray they do. Read more!

The Fate of the Republic Hangs on a Man's Frail Spirit

Pres. Bush is a dangerous man at this moment. While his lackeys may try to salve his pride with the idea that he's Truman, the only give em hell that George has left is the last sick gasp of a fool running from the derision of history.

Let's hope George listens to his toadies, for if he doesn't then I fear that Pat Lang is right--we are looking at a man who wants desperately to mean something in the world and to do so he just might take us all with him as he jumps off the next cliff. The drug of power may have just put the type of delusion in this man's mind that LSD used to evoke. ...

There's something sinister in looking at recent videos of George sitting next to James Baker as Baker reels off the mistakes that little George has made. You can actually see George shrinking in his skin as the living ghost of his father looms before his eyes and reprimands him for having done something stupid.

But there's even more than this, I fear, lurking in George's shriveling spirit. There's the look of nihilistic fury that a man who believes that heaven is nigh gets when his God has let him down. As that world-shattering vision fades before his eyes and the fatal brutality of the hells he has spawned in his fanatical belief in apocalypse rises up like so many hundreds of thousands of terrorized children there is truly the fear that a sucicidal mania will grip his weak mind.

God save the republic. And may those who believed in this man and brought him to power find themselves rooting around for salvation in the ruins they have made of a once great country.

[xposted as comment at Sic Semper Tyrannis Read more!

sensory antennae of the empire's decline

start? since when did it stop?
no coffins dead babies
in dead arms of dead parents
grandparents aunts uncles
cousins children dead and dying
in a war the lame duck wading
in his own piss thinks only kills
trees or blows rocks apart
or some such thing though
if he really read ye olde goode
booke he says he read he'd hear
the stones themselves howl
in agony and terror that children
dream at night when his planes
deliver their phosphorescent
love notes bent in a wind
that spells terror from his hand
to theirs yes start censoring now
cause it never stops and never
will when you think god's plan
sits in your nuts and the guts
you wear around your brow
reek of the insane innocence
that spells deceit and lies
and the silence of the dead
and the dying and clawed hands
digging beneath the dirt to reach
the other side of the world
where the demon man with empty
head sits in judgment of child
father mother and all who inhabit
his plastic world of evil and axes
of pain and hell and the corrupt
soul of a state gone in the teeth Read more!

Holocaust Denying Muslims?

Everyone knows that Iran's President is something of a crackpot. One of his stupider thoughts is that the Holocaust never happened. In fact, he's so taken with his own idiocy that he's holding an international conference in Tehran this week on whether the Holocaust happened or not.

Of course, the Holocaust industry won't let us forget how stupid Ahmedinajad is. Nor will the Zionists let us forget that the idiot Iranian president supposedly said that Israel should be wiped off the map. I've written before that this mistranslates what Ahmedinajad said, but no journalist or public figure seems to have the cognitive skills to grasp that. ...

With the sad spectacle of a country's leader foisting lies onto his own people and perhaps the Muslim world, it's good to see that more responsible Muslims tackle the subject of the Holocaust with honesty and facts. One such Muslim is Arab Israeli Khaled Kasab Mahameed from Nazareth. His books on the Holocaust and how it determines the Jewish Israeli's world-view is a testament to cross-cultural understanding, not to mention an inspiration to those who wonder how the Palesitnian-Israeli issue might eventually find resolution.

In an interview with Canadian Broadcasting, Mahameed explains what he's going to tell Ahmedinajad in Tehran. Strangely enough, it seems, the Iranian Holocaust deniers invited someone who knows what they're talking about. Read more!

Confession In Search of a Dialog (1)

When I first saw Ali's title I was glad because I'd been thinking along a similar line. Then I found he was discussing a policy issue while what I'd been considering was a more personal, perhaps confessional, posting. I was thinking that what often gets lost in many discussions and conversations between people of different cultures is the "personal," even intimate details of our lives.

If different cultures can approach any type of authentic discourse, it seems to me, it is this intimate level that it must reach; otherwise real, heartfelt understanding can't and won't take place. (I think that it's significant beyond simple anecdote that most people overcome prejudices when they have a chance to live near and interact with people they previously were prejudiced against.) ...

What I will confess in the following are details of my personal life, particularly in relationship to my children and my other relationships in life. Some on the forum might be scandalized by what I tell. Others might say how stupid of me, while others will judge my lack of character or other defect. To all, I would say that I am a sinful man--I know that.

I have made huge mistakes--not just ethical mistakes but also sins that are perhaps worse than anything ethical. I say this because I accept the notion that sinfulness is not equated with breaking social laws or customs or traditions.

Having said this, I ask others to exhibit unrestrained, unfettered, judgmental remarks to what I write. I welcome your words. I believe that I am as conscious of my faults as any, or at least I pray that the veil of deception be lifted from y heart. So where I can learn and change I will. Where I see prejudice and unwarranted judgment I will call a spade a spade as Americans like to say.

Do not expect me, however, to accept judgments based on cultural values that are patently limited in time and space to one culture. I do not accept the notion that cultural values and traditions have the type of transcendent truth that many ascribe to them.

Some will perhaps say that all this is nice, especially since I write from behind a pseudonym. There's much to that, I think. Indeed, many will say that I do so because of my shame. There's something to that as well I think. Yet, I believe that it is exactly this issue of shame that must be broached in these types of conversations.

Some will see what I propose as typically American, perhaps a la Jerry Springer. I would hope that those who read my confession might do so with the poets Allen Ginsberg in mind or maybe Sharon Olds. I do see that these confessional writers have their detractors, but I’d remind forum members that the confession goes as far back as Augustine, the great northern African thinker.

Martha Nussbaum has proved quite conclusively I think that shame is a culturally formed emotion. What Americans accept as an issue for shame, others might not. At the same time, what other cultures find shameful Americans do not. Indeed, within American society you will find that Americans are as of many minds about what is shameful as they are about any other issue. For some Americans in fact, it is the loss of shame that tells how corrupt American culture and society are.

In this, no doubt, they agree with the other critics of American secular life that they otherwise consider enemies.

My son has told me that he's moving to the southwest to live with his mother and to go to community college there. He's been working at McDonald's ever since he was put on academic parole for bad grades during his first year at college. He decided to party instead of work on school. Now he is reaping the fruits of his desires I guess.

His mother and I divorced several years ago; the formal divorce happened after a spiritual and emotional divorce, a time during which I lived as though I was single.

After moving east with my son, she remained behind with my two daughters. I have five children. Three from my former wife and two by a previous relationship wherein I did not marry the mother of my two other children.

My son has been living with a young woman for about a month or so. His decision to move to the southwest made her cry several times, he said. I feel very sorry for this young woman who is very nice. She works very hard at her job and she has shown a lot of forgiveness in allowing my son to be with her while he has already expressed his plan to move away.

My daughters who live with my former wife have been living what many would consider a dysfunctional life-style. My older daughter (15) has told me that she has experimented with some drugs though she does not do so now. She had a short relationship with a young man for a month or two but she broke up with him because he cheated on her. She’s been sexually active for several months.

I find myself concerned about both of these incidents. I had hoped that they would not replicate the mistakes that I made in my own adolescence. A product of a broken, abusive, drunken marriage myself, I experimented with drugs, had relationships at 15, and became an alcoholic for 10 or so years. I’ve been drug-free and sober for over 20 years now.

