Orthodoxies

That's a nice and interesting post, tks. Waking up out of a mental dream (or busting out of a mental straitjacket, or whatever) can be quite an experience, that's for sure. Though it's always good too to remember that just because the lefties are wrong doesn't mean that the righties are right. And vice versa, of course. Me, I'm skeptical of Primarily Political People (PPPs) generally, and am proud to say I always have been, though where this leaves me politically is a bit of a puzzle. (Modest, mainly, and rooting for S/he who will do the least harm.) PPPs like power, and like power above all things, it seems to me -- why else would they be PPPs? I've never met one I liked and didn't mistrust. Why would I want to join a team made up of such people? Still, we're stuck with 'em, I guess. FWIW, it seems to me that, taken properly, lefties are sometimes useful. They can liven up a discussion, they've got a lot more style and generate a lot more in the way of Culture than righties do, alas, and I often agree with their criticisms of American culture, loony though I usually find their preferred solutions. Like gays and artsies, I think of them as the R&D department of life. I wouldn't want them to run the organization, but I think they make the place more vibrant than it'd be otherwise.>

Good post, Rod.

Susan - come now; requesting that religious people not be caricatured in the media, and that religious issues be explicated thoroughly, constitutes a "victim card"?>

One of my enlightening moments came from meeting a member of the Abraham Lincoln brigade who regaled me with how they were fighting for a communist revolution in Spain. He had names, dates and history. A really sharp old guy and not afraid to tell the truth. He hated the fact that the PC history told about them was that they were fighting for bourgeois democracy. He hated bourgeois democracy and his hero was Fidel. He and several of his old buddies were raising money to support the Sandinistas in Nicaragua who he saw as communists also.

In fact, everybody I met who was supporting the government of Nicaragua assumed that they were communists but all of the offical rhetoric of the movement claimed otherwise.

That is merely one story but one of the most colorful.>

paggle - India may not be your best example. I travel to India regularly and I've met plenty of people there who miss the British. (And not just in the upper classes.) Usually they are people who associate decolonization with The Partition, and not entirely without reason. Partition was a genocidal nightmare for India. And colonization wasn't a straightforward case of "looting" either. The costs of colonization was high for the British. By the late Victorian era it was less about gaining wealth than about geopolitic, e.g. "The Great Game". Yes, the British did some horrible things, such as the Amritsar massacre. But they also did some very good things such as creating the civil service and ending Sati. The people who miss the Raj may be a minority, but they do exist.

As for your comments on "trickle down" economics, well, I'm with you on that one buddy. I've seen firsthand what's happened to lots of communities once the unions died.>

Great post, Rod. It took me a long time to accept the term "conservative" for myself, and now I'm beginning to think about repudiating it. I think it's actually fairly accurate, but you can't pedantically ignore what words come to mean in ordinary usage, and I'm more and more put off by the shallow ranting which is coming to define "conservative," not--and this is important--not just in the prejudices of lefties but in fact.

E.g.: Rush Limbaugh was fun and even impressive for a while when he was saying things that simply were not said by most of the media. Now it just seems like schtick, at a time when we urgently need serious thinking.

Of course there really is some good thinking going on, at least in the realm of social issues. And the left is so much worse.

But in the realm of foreign policy: wouldn't it be possible for at least one really bright, really well-informed, really serious voice on the right to give us a sober repeat sober appraisal of the threat from Iran? Mostly what we're getting is hysteria: if we don't bomb Iran in the next three weeks, NYC and DC are toast. Or something.>

The crises of political faith and intellectual exile-and-rebirth limned by Rod and Ross, &c., are case studies within the psychology of religious/ideological belief played out world without end, endlessly shape-shifting across the history of ideas under the flux of events. Those feeling a bit homeless politically amid the latter-day infantile psychosis of our political culture, and inclined to fortify their post-ideological politics with a more rounded humanism in the classic sense do well to jack up drastically that portion of their leisure devoted
to history and biography, and less to the mass media, which operationally and in content alike are literally just rival arms of the corporate entertainment industry, no more and no less - their sole job is to sell soap and dog food via the reductive construction of pleasing
fictions - the "news" folk at CBS and Fox, et al, are soul-sibs to their Hollywood-scriptwriting breth-and-sist-ren, from Danger Dan of Black Rock to Gretel HanSelsteren of Moloch Murdoch. TV "news" isn't a public trust - it's undisguised corporate propaganda with
a class bias a mile deep, sucking the life out of everyone who inhales it.

