Permalink  politics  No Responses »
Jun 192010
 

The modern president is America’s shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He’s also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth.

This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after decades of public clamoring. … Americans, left, right, and other, think of the “commander in chief” as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the rescue when danger strikes.

Gene Healy in the June 2008 issue of Reason.com.

Right now, Obama is expected to walk out on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, extract the oil – if a vacuum cleaner can do it, so can the President – and hurl the damned stuff into outer space. (Aliens don’t vote.)

But this is only the first of three disquieting features of the current crisis. Americans ar confronted by a technological problem to which there is no immediate technological solution. This must be somebody’s fault, goddammit. Worse,  the problem is oil, a substance worshipped wherever two or three SUVs are gathered together. It’s as if holy water turned into sulphuric acid.

We know what America does when foreigners  threaten its oil supplies. The question now is what it will do to itself faced with this more intimate threat. Be very glad that Obama is in office. George W. would by now have annexed the Home Counties.

 Posted by bruce at 1:52 pm  Tagged with: , ,

Lots and lots of popguns

 politics  No Responses »
Jun 172010
 

So is the US an “aggressive, war-mongering military machine” obsessed with spending on defence and plumping up its armed forces? Perhaps, the numbers say, not.

But you have to follow the charts quite a way down to see why.  Compare this presentation with the one-line statistics in our newspapers – makes you groan.

Other highlights. The North Koreans have 24,728 people per 100,000 in what might be called the aggression business – soldiers, reservists and paramilitary. A 2008 census gave a total population of about 24 million of whom about half are children. It follows that about half the adult population are in the aggression business.

Then there’s Burma, which spends 26% of its GDP on the military.

 Posted by bruce at 4:55 pm  Tagged with: ,

Liberals: an endangered species?

 politics  No Responses »
Dec 222009
 

Abbott’s new cabinet confirms what has been obvious for some time: that the Coalition parties have forfeited their right to the term ‘liberal’. Robert Manne nailed Howard – a mendacious populist. People like Ruddock and Andrews are authoritarian reactionaries. (There are no words to describe Bronwen Bishop.) In The Age the other day a Liberal lamented the death of the party Menzies founded.

Andrew Norton (“Carlton’s only classical liberal”) gives some interesting survey figures to show that on the Australian “Right”, there is a clear statist majority.

Some of us can’t support either major party, and are tired of flinging tokens to Bob Brown. How’s about a re-formed liberal party – Turnbull at its head, Keating the grey eminence?

 Posted by bruce at 10:59 pm  Tagged with:

Crack for the masses

 culture, politics  No Responses »
Jul 302009
 

If you stick around and pay attention, what you’re disposed to say will eventually get said better by someone else.  (Accepting this is another of the pleasures of aging.)  This is Leon Wieseltier, talking about how Marxism once appealed to him.

The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one–infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga.

That captures exactly a few years in which I tried to understand Brecht and the Brecht-cult in theatre studies.  The more I read of Brecht, the more I came to hate the man and to understand that, like any commissar, he would say or do anything, licensed by the belief that what was good for Brecht was good for the down-trodden. ( My views of the work are more nuanced, but don’t belong here.)

The lure of a ‘humane’ Marxism operated strongly on my generation, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal as we were – and ignorant of both. When I eventually came across Leszek Kolakowski, the great critic of Marxism, whose recent death is the occasion of Wieseltier’s piece, I had already come to my senses. I wonder if Kolakowski is read by those in our English Departments – both in schools and universities – who peddle ‘Marxist’ approaches to literature? Or are they too busy spinning ‘into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations’?

 Posted by bruce at 11:51 am  Tagged with: , ,

A prophetic voice

 politics, public debate, universities  1 Response »
Apr 182009
 

Date the following passage.

In the past, a rising class was aware of something valuable enjoyed by others which it wished to share; but this is not so today. The leaders of the rising class are consumed with a contempt for everything which does not spring from their own desires, they are convinced in advance that they have nothing to learn and everything to teach, and consequently their aim is loot?to appropriate to themselves the organization, the shell of the institution, and convert it to their own purposes. The problem of the universities today is how to avoid destruction at the hands of men who have no use for their characteristic virtues, men who are convinced only that ‘knowledge is power.’

If you said 1969 you have everything on your side except the facts. These are: that the author is Michael Oakeshott, writing in The Cambridge Magazine and that he wrote this passage in 1949.

 Posted by bruce at 11:20 pm  Tagged with: ,

Who wants to play the proletariat?

 Islamists and all that  No Responses »
Mar 282009
 

There’s a kerfuffle going on at RMIT over the question of Muslim prayer-space. The Muslim students want a space of their very own.

There are already eight Muslim prayer rooms across the university’s three campuses, Dr Maddy McMaster, Acting Pro Vice-Chancellor (Students) said.

So what’s the problem?

“The university’s policy is that prayer rooms in its spiritual centre are multi-faith, open to bookings by members of all faiths,” she said.

There’s the hitch: the Muslim students aren’t about to use a room contaminated by Christians and Jews and who knows? by Zoroastrians. So they pray in corridors, and other drafty places.

They order these things better in France.

What engaged my attention was a twist. Continue reading »

 Posted by bruce at 12:13 am  Tagged with:
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