My concern for my children is that they be happy. While I believe that the education I have undergone by life has made me into a better person—for all its suffering and pain, both self-inflicted and other-inflicted—I did not trust the workings so much so that I wanted to entrust the lives of my loved and cherished children to its rigorous regime. Yet, it is perhaps only life that will bring them to the infinite, as I understand it in all my sinfulness.

The Greek philosopher Socrates once laughed at the leading politicians and teachers of his time for being unable to explain how we can teach virtue. He pointed out that those that other people called virtuous often raised children who were perceptibly non-virtuous. In his search for a method to inculcate virtue he was very skeptical that such a regime could be found.

I am not a politician nor prominent member of society. I do occupy a position of some prominence, however. While I would never ask others to imitate my life, I had hoped that I could pass on to my children some of the things I had learned from life. Even my religious practice, though, has never been enough. That is, perhaps because I have moved from a churched person to non-churched. This has occurred because of my disaffection with dogmatic and doctrinal religion but also because I could not honestly say that my life mirrored the virtuous life espoused by those churches.

I’m afraid that this short portrait neither does justice to my life nor the lives of my children. It perhaps draws too much on the shadows to make its point and not enough of the light. Yet, I must say that from perspective such shadows do indeed haunt my dreams and waking life.

Perhaps my airing them on this forum is a way to exorcise them. I don’t know whether that is needed, since my confession to the Other is always more important and more salvific than any social or cultural anodyne might offer up as salve for psychic wounds.

Related Links

• In China, Shaming Draws Outcry

[xposted at eteraz.org] Read more!

Daily HotShots! 5*2*06

Snowy days bring bad drivers who think that cars make great snowmobiles; white landscapes, horses decked with blankets of snow, rabbits and their tracks in the front yard. I am trying to stay abreast of changes in the political world while keeping in focus personal alignments with spiritual realities that I cherish.

Is secularism part of a greater historical movement to a newer more spiritually advanced civilization? Or are we going to hell in a hand basket? That indeed is the question from my perspective.

100,000 mercenaries in Iraq One of the major threats to a democratic republic is power in the hands of private groups and organizations who operate outside the are of public debate. Mercenaries operate at the behest of those who pay them, not the general good. When will the MSM cover this story?

Following up on the Iraq Fiasco with the CIA's Political Islam Expert Yes, the CIA does have Islam experts. No doubt, they were considered too biased when the Bush admin. ranted and raved for war in Iraq like a bull in heat.

"the politics of the last atrocity" You want straight talk, no spin, no BS on Iraq? Here it is. Now, can you handle the truth? And what you gonna do about it? It's worse than you think. ....

Video Is a Window Into a Terror Suspect’s Isolation The treatment of so-called Dirty Bomber Padilla is getting some coverage in the MSM and rightly so. The physical aspects of torture are always the ones that people glorify. The psychological techniques, though, are perhaps even more barbaric. I know, what could be worse than having your entrails pulled out of your body as you watched? I guess you have to have a soul to understand.

The U.S. Has a History of Using Torture Speaking of torture, it seems that the methods used at Guantanamo and countless unknown tortuaries around the world were begun and refined in the Philippines many decades ago.

'Mugged by Magic Realism' after 911 An excellent little tongue-in-cheek analysis of what's wrong with the neocon agenda.

The Billionaires Club Okay, you know I wear pink pajamas if you've been reading this blog for some time. But hey, as Grissom says, I just go where the evidence leads me. This study in world wealth distribution says something, doesn't it?

The Jihad: An Ironic Contrast with the CrusadesAnother excellent installment in Laura Rosen's series on the Crusades and Islamic reactions. If you haven't seen the other installments be sure to take a gander. This section investigates the ideological similarities and differences between the religious rationales of the protagonists.

Religion and Intolerance This posting provides links to two extensive studies of 1) religion and suicide bombers and 2) religion and intolerance.

Precis of Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure Over at Eteraz I've been discussing some of Heidegger's ideas on technology. If you're not familiar with that guy, here's a relatively decent overview of his thought.

Emergency ethics — Michael Walzer! Ethicist Walzer explores how much backtracking we can do to justify just about any act.

Merely Christian? Reflections on C.S. Lewis's Apologetics After 60 years by N.T. Wright Anyone familiar with the Christian tradition has to acknowledge the power of CS Lewis' Everyman approach to religious issues. Writing in that wonderful plain style that's the mark of both style and intelligence, Lewis glided easily between imagination and theology. If you ever get a chance, see the movie Shadowlands, based on Lewis' late-in-life marriage and eventual loss of his beloved. It made even such a cynic as I get water in the eyes. Anyway, in this piece, the good Bishop of Durham asks whether Lewis' theology has withstood the advances in historical critical findings in biblical research. Excuse me Bishop, but as much as I respect your scholarship, the power of the imagination is much more relevant to the life of religion than historical-critical jots and tittles.

Biblical Studies Carnival XII Speaking of those pesky biblical historians, take a look at the recent carnival of numerous blog writings on the most up-to-date research in the area. IE Search for the Historical Jesus 4.0--but seriously, this is often a stimulating and informative area of public discourse.

history and the end of the story When do you know that you've got "the rest of the story," as Paul Harvey used to say? In other words, when do historians know where and when to stop in their collection of data? Read more!

The Rabid Dog -- Exihibit A

I quoted Helena Cobban in the original post. Her understanding of Mideast politics is quite extensive. In consultation with other Mideastern political experts like Juan Cole and Pat Lang, she produces some of the most in-depth analysis of Mideastern politics than anything you can find in innumerable think tanks and talking heads on the MSM.

Beamed over the MSM all day today was Pres. Bush's meeting with Shiite parliamentarian Hakim. Amid all the emprty talk and spin, I was left scratching my head in confusion about why the heck Bush was meeting this man at this time. The so-called analysis on the MSM just didn't make sense. Imagine my surprise, then, to read Cobban's understanding of what's afoot in Iraq. ...

That is, while Bush is flailing about like a drowning man but with that shit-eating grin that's really starting to get under my skin, while US troops seem engaged in an insurgency of attrition, Bush's brain trust seems to have had some type of "thinking outside the box" and brought in far left field perhaps a misstep that will not only worsen the political situation but exacerbate the carnage.

Cobban writes quite convincingly that Bush's A-Team has misjudged, misunderstood, and stepped into the cow paddy up to his hip this time.

According to Cobban, the story that the MSM's missing is that the movement that Bush should be concerned about and perhaps backing is the one being ndertaken by the very man that Bush's fascist minions are presently saying he should assassinate--or "take out" as Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs so nonchalantly suggest.

Cobban writes:

I mean, what is happening is that apparently Moqtada al-Sadr-- who was crudely caricatured on the Newsweek cover this week, and portrayed as some kind of near devil-incarnate-- is entering a coalition with Mutlak (a "Sooni") and Allawi (pretty much of a secularist and a fairly strongly Baath-style enforcer)-- and between them the three of them are also hoping to split Maliki's party and lure a sizeable chunk of its members over to their new Front....

Important stuff, don't you think?

The politics of the new Front haven't been described in any great detail that I've seen. But I'm fairly confident that this group of people would be fairly strongly Iraqi-nationalist and anti-occupation. (Though Iyad Allawi looms like a bit of an outlier in this regard.) They are also determinedly cross-sectarian.

So my question remains: Why don't we hear anything about this in the MSM?