For discernment transcending yet embracing politics, you could do far worse than to attend the lives and arcs of the anti-totalitarian dissident Soviet-bloc humanists of the postwar decades, who experienced "crises of confidence" so intimately and to such hard-won and fruitful effect they make our own orthodox progressives and rightist punditariat alike seem pathetic by telling contrast. Beside such towering headliners as Solzhenitsyn (the only true colossus still alive in the West) and Havel, don't overlook those equally mighty and cerebrally nimble Poles once grouped round KULTURA magazine, e.g., the late poet and essayist Czeslaw Milosz (Nobel 1980), heir to Blake and Dostoevsky in many ways, who diagnosed the sickness of soul within THE CAPTIVE MIND (1953) decades before most, and philosopher-essayist Leszek Kolakowski, the most commanding of anti-Marxist bulldozers philosophical Europe has produced, a son of Erasmus in his genial irony and attention to the structures of religious belief played out in religion and politics alike.

As such men as Milosz and Kolakowski came to shred the illusions of the Western progressive left - and those of their own youth - under the weight of the persecution of their lives and countryfolk by two successive tyrannies, they wrote with extraordinary dissident grace, and grew to see redemptive sunlight unsuspected amid the storm clouds tempting despair, while training the keenest eyes upon the virtues and vices alike of their adopted homes in American, English and Parisian exile. For a decent primer, don't miss the Kolakowski (and Marxism) 101 provided by Tony Judt's essay in the current number of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS,

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19302

which speaks in closing to the ideological blinders obvious among the politically-minded Big Thinkers of our
time no less than time past:

"In the early years of this new century we thus find ourselves facing two opposite and yet curiously similar fantasies. The first fantasy, most familiar to Americans but on offer in every advanced country, is the smug, irenic insistence by commentators, politicians, and experts that today's policy consensus lacking any clear alternative is the condition of every well-managed modern democracy and will last indefinitely; that those who oppose it are either misinformed or else malevolent and in either case doomed to irrelevance. The second fantasy is the belief that Marxism has an intellectual and political future: not merely in spite of communism's collapse but because of it. Hitherto found only at the international 'periphery' and in the margins of academia, this renewed faith in Marxism at least as an analytical tool if not a political prognostication is now once again, largely for want of competition, the common currency of international protest movements.

"The similarity, of course, consists in a common failure to learn from the past and a symbiotic interdependence, since it is the myopia of the first that lends spurious credibility to the arguments of the second. Those who cheer the triumph of the market and the retreat of the state, who would have us celebrate the unregulated scope for economic initiative in today's 'flat' world, have forgotten what happened the last time we passed this way. They are in for a rude shock (though, if the past is a reliable guide, probably at someone else's expense). As for those who dream of rerunning the Marxist tape, digitally remastered and free of irritating Communist scratches, they would be well-advised to ask sooner rather than later just what it is about all-embracing 'systems' of thought that leads inexorably to all-embracing 'systems' of rule. On this, as we have seen, Leszek Kolakowski can be read with much profit. But history records that there is nothing so powerful as a fantasy whose time has come.">

Rod wrote:

>I quit hanging out with them [the Progressive Student Network] on the morning that Leon Klinghoffer was murdered by Palestinian terrorists on the Achille Lauro. Arriving at the literature table to work >that morning, I was really upset over what had been done to Klinghoffer. One of my co-progressives responded that you always hear about Jewish deaths, but never about Palestinian deaths.