I mean, I know journalists can tend to get lazy and use handy labels like "Shiite" or "Sooni" in a fairly sloppy way... But doing so at a time like the present seems to run at least two serious risks: (1) Inasmuch as western media people have any effect on attitudes in Iraq, the too-sloppy use of such labels would seem to essentialize and harden the inter-sectarian differences in question; and (2) This sloppiness leaves the average US consumer of media-- and the average US policymaker-- completely in the dark about what is really going on, while strengthening these people's beliefs that all Iraqis are simply primitive, unidimensional beings who are "consumed by ancient tribal hatreds", etc etc (and thus, that they more or less "deserve" whatever horrendous things befall them.)

You have my vote Helena for Secretary of State. Or how about a position as editor at WaPo?

PS This is an amazing little interview with al-Sadr's spokesman, Baha al-Araji. Listen to this guy; he's intelligent, articulate, knowledgeable about American politics. Imagine seeing this guy on TV--wouldn't that dispel something of the MSM's portrait of the insurgents, al-Sadr etc. as stupid, parochial blood-feeding zombies?

al-Araji says:

The emergence of militias in Iraq is a natural response to the situation here. There is a principle which says that for every action, there is a reaction. So, when there are occupation forces on the ground, there should naturally be a resistance to that occupation. We choose peaceful and diplomatic resistance, so the government and the coalition forces should not exaggerate our activities. Because those of us who are affiliated with the Sadr movement are sensitive, we don’t like to provoke this contentious question.

Do you know that 60 percent of the Mahdi Army already serves in government programs and installations? One of our biggest challenges with this issue is getting the Americans to understand it. The problem is that the U.S. leaders in Iraq, even though they are here, still think in an American way. But Iraq totally differs in its nature, its economy, and its culture from the United States.

Or maybe it's this guy that the Bush brain trust is listening to:

Washington is abuzz with theories offering a potential way out of Iraq, one risk expert poses a new option: split Iraq in two. "We need radical thinking. The military situation (in Iraq) cries out for political experimentation," David Apgar, a risk and development strategist and author of the book "Risk Intelligence."

Read more!

The Machine Just Keeps Breaking Down

My car's heater went out. I thought I could get through a few more weeks before I'd have to spend money on getting it fixed. I think the squirrels built their nests in their--like they did the last time this happened--and the heater motor went. This time, it seems to have affected the compressor too--or at least the compressor transmission, something about which I know nothing.

I hate having a sick car. It kind of makes you feel helpless. There's even a rage that wells up when you think about it. I think about my kids and their reactions when I say something like: I had to take the car into the shop. The concern in their voices is very deep. What does it mean that our machinery is such a part of our lives that we develop emotional attachments that include rage and deep concern when they do not work?


I have written in the past about the machine and how it affects the American outlook on life. I am not talking about just some superficial sociological story that extols the blessings of technology blah blah blah. I am talking about this deeply engrained way of thinking aboiut the world that shapes not only how we think about things but also how we think of ourselves and the world. I don't want to get all Heidegger about this, but there's something to his essay on technology that is quite illuminating and profound.

Back to brass tacks: the regular American Joe/Jane thinks in these terms on a deeper level than perhaps others in other cultures realize. Yes, auto racing is the biggest sport in the US. But what does that mean?

As a kid, it meant going off to the racetrack each Saturday and perhaps meeting up with some loose chick. It meant standing around with the guys and looking into a motor and being able to sound tough in talking about horspower, hemis, and MPH.

There are very few writers in the US who understand the relationship that many Americans have with their machines. One of the better writers is Sam Shepherd. I once saw Sam in his souped up muscle car as he cruised the santa Fe plaza. I think he's a genius and laugh at those egghead theatre teachers who think that Sam's too feral for their elitist tastes.

Anyway, while sam understands engines and cars, I am not so sure he understands how borg-like the machinery has invaded our dreams and way of thinking about the world. This means that Americans tend to think of everything in how well oiled it is, how well the gears shift, if the weheels stay on... and so on. Metaphor after metaphor that shows just how much we have become what Heidegger calls "standing reserve", and what my gay friend used to call "fungible resources," meaning me and every other employee in the company he was part owner of.

And you know what's really interesting? Berdyaev had an inkling of all the borg thinking, the robot metaphors, the mechanized society and once asked--this is in the late 20s--whether human life would be able to withstand this mechanization of our lives or whether we'd ultimately become just meat machines.

Is this, perhaps, what any of this war stuff is about?
----------

Postscriptum on Heidegger

I note also the rootlessness that some identify as a main characteristic of Heidegger's thought. Simone Weil's work, The Need for Roots, addresses this question. A religiously-motivated anarcho-sydicalist, Weil says that the loss of culture is tantamount to a kind of genocide.

Some see the situation of those in the secularized world as nomads. I find myself attracted to this concept, since I see that secularization--or levelling, as Kierkegaard calls it--as somehow inevitable, if not indeed something positive.

This might appear at first as some kind of nihilistic religious sentiment a la Pat Robertson, but it differs significantly because it sees that secularization is preparatory to a way of life that will be more religious, more aligned with the universal aspirations of all humanity. Of course, you might recognize this as something Heidegger writes in his essay on the time of the return of the gods (or is it "a" god?).

I am afraid that I am meandering here. I did want to address the issue of Heidegger's notion of "standing reserve." This is the idea that everything is commodifiable, quantifiable and put into a mechanized process. For Heidegger, this is not just relegated to the field of things, but invades the human world as well. We become, as my friend used to say, "fungible resources."

Hubert Dreyfus thinks that the usual interpretation of Heidegger's essay on technology (ie, it's being an anti-technology statement) as a misunderstanding of Heidegger's thought. Instead, Dreyfus says that Heidegger is trying to think the new form of life that this notion of standing reserve will give birth to.

[xposted @ eteraz.org Read more!

when apartheid takes on the divine face of freedom

what does it mean when suffering teaches naught but the gun
in the face the wire around the neck starvation in the cities
where the children meet at night to instigate a fight with ghosts
\of their own memory:for the state is a reliquary of taunts
and history's dead words caught in the throats of a girl
\who gets a bullet in the brain for playing like a terrorist
near the fences that would keep out despair and the memory
the memory the memory that besets those who victims who
would vicitmize the world for being once held captive

yes mirror will not show me the gaunt face the skull face
the terrible curse and sacrifice that only a lost god could
fathom and dredge from the abyss of his love:no they will
not seek justice for evil they will build a temple of eyes and teeth
and seek their sorrow in the cries that they smother beneath
contempt and orchestras of universal shame

A system of apartheid, with two peoples occupying the same land but completely separated from each other, with Israelis totally dominant and suppressing violence by depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. This is the policy now being followed, although many citizens of Israel deride the racist connotation of prescribing permanent second-class status for the Palestinians. As one prominent Israeli stated, "I am afraid that we are moving toward a government like that of South Africa, with a dual society of Jewish rulers and Arab subjects with few rights of citizenship. The West Bank is not worth it." An unacceptable modification of this choice, now being proposed, is the taking of substantial portions of the occupied territory, with the remaining Palestinians completely surrounded by walls, fences, and Israeli checkpoints, living as prisoners within the small portion of land left to them.

Read more!

The Rabid Dog (The Media) 1

Let me start out with an image: the modern news media remind me of those people who once used to follow behind the circus elephants to shovel their dung into wagons as they walked down main street before the show. The innovation of the media on this humble job, though, is that they take the offal back to the studio, hire pundits to scrutinize every grain and straw in the pile before them.

Of course, if the news media were historians, archaeologists, biologists, or anthropologists such an enterprise might seem appropriate. The crux of the disconnect is not simply that news people aren’t trained in these other disciplines but that type of activity is not what they should do in the first place.

But that raises the question, doesn’t it, about what it is the media should be doing. …

If the press had spent just 10 percent of its time producing reports like the one I just saw Arwa Damon on CNN or those running nightly by Michael Ware in the run-up to the war in Iraq I imagine that their reports would be much different at this point.

The problem with the press is perhaps best exemplified by the way that CNN host Wolf Blitzer is framing the question about whether to call the Iraq situation a civil war. According to Blitzer, CNN has chosen to “leave it up the public” to come to their own conclusions about whether it’s to simply be called a civil war or not. This “discussion” only comes up because of NBC’s announcement that it has decided to call it a civil war.

There are numerous proposes for the failures of the press in covering the political landscape (see, for example, this article). A decent portrayal of one such explanation comes in John Sayles’ movie, Silver City. There we see the fight that reporters have to wage with the corporatizing of the news, especially in terms of reduced staffs, news bureaus, and pandering to corporate interests in having the corporate ethos. The truth of this portrayal can be seen in recent reports that news agencies are shipping jobs overseas.

Helena, Cobban, a journalist for over forty years has an insider view on her craft. Having written for both British and US media outlets, she suggests that the difference between the two ways that journalists in the US and Britain see their place in the power structure is a matter of elitism. She writes:

Since I grew up in England and have worked in both the British and the US media, I have often been struck by the different self-images and self-definitions that journalists seem to have within the two different national cultures. In the UK, as I understood matters, a "good" journalist was always expected to keep some distance from, and a huge degree of skepticism towards, the holders of or aspirants to political power. But in the US a "good" journalist was seen as one with good connections with the holders of power... The norm of US officials anonymously "leaking" tidbits of newsworthy information to favored journalists only strengthened this tendency of these journos-- Tom Friedman comes to mind here for some reason-- increasingly seeing themselves as part of the power structure, judiciously giving their advice to power wielders while helping the powerful to frame the image they presented to the voting public...

What’s common, perhaps to Sayles and Cobban’s view is the idea that the news has suffered a decline in its reporting by renouncing the critical and analytical understanding of the stories that are important.

Mr. Wolf at Blackfive sees things differently. For him, US news outlets have a decidedly liberal bias and show it by reporting only the negative—anti-American—side of stories. For Blackfive, the news media should provide more balanced reporting. It is difficult to see what differentiates his understanding of the media’s role in American politics from propaganda. In this regard, Blackfive’s prescriptions for fixing the news spears quite similar to the goals and objectives that were recently announced for a Department of Defense office that would monitor and correct news 24/7.

I have documented the techniques and methods used by professional political information consultants in molding messages that produce desired effects (see here, here, here, and here.) CBS News’ Dick Meyer believes that the matter rests in the fact that the press is afraid to breach certain rules of civility that are unspoken rules among the press and those they cover. In this way of looking at the issue, the idea is that we need more straight talk. What’s meant by straight talk here is that kind of talk that can go by numerous clichés: taking the gloves off, no holds barred. For Meyer the problem involves the idea that the press is too civil in its interaction with the inhabitants of the halls of power.

Often what I am calling phony emerges after something older, something that felt authentic, has gone away. In politics, for example, there have been phonies, hypocrites and blowhards since the spoken word was invented. But American politics changed dramatically after modern political marketers, pollsters and ad makers transformed politics for the TV-generation and later for the Information Age. They invented a kind of artificial, ersatz politics: wedge issues, Astroturf lobbying, kabuki hearings, spin, "on message," photo-ops and negative television ads. Of course there have always been dirty tricks and showboating in politics. What has happened in the era of electronic media is categorically different.

The methods that Meyer says are the reason for this inauthentic political discourse are, of course, quite thoroughly documented. I have covered some of them in several postings. Yet, even here, there seems to be a more basic undergirding of these practices. That is, the people who want to employ these professional communication consultants and the methods used to mold public opinion to fir policies.

In his work, The Phantom Public, Walter Lippmann writes about insiders and outsiders. The insiders are those who have the knowledge and expertise to run the government. For Lippmann, this makes perfect sense since the idea of running government by common consent or public consensus is tantamount to courting chaos. Government requires knowledge; that those on the outside don’t know what’s going on only makes the job of governing easier.

In recent postings , Glenn Greenwald has undertaken a very detailed analysis of the insider workings and how they make their way into the media. In a recent analysis of the conflict between Pelosi and Harman, Glenn Greenwald comes close to rendering as clear a statement of this insider cult as has Lippmann.

Greenwald writes:

At first I thought that the media's obsession with smearing Pelosi was some combination of its adolescent cravings for cattle-like demonization of the unpopular, loser Democrats, combined with the surprisingly (at least to me) strong and obvious discomfort with a woman being this politically powerful in her own right, not dependent upon appointments or derivative popularity from political spouses. And there is definitely a lot of that driving this chatter.

But now I believe that what is really responsible for this amazing obsession with undermining Nancy Pelosi before she even starts -- over matters as seemingly irrelevant (in the grand scheme of things) as Steny Hoyer and Jane Harman, no less -- is that institutionalized Beltway personalities fear a repudiation of the rotten system on which they depend and of which they are such integral parts.

They were so petrified by the possible rejection of Hoyer in favor of the anti-war Murtha because that would have been viewed by them as a repudiation of their brand of Serious Washington Centrism -- the disease which enabled the Bush administration and brought us this war. It would have meant that those who continue to prop up this war and this administration, either actively or passively, are going to suffer a loss of prestige and credibility. And that is exactly why it is so important to them that Jane Harman become House Intelligence Chair and why Pelosi's refusal to allow that will unleash even more hostility towards her.

If we didn’t have Lippmann’s testimony and that of Edward Bernays, many might consider such views as somewhat conspiratorial. Yet, the truth of the matter comes by way of those privileged enough to see the insiders at work. Steve Clemons is one of those people. Known as an insider’s insider, Clemons lives in Washington and is part of the social class that is allowed to participate in dinners, lectures, and other hobnobbing events where the powerful talk the talk of technocracy—that kind of talk where the hype and disinformation have their birth. More importantly, this is where the plans and processes are discussed in naked frankness.

Consider the following description from Clemons of a dinner where the very movers and shakers of Washington gears within gears gathered one evening:

I really can't discuss the participants or venue of a dinner I attended last night but suffice it to say that some of America's and Europe's leading current and former political personalities were there -- 60 people only -- and among them a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense. The attendance list was extraordinary.

And the conversations -- on the whole -- were about the crappy condition of America's national security position. The guests in this dinner probably represented key participants in any new strategic consensus for the country. If there were brilliant [sic], silver bullet ideas that might help this country move quickly beyond its problems, it would have been in such a crowd where such notions might be taken seriously and have impact.

But nothing. Absolutely nothing. People were depressed and dismayed about current conditions. One very, very senior Bush administration official when asked by me what ideas he had to stabilize Iraq and stop our slow bleed situation said he had exhausted what he felt was possible.

Another top tier official when another guest pushed him to move the President into some rational deal-making that might trigger a more fruitful trend, ominously said "don't hold your breath." (also see this posting)

This description might shock some for its stark display of power brokers stymied by current events. Others might simply be agog that this is how decisions are made—contrary to the media perceptions. Others might ask why these questions and discussions occur behind closed doors and not within what’s known as the public sphere.

All of these questions and reactions are legitimate, I think. For people like Clemons and Greenwald, obviously, getting to that that level of intimacy revealing the inner workings is paramount in ensuring the health of democracy. Yet, unless you happen to have access to the internet and then are lucky enough to find their blogs, what chance is there of this type of information gaining more widespread dissemination?