Rod's onetime red-diaper buds must have been channeling the late Edward Said, who penned the following parenthetical aside in a 1986 dispatch on terrorism for THE NATION, posted for effect at the hammer-and-sickle-sell-anemic mag's website last month:

"(It is worth noting that victims of 'terrorism' like Netanyahu and Leon Klinghoffer get institutes and foundations named for them, to say nothing of enormous press attention, whereas Arabs, Moslems and other nonwhites who die 'collaterally' just die, uncounted, unmourned, unacknowledged by 'us.')"

http://www.thenation.com/doc/19860614/said

The author of ORIENTALISM has taken a drubbing in recent years, what with old pal Hitchens' sadder-but-wiser, chance-that-got-away rueful musings in the September 2003 ATLANTIC,

http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/TheAtlantic/2003/09/01/377243/print/

and Said's protracted poison-pen needle-match with the late Ernest Gellner in the letters columns of the TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT of London over the latter's review of his CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM, which threatened any day to issue in pistols at dawn. Then there was Bernard Lewis taking on Said's Orientalism thesis in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, which began -

"Imagine a situation in which a group of patriots and radicals from Greece decides that the profession of classical studies is insulting to the great heritage of Hellas, and that those engaged in these studies, known as classicists, are the latest manifestation of a deep and evil conspiracy, incubated for centuries, hatched in Western Europe, fledged in America, the purpose of which is to denigrate the Greek achievement and subjugate the Greek lands and peoples. In this perspective, the entire European tradition of classical studies--largely the creation of French romantics, British colonial governors (of Cyprus, of course), and of poets, professors, and proconsuls from both countries--is a long-standing insult to the honor and integrity of Hellas, and a threat to its future. The poison has spread from Europe to the United States, where the teaching of Greek history, language, and literature in the universities is dominated by the evil race of classicists--men and women who are not of Greek origin, who have no sympathy for Greek causes, and who, under a false mask of dispassionate scholarship, strive to keep the Greek people in a state of permanent subordination."...

- which prompted a heated 7000-plus exchange with Said instanter, beginning thus -

"To the Editors: Insouciant, outrageous, arbitrary, false, absurd, astonishing, reckless these are some of the words Bernard Lewis uses to characterize"...

The Said watchers' favorite, though, had to be the snapshot of Fast Eddie tossing stones from his glass house across the Israel-Lebanon border at an Israeli watchtower in fraternal solidarity with his adopted paisans...

http://www.aijac.org.au/review/2000/258/id258.html

From "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" (Wordsworth) to "All our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre" (Kipling) - as not just Edward "Rocky" Said, but today's tub-thumpers for democracy-by-bayonet in the Levant have had reason to discover: he who lives by the sword...tho' the fact that Muslim birthrates will render Western arms for naught may prove the penis mightier than the sword indeed - so any militarist pundit would do well to beat ploughshares into his words...>

Thanks, Bill, for the friendly pleas-of-release-me - when an avatar of self-restrained discipline and a less-is-more ethic-cum-aesthetic ignores his own precept, the only beneficiaries are Big Caffeine and Big Kilowatt. My response to your query will please you even less than it does me but - [cocks head Reaganesquisitely] Here I Go Again:

As I reflect on the impotence of our elephantine technocracy to face the threats its sheer scale helped spawn, I recall two illustrations: the first, from Taoism, states that "power weakens as it grows"; the second, from biology, shows how organisms grow only as large in form as their functions demand, crippling or extinction the result when a part or the whole grows beyond its carrying capacity.

Look at history since the Enlightenment, and you find, in place of a conception of man as a soulful organic being rooted in a sustaining earth, a conception of ourselves as though we were mechanisms, extensions of the ones we devised, to be studied deterministically after the manner of atoms, engineered socially by the State. In America, a doctrine of every man for himself took root early, with nature as a storehouse to be plundered relentlessly for maximum short-term gain.

The treadmill of industrialism so unfolded spawned not just technical advance and undreamed wealth - but a division of labor rendering us dependent upon armies of experts ; vast and impersonal corporate and government bureaucracies locked hand in hand; and, not least, a mass alienation from nature in all its complex finite ecology nature, like all forces repressed, always returns with a vengeance: we became a nation of rubber-burning, pill-popping, push-button gas-guzzling speed freaks amusing ourselves to death, on an earth with a finite carrying capacity, every aspect of our lives desacralized by the pagan idols of marketing, our fears that our place at the head of the world s banquet will be taken away at once assuaged and stoked by perpetual war for perpetual peace.