Some will say that this is exactly what the press is supposed to be doing. They are supposed to be getting the insiders; secret discussions before the public so that those conversations and the decisions that follow are more participated in by the majority.

Let me cut to the chase by pointing out reporters have done this in the past. Look at Edward R. Murrow’s attack on Joe McCarthy. What Murrow did was to present the facts and then present his conclusion about what the facts revealed. This is the proper way to report events—present the facts and conclude what they show. Based on those facts, the journalist then takes what they have found and makes what can best be described as a crusade of it.

This mode of operation goes back to the beginnings of what we have come to know as the public sphere. Voltaire took up the case of a man unjustly tortured and imprisoned for crimes he did not commit. Voltaire used that event not only to publicize the injustice towards the man but also as a means of attacking the very assumptions that seemed to authorize monarchical rule.

It is this mentality that is perhaps most lacking in the press. Cowed by institutional, social, and political process, they have evinced a lack of courage to confront that very structure that would bring corruption and political injustice to light. And—as we have seen—the consequence is a so-called war that will go down in history as the worst military and foreign policy decision in 2,000 years.

Even more importantly, it has also meant the deaths of 100,000s of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, the deaths of American young men and women, and the padding of the pockets of the military contractors and corporations whose lobbyists have helped plan and sell the war.

To return to the image at the start of this posting and to answer the question about the job of the news media: instead of following behind the circus cleaning up the shit, they should instead be out in front, much like the drum majorette, setting the time and stirring the crowds to want to spend their precious time at the circus.

… to be continued …

PS On the heels of this post Juan Cole comments on the Rumsfeld memo that is making so much news yesterday and today. While most in the press are highlighting the resemblance between Rumsfled's plan for Iraq and that of Democrats like Murtha, Cole focuses in on the "rhetorical" (as one journalist called it today on NPR) aspects of Rumsfeld's memo.

Cole is sensitive to the aspects of this memo that affect the lives of Iraqis. He is also aware of the fact that the insiders don't just come up with ideas, but that those ideas have to be sold to the public. Indeed, the success of a plan--not whether it's a good plan or whether it's workable--depends on the spin and the angle that the technocrat takes in getting that plan in place.

Cole writes:

Rumsfeld spends more time plotting out how to manipulate the American public than how to win the war. Everything is about spin, about giving the image of progress even in the face of a rapid downward spiral into the abyss. Consider these phrases:

' Publicly announce a set of benchmarks agreed to by the Iraqi Government and the U.S. — political, economic and security goals — to chart a path ahead for the Iraqi government and Iraqi people (to get them moving) and for the U.S. public (to reassure them that progress can and is being made) . . .

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist. . . '

It is about how we talk, how we are perceived to set goals, what is made to look like progress. It isn't actually about getting progress. The point of going minimalist is to reduce expectations among the American public. If you tell them you can only move the ball a yard, you get a lot of points for moving it two yards.

It's the illusion that counts, an illusion that is meant to forestall debate and question and discussion about whether these are the things that this country should be doing now. Read more!

An Open Letter to Bill O'Reilly

Dearest Bill:

On your show last night (11/30) you stated unreservedly that Muslims have not come out against the slaughter of Muslims by other Muslims. You also said that no Muslims have criticized the recent trial and jailing of the British school teacher who allowed her Sudanese students to name a Teddy bear "Muhammad."

You must now be aware that you prematurely crowed about the lack of Muslim opposition to the sentence against this teacher. Even Fox News reports today that two Muslim legislators from Britain have visited the woman and asked that she be released immediately.

I know you will correct the skewed picture that you continue to paint about the vast majority of Muslems after you reflect on these reports.

I respectfully suggest that you review the list of links at Middle East professor Juan Cole's blog posting on the issue of Moslem condemnation of terrorism:

You might wish to direct your viewers there to further educate themselves about this issue as well.

The following sites report Muslim protests against the sentence against the British teacher:

Canadian Muslims enter Sudanese teddy debate

Student defends jailed teacher: Pupil, 7, named stuffed animal Muhammad after himself

The following comments by Muslims in a BBC article do not substantiate your view that all Muslims support the sentence against this teacher, even within Sudan:

""Millions of Muslim children in Muslim nations give their dolls, pets and teddies Muslim names of the Prophet and his mother, daughters and wives."

Gill Lusk, the associate editor of Africa Confidential and a specialist on Sudan, says the incident will have offended many in the country. As Sudan is a place where religion is never mocked or satirized, it's "unthinkable" that a toy or pet could be given a religious name.

"You're not supposed to give a religious name to any objects - it could be seen as idolatry."

But the majority of Sudanese people won't have wanted to see Ms Gibbons in trouble for the naming of the teddy bear.

"People are very forgiving of foreigners, particularly Europeans. Nobody would think she was trying to offend them - they would just think she was ignorant."

Granted, you're not a fan of nuance, but you will surely see that the Sudanese reaction indicates a localized incident to that cultural milieu that is not shared by Moslems from other cultures.

On the issue of whether Moslems, especially Arab Muslims, do or do not condemn terrorism, you might wish to review the following article from aljazeera.com:

BAQUBA, Iraq (AFP) - Dozens of suspected Al-Qaeda fighters raided a Shiite village north of Baghdad Saturday, killing at least 14 people including women and children, police and medical officials told AFP.

I know you will correct the record now that you have evidence that contradicts the misleading information you disseminated in last night's broadcast.

Related Posts

• Sudanese views differ in teddy row


• British Sudanese defends teacher

Read more!

Issue 1: Kierkegaard Carnival

Welcome to the November 30, 2006 edition of Kierkegaard Carnival.

The Kierkegaard Carnival is happy to make this issue available to the public. Hopefully, this will be the first of many more issues to come.

Kierkegaard's writings are difficult to write about. This is not only because he writes in Danish but also because his work is filled with paradoxes and riddles, all of which are scattered among the purported writing of characters that often seem to come from the world of a vast novel than they do from real life.

Kierkegaard's use of pseudonyms--also known as pen names--is strange to Americans because one of the defining characteristics of American culture is openness and honesty. Using pseudonyms seems duplicitous and suspicious, if not downright dishonest. ...

This way of looking at Kierkegaard's use of pseudonyms is understandable yet regrettable. For Kierkegaard's purpose in using pseudonyms is to portray characters who are caught in real-life crises where life-changing decisions must be made. Kierkegaard does not want to come across as an academic writer or philosopher; he hopes to draw us into a world where the emotional, spiritual and intellectual problems we face in everyday life confront us in all their immediacy.

He does so by creating a distance between writer and reader where the reader is not given a canned solution to the problems depicted but where s/he inhabits a space wherein s/he can reflect on their own problems and come up with their own solutions.

This latter aspect of Kierkegaard's modus operandi illuminates many of the blog postings collected in the first Kierkegaard Carnival. That is, written in most part by non-academics, the following pieces often have the flavor of that struggle with life's crises and decisions that characterize the power of Kierkegaard's relevance for modern life.

The first issue of the Kierkegaard Carnival is diverse in subject matter. From musings on the Internet to meditations on particular writings, the following pieces exhibit both the personalities of their writers as well as the depth and variety of topics that Kierkegaard's writing covers.

I want to thank all the writers for their permission to reprint their blog posts in the Kierkegaard Carnival.

Fear and Trembling

Thomas presents What was Abraham Thinking When He Raised the Knife? This is a short review of Kierkegaard's most well-known and world-famous riddle-box, Fear and Trembling. While you will find this work in many introductory classes on philosophy, the work is such that it could take a life-time to decipher.

Matt presents Kierkegaard and the work of faith This short piece provides some important remarks on that riddle-box again. Interesting to note that the author understands faith as work--an important theme that Kierkegaard takes up later in another writing, Works of Love.
.

Stages of Life

Quinn presents Korrektiv: KSRK: Reading Roundup 2 This is an extensive and detailed commentary between several bloggers who call themselves "a [few] bad Catholic[s] at a time near the end of the world." The writing is often vivid and exciting as the writers wrestle with Kierkegaard's most convoluted religious novel/spiritual meditation, Stages on Life's Way.

Sickness Unto Death

Timothy presents The Sickness. This posting provides excellent discussion of and introduction to one of Kierkegaard's fundamental formulations of sinfulness: despair. For Kierkegaard, sin is despair and despair is sin. The uncanny thing about despair, however, is that many people do not even know they are in it.

Kierkegaard and the Bible

Jordan presents Faithfulness in Biblical Interpretation This piece analyzes some of Kierkegaard's comments on biblical scholarship. While not exhaustive, it is a relevant remark on the role that Kierkegaard understood the important historical study of the Bible should have in lived Christianity.

Kierkegaard and the Internet

Brad presents Education and The Internet The Internet has become a valuable medium for disseminating ideas and opinions. While many glory in the potential of the Internet, few take time to consider some of the drawbacks that reliance on the Internet might involve. This piece deals with Heidegger-commentator Hubert Dreyfus’ arguments that critique of many of the misconceptions surrounding the Internet, as well as the potential of this medium for education.

Reading Kierkegaard for Life

Sam presents "Who do you say that I am?" Intended as a guide to a group reading of Kierkegaard, this piece provides useful notes and comments on Kierkegaard and selected biblical passages.

Kierkegaard in Dialog with Islam

Dino presents Kierkegaard and Sufism This review of a lecture he attended provides information on correlations between Kierkegaard's writing and Islam's Sufi mystics.

Kierkegaard in Popular Culture

Edward presents Kierkegaard the Novelist and Three Kierkegaardian Novels: The Moviegoer, The Sportswriter and Rabbit, Run The influence of Kierkegaard in modern literature has been extensive. From Scandinavian writers such as Ibsen and Isak Dinesen, his spiritual investigations have also influence American novelists. This piece reviews three such American novels.

Book Review

Alok presents Kierkegaard: Some Random Notes on his Biography Reviews the recent Kierkegaard biography by Joakim Garff.

Death and Love

Charles presents All Hallow's Eve Reflections and Hauntological Remarks A meditation for All Hallow's Eve, with a concluding remark by Kierkegaard on love and remembering the dead.

Humor

Kierkegaard presents Kierkegaard's MySpace Entry

Online Resource

For numerous online articles, don't forget to visit Online Kierkegaard Links

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of
Kierkegaard Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Also, be sure to check out the description for the next issue of Kierkegaard Carnival.

Technorati tags: kierkegaard carnival, blog carnival, philosophy, religion, ethics, spirituality, ecumenism, Christianity, Kierkegaard, existentialism. Read more!

Fragments and Disruptive Reflections on Machiavelli, Kierkegaard, and Apocalyptic Confessions

There’s a darker side to my personality that I attempt to mostly keep at bay. This aspect of my personality looks at the world and news of events with a longing for chaos and anarchy. I want to see things apart. I don’t know whether others share this dark side to their personalities or not—I guess I shouldn’t really care.

In Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak describes a short discussion between Yuri Zhivago and an anarchist. For the anarchist, the new society that must be brought to birth can only be done so after complete and utter leveling of the old. Nothing of the old must stand for the new world to rise like a phoenix from its ashes.

I might interpret see these thoughts and emotions that I have as a sign of great boredom with the world. I once wrote that it is this deep-seated ennui that gives way to playing with variations on a theme. The nihilistic attempt to clear away the rubbish of the past and start anew is believe in what context, however? ...

I find a bit of solace when I remember that others whom I consider geniuses as sharing such views. Some of Wittgenstein’s remarks exhibit just such a desire to see western civilization leveled to the ground. He shared Oswald Spengler’s view that modern scientistic culture is a corrupt and ultimately debased civilization. This from a man who once served as a private in the Austrian army in WWI and a nurse during WWII.

Camus once noted that the Russian nihilists and Camus’ archetypal rebel respond to the overwhelming injustice that they see in the world by tracing its roots to basic human instincts and institutions that are corrupt at the core. To extirpate this corruption a complete renewal of human nature must take place. Since you could argue that human nature itself is an artificial construct and merely reflects the society that forms it, then that nature is ultimately as malleable as any animal’s.

The Marxists I read these days are a sad lot in this regard. They are waiting for a theory of community that will allow them to once again proselytize the world. There is something prudent about this waiting: it enables an assessment of where the political and related goals of the last attempt at revolutionary renewal. Beyond prudence, however, this waiting does seem somewhat comical and gives one license to view their standing on the street corner of history from the perspective of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

The strand within this school of thought that I can most easily identify with is the one put forward by Hardt and Negri. That thesis looks to a sort of riding the back of neoliberal empire as it lays waste the globe. In the wake of this desolation, possibilities will open up for revolutionary action that are opposed to reigning neoliberal regime and might finally give birth to a blueprint for future revolutionary communities. I am attracted to this game plan since it accords with some things I have found in my other readings, especially of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein.

Then there’s Kierkegaard. I have written about his remarks on the plague. Pessimistically perhaps, Kierkegaard’s views are unstinting in their awareness that any rationalized regimen—while socially and ethically prudent—will not provide the type of radical undermining of lifeways that have given rise to a, for him, a Christendom that was eminently antithetical to everything Christian that Christ revealed. Any such renewal, again for him at least, required something so monumentally shattering to those lifeways that anything short of it would leave vestiges of the old in place that would ultimately engender the same types of corruption as the original that it had replaced.

The little that I have read of Slavoj Zizek’s work seems strangely Kierkegaardian in this regard. An avowed atheist, Zizek nonetheless demythologizes early Christian though to gain insight into its essentially revolutionary character. For Zizek, even an apparent accomodationist as Paul can be seen to be preaching a message that was radical in its undermining of naturalistic and imperial ideologies.

There are several ways to read Kierkegaard’s political thought. Many take the only outright political document he wrote, The Present Age, and go with its somewhat conservative message. They read this understanding of his thought forward into such documents as his later attacks on Christendom. Others, however, are beginning to see that The Present Age was just a way station on the road to a much more radical ethico-religious critique of modern society.

Be that as it may—since it’s the province of numerous egg-heads and specialists whose work I adore but whose application must be earned rather than assumed—there’s a somewhat strange affinity between Kierkegaard’s thought and that of the republican Machiavellians. Now this will seem strange to say—though it perhaps clarifies some posting that I’ve made on Machiavelli at this blog—since it goes against both received interpretations of Kierkegaard and Machiavelli.

Since I believe the scholarship has clearly shown that Kierkegaard was a thinker neither irrationalist nor apolitical, I’ll dispense with that misperception without further remark. The received understanding of Machiavelli’s thought is harder to dispense with, but I concur with Pocock and Quentin Skinner in seeing Machiavelli’s political philosophy as one that is eminently amenable to revolutionary agendas.