To a nation both of whose political parties have colluded with us in eroding our community-centred self-reliance, a political solution - rooted in force is beyond my stomach and competence. Social change is best enacted nonviolently and at the capillary level, through accumulations within the moral ecology in which we each live. We can take more responsibility for our health, education and welfare out of the hands of self-anointed experts . We can learn how our food is grown, and vote with our dollars when that proves, as it should, unsettling and start growing our own however modestly, restoring our kids to their eternal roots in the cycles of organic life outside the joystick jungle. We can seek examples from across the growing counterculture for whom the command on a highway sign I once saw YOU SLOW DOWN is of the essence of harmonic life, for whom Bigger and Faster and More Complex is a highway to hell no one is duty-bound to travel for longer than the time it takes him to bolt the off-ramps.

If you still need inspiration, when you are next confronted by an agent of the technocracy offering you yet another convenience in exchange for the tiniest wafer of your soul, you might recall the Quaker who, confronted aboard ship by a pirate, replied, Friend, thee has no business here and calmly and stoutly tossed him to the sharks.>

Enough with the "Conservatives used to be so much more sophisticated back in the day" routine.

For you pointy-headed academic conservatives, there's plenty of material for you to sink your nose into--just get the Claremont Review of Books and let the snooze fest begin.

But the fact that many many many more people today call themselves conservatives than during Buckley's time is a damn good thing in my book.

And we have Rush and O'Reilly and Hannity and the like to thank.

Why is it a bad thing that the hoi polloi understand and embrace conservatism?

The elites liked it better when it was a smaller clique?>

"But the fact that many many many more people today call themselves conservatives than during Buckley's time is a damn good thing in my book."

"And we have Rush and O'Reilly and Hannity and the like to thank."

Yet another cultural sleight-of-hand prompting suicidal triumphalism.

"Rush and O'Reilly and Hannity", et al, retain part of their respective audience under the pretense that they are "conservatives" just like them, People's Tribunes in defense of Truth, Justice and The American Way of Death [RAISES HAND IN BENNY HILL SALUTE].

Others watch or listen, if they do, seeing in them a variant flavor served up by the great corporate entertainment-industry ice-cream parlor, no more of their "team" values than their moral equivalents at CBS/NBC/ABC "news" - they're all in showbiz, selling soap, dog food, and best-selling (often unintentional) humor "books", while gulling some into the belief that they are noble servants of a public trust and/or a respectable political tendency - yeah, tell that to the GE Generalissimos, Murdoch Moloch, and Viacom vampires...

Take the left-wing comic actress Ann Coulter, prized recruiting poster for the DNC and objective agent of the VLWC - not since Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING has a beloved gift for tragicomic derangment found such canonic popcorn incarnation. Someday she'll diversify the acting chops she picked up at New Canaan High big-time when Mel Gibson offers her the chance to stretch in mounting the casting couch in pursuit of an uncredited cameo in his next vehicle, where her portrayal of a human being will have jaded jaws hitting sticky floors in every multiplex from Tokyo to Times Square...

Q. Where is the most formidable enemy facing conservatives today, blocking their progress in finding greater traction in the culture?

A. You'll find it within the prime constituency toward which Rush/O'Reilly/Hannity pledge their lives, fortunes and *scared* honor - just wipe the steam and cream off the morning mirror for a better look.

Like the rest of us, conservatives largely get what they deserve, whether well-earned success or instructive frustration. Someday they'll get over themselves, too: wake me in about 2306 when, say, NATIONAL REVIEW follows up its anti-Clooney cover piece ("Get Over Yourself, George") with a like takedown of Hannity & Co.

Now if you'll 'scuse me, I must go - can't wait to see what Hugh and the Powerline boys have to say about the latest from Jonah and the gang over at The Corner - whoops, mustn't forget Tarantulo over at the WSJ, Little Seen Footfalls, and the Best of the Rest from the very cream of the self-fellating glob-ooze-fear:

Arianna Huffanpuff wonders whether GOP wolves will blow her house down (1) (tip: Insteadipunnedit).

The Smith Brothers wonder (2) if long Victorian beards will make a comeback.(3) (tip: Ricola Alpenhorn)(4)

Two Stark Raving Loonies debate whether cancelled smirking neo-neocon hipsters have a future on the news channels (5) (tip: Denni Smiller's Sense of Snow