What makes me think that could be any relationship at all between Kierkegaard and Machiavelli? Consider the following description of Machiavelli’s thought as formulated by JGA Pocock at then of his Machiavellian Moment:

Forms of property were seen to arise which conveyed the notion of inherent dependence: salaried office, reliance on private or political patronage, on public credit. For these the appropriate term in the republican lexicon was corruption—the substitution of private dependencies for public authority—and the threat to individual interests and self-knowledge which corruption has always implied was reinforced by the rise of forms of property seeming to rest in fantasy and false consciousness. Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or in credit, the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows, and these evaluations, though constant and public, were too irrationally performed to be seen as acts of political decision or virtue. The threat posed by corruption cut deep … [Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, p. 464]

For anyone familiar with Kierkegaard’s Present Age, as well as numerous journal entries and Practice in Christianity, will discern, these themes of public, individual, false consciousness, money, and so on become paramount themes for the later Kierkegaard.

There’s an easy way to find roads between the thought of Kierkegaard and Machiavelli. Kierkegaard’s humanistic educational training in the classical authors is perhaps the best road. As Pocock maintains, Machiavelli was adapting an Aristotelian political model to his day in Italian politics. Kierkegaard’s reliance on several key Aristotelian notions is well-known. (Indeed, the Aristotelian framework that Kierkegaard sometimes borrows led the German philosopher Heidegger to call Kierkegaard’s philosophy medieval in spirit.)

There is another correlation between Kierkegaard and Machiavelli that I’d like to suggest. It applies as well to why I think that Hardt and Negri’s idea are amenable to Kierkegaard. This has to do with the view that history is cyclical and exhibits an evolutionary quality that runs from birth to growth to decline. The last phase of decline is simply prologue to rebirth.

It is this aspect that correlates with Kierkegaard’s notion that secularization and decline in western society should not be opposed. Instead the leveling processes should be allowed to proceed since they are preparatory to something new and revolutionary. In some ways—perhaps superficially—this idea of allowing a corrupt process to runs its course parallels what I understand of Hardt Negri’s analysis of neoliberal imperial designs.

If I am right, Kierkegaard modified this view of evolutionary change which he no doubt hoped to mimic Hegel in using. Instead, he becomes more radical in his awareness of how deeply the root of corruption runs. This is where he might ways with Machiavelli, wrestling with the problem of corruption never did seem to get resolved. Unable to accept theological concepts, he was perhaps blind to how closely his meditations on corruption mirror the Christian notion of original sin. (This no doubt is due to the misconceived formulation of that concept anyway, a reformulation of which we are in dent to Kierkegaard for BTW.)

If I am right, then, Kierkegaard still saw the process of corruption as inevitable, yet its healing would come in a far deeper crisis than anything socio-political could marshal to the table. Instead, the complete undermining of the ways and means of corruption would require something on the scale of plague and the consequent existential and socio-cultural disruptions that such an event creates.

Some politically conservative theologians and pundits seem to have glommed on to Kierkegaard’s critique of Christendom as a justification for their own contributions to the so-called culture war in America. This is understandable since a prevailing understanding of Kierkegaard’s life has come from fideistic-minded Lutheran translators and interpreters. Recent translations of his work, however, paint a much less fideist, not to mention quietist, portrait of Kierkegaard’s writings. Indeed, these recent translators and commentators put a decidedly leftist slant on these works.

That is, in plumbing the depths of western culture’s spiritual decline, Kierkegaard creates not only a critique of all ideology—as Merold Westphal calls it—but a more radical and comprehensive destruction of the very foundations upon which western society bases itself. The more astonishing aspect of his critique is that, contrary to the prevalent views, this spiritual plumbing work is just as much done in recognition of the economic aspects of that decline as it is in the psychological or simply religious aspects. In other words, Kierkegaard, in a work like The Sickness Unto Death for example, creates a spiritual typology of personality disorders that capitalist economies and their politico-theologico ideologies generate.

With these apocalyptic confessions off my chest, I can now go back to my job, living room, favorite TV shows, Chihuahua in my lap, uneasy concerns over children’s futures, and the unending desire to feel more worthwhile than the world seems willing to grant. Read more!

the cold winds of the interregnum

The northern winds churn their charmed ice palaces in the womb of winter. As the terrible news of civil war freezes the face into a hollow ghost like howl, I sit listening to industrial odes to my own wrestling with the angels of annihilation. ...

The politicians pick the bones of the language games whose wreck they have engineered. Whether the terror and ethnic and religious strife whose images they abhor and keep from reaching us, they bicker about civil war just to save their imperial asses.

If there's any truth to contextual historical accounts, it's that those who control the language games do so not in the search for confessional truthfulness but out of a despairing clammer up the dung hill where they play king of the hill.

I hear many on all sides of this clash of civilizations triangulate the amount of suffering that is or is not meaningful in this war. Not only this, they also say that one death equals so many more of the other side's dead. They thereby implicitly condone an algebra of human suffering that crazily skews and cravenly sears the mind with despair.

For those who hope to inoculate themselves against the sickness unto death with reason, all is caught in the intransigent antinomies that honest Kant once descried. Though he later betrayed his own thought with paeans to Reason, he eventually came to his sense when he saw the heart of darkness called radical evil.

No politician would dare touch such a notion though some on the right try to marshal its theological cousin original sin to their propaganda. The Left of course is simply caught in visions various forms of u/dys-topic meanderings that any true revolutionary has too much salt int their bowels to believe.
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magus eye in temple bright shine on empire

reality is in the eyne of the beholder:the magus eyne is least able to gaze into lest you find oneself mesmerized like a snake before the charmer. the king it seems heard the snake charmer:mesmerized by the evil magicians whose lies and deceit have set his smallish mind adizzy with visions of empire gifts and apocalypse on the potomac.

oh the sad fate of the idiot king who walked naked to his political funeral;
danced before the fires of armageddon with jesus his purpled lord;
walked on streets of topaz and opals with the families of the dead he'd sent to their deaths;
sat before the philosopher savior whose words gassed his lungs with joy:

then he awoke to a world set ablaze with terror and horror and cries that called his name as though demons themselves spoke into his ear and talked of a sin that he must crawl on his knees to holy mother church for ten thousand years to repent.

the following is realism--maybe magical if you seek the truth--but surely more real and less deceit than you will find in the kristol wyrd stone dark:spoken by the guru's guru of those who prognosticate the fall and decline of imperial designs:

Given the result of the recent US elections, we need to think hard about the consequences of possible defeat in Iraq. To elaborate on what I said earlier, that conflict can be won only by a much more effective coalition effort, requiring a major increase in US and allied troop numbers in Iraq, substantial improvements in training and operational methods, and a much stronger civil reconstruction effort. This is not likely to happen. The probable outcomes are either a sudden descent into chaos as Coalition forces are withdrawn, or a protracted civil war, overlain with an insurgency against remaining coalition forces.

In the event of chaos, effective government in Iraq will cease for at least some years during which terrorist groups will be able to concentrate, re-build, flourish and reach out to other targets utside Iraq. Enemy forces will be heartened; recruiting will rise; funds and weapons will pour in; pressure will be exerted on regional governments friendly to the West; more young men and women who are willing to commit suicide to harm Western and Israeli interests will become available; and the oil price will rise to new heights. Defeat in Iraq will be a serious blow to the public standing of the United States and will invite other challenges to its authority...

Iran will read a message of encouragement for its intransigence in dealing with the West. It will almost certainly go ahead to produce nuclear weapons. It will exercise an overshadowing influence in Iraq, Syria, the Arab Gulf states and Israel. The lesson of US failure in Iraq will be read (perhaps wrongly) as US unwillingness to attempt regime-change in Iran. The North Koreans will probably draw similar conclusions, although with less justification than in the case of Iran because North Korea is nowhere near as strong a state. Nuclear weapons proliferation will become more difficult to control with the threat of intervention against the proliferators dismissed...

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Faces Whose Script No One Can Read Except the Wretched

There’s an old tale—whether a wife said it or not I do not kn0w—that if something scares you enough your hair turns white. Fear has many forms. It need not shake its skeletal hand at you in supernatural rags to put the psalms of god in your heart. Life itself—full and ruddy life, bellowing like a bull at the bovine moon in rutting desire—can scare you and turn into an ash heap the table of plenty.

Faces often tell tales too. Think of Abraham Lincoln’s face as it aged from the first years of his presidency and to the end, before the assassin’s bullet shattered his skull. That face, the one I used to ponder for hours as a child, that face that seemed to mirror the deaths and agonies of the million who went to their death fighting for justice and against it. …

Watching CNN reporter Michael Ware these past weeks reminds me of Lincoln’s face and the imagined faces of all those whose visages sculpted by terror I have never read. Ware’s reportage from Iraq has grown more and more terror-laden, his face dragged with death’s tine as he increasingly seems threatened with the extinction of wordlessness in his effort to describe the horror he’s witness to.

Ware’s face—no doubt wracked by sleeplessness, inability to shave or wash, concern for his safety and that of his fellow journalists—grows gaunter and thinner. His Australian accent--thicker with an exhaustion born of sleeplessness, but perhaps more the sight of bodies torn to shreds by bombs and body parts strewing trees and desert street--almost cracks with the wails and ululation that he has no doubt heard on the desert wind.

In his philosophical remarks on the infinity of the Other, Emmanuel Levinas talks about the trace of God. For Levinas the other is the person whose face I must espy in all its primeval tender responsibility. Levinas evokes the care and tenderness of a mother for her newborn in his concern for treating others with justice and love.

But even before that, even before the solicitude of the maternal there’s a trace, as he calls, of something more infinite and transcendent and for which the maternal is at most a symbol, pregnant as it is. For it is that trace of the infinite and insolubly mysterious responsibility for justice and love that is the trace of God, for Levinas. And no human image can ever be that image though it can and will hearken back to that infinity which humans have called upon in their cries for justice and compassion.

For the cheery news people ensconced in their studio far away from the dangers and death-dealing war machine, Ware’s scruffiness is no doubt becoming something of a joke. “How unprofessional,” no doubt lurks around wry smiles. At best, they think of the gritty images of a man unkempt and almost shrill in throat as good TV.

That Michael Ware face reflects such agony is a subtle hieroglyphic in a divine script whose interpretation cannot be read without a lexicon. That lexicon itself cannot be read unless you understand a language and its unwritten signals that no culture, no education can teach except the life lived in fear and trembling for not only material welfare but that of what may arrive more preciously.

Related Links

• Bush to Press Maliki on Escalating Violence
  
• Civil War in Iraq Is Imminent, Annan Says

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The Right and Marilyn Manson Hold Counsel

Certain phrases have switches that can be flipped one way or the other, contrary to the avowed intention of the writer. from the simple exercise of turning a bully's taunts into an emblem of pride to appropriating curses as inspiration for further rage, the switch in words meant to deride and turn you from self-idolized image to focus of ridicule exposes the raw nerve of much of our psychology.

It's said that the pull of the profane can be bent to one's own purpose since derision and social alienation appeal on levels that lie deep within the apparatus of social margins. Those on the outside suffer insult and terror and have little choice but to fight back or accept ignominy and shame. What better way to fling back into the face of such social stigma the nettles that sting than to imbibe the poison and draw strength from weakness? ...

The appeal of what some ethnographers have called the liminal is well-attested in history and ethnographic studies. It is perhaps best exemplified by the ancient European ritual of all fool’s day. In this ceremony the person most dispossessed and the object of public ridicule was placed in the seat of power for a day; the leader was demoted to the lowest status. In the reversal of values, what used to be profane and disallowed became suddenly allowable. It's said that these rituals are the basis of well-known modern festivities like carnival as it is played out in Brazil and what used to be New Orleans.

While these secularized festivals have perhaps lost their religious nuances, the religious impulse behind them has gone underground and been subsumed beneath more rationalized practices. Yet, the impulse and psychological mechanisms that make these practices meaningful may still be part of what's called human nature. They do appear in numerous cultures around the world and they appear to be able to maintain their meaningfulness even within the meaning-draining maelstrom that is modern secularization.

Indeed, you could say that such mechanisms have become the wellspring for people within the desert of the real. That is, to maintain distinctness from the conformity required by the modern rationalized state, people seem driven to find a way to mark themselves off from the confines erected by that conformity. From Marilyn Manson to glam rock to other niches in popular culture, the pull of the outsider and the forbidden and profane draw on these psychological mechanisms.

It'd be a mistake, however, to limit the play of this psychological phenomenon to the cultural. For they seem also to marshal their emotional cargo in politics, thereby lending various political movements with a powerful reservoir of anger and rage. The modern image-makers known as political consultants can massage these emotions into whatever direction they wish. Indeed, it seems to me that the secret of much of the Rove-laden propaganda emanating from the bowels of the White House has discovered a way to exploit these emotions. Karl Rove has discovered how to take what is intended as a negative characterization and to turn it on its head to become badges of honor.

Given the proliferation of political correctness, those who find themselves the butt of jokes and called uncool are drawn to messages that exploit that very outsiderness and help them to glory in it. In this way, you can explain the popularity of such culture mavens as Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Anne Coulter, and Rush Limbaugh.

No doubt, there are social, political and economic sources for the anger of the so-called trailer riff-raff that liberals and Leftists love to despise. With the uncertainties promulgated by neoliberal economic models, the dissolution of traditional family structures and values, the attack by enlightenment values on religious institutions--all these promote a crisis environment in which those seeking stability grasp at any straw to maintain equilibrium.

In a world comprised of opposites, it's not so much that they attract each other (as the old cliché goes) as that one turns the image of the opposite into a positive source for motivation and meaning.

Related Link

• Can the GOP Find Its Center?

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war my king with mammon entrails round waist bedight

war is the hammer to break into little pieces
the nations that bow not to mammon the sacrifice
the ritual piety are the byways highways and skyways
that enjoin obedience to the will of the juggernaut

take iraq:chaos precedes the creative peace the war
machines need to enforce martial law the regimes
of conduct and life-form that the juggernaut breeds
in cryptoclastic symbiosis with electro-mechanical
appendages:for the machine rises like a steel burnished
phoenix from the chaos the level ground where all
is built anew amid fraud corruption and tyrant fist

wrapped in oily garb:shaken from slumber in blood:
war dredges from crypts the dead whose
dying breath cursed stars spangles and stripe:
our king walks in oedipal haste thru halls
hung with intestinal testaments to his mute
and hazy vision of halcyon days though he dance
before the ark of a covenant of death

justify naught save the blood-lust dressed
in twilit rags:thy despair
remains unseen because thou seekest
ghosts in the skies:lame hunchback
psychic assassin who cannot live
with your deformed pain: see empire
impotent rage:the kingdom whose light
has died many deaths in your zeal
for destroying the human you say god
formed from dirt but you bury
because your heart craves the image
that god hath cast into gehenna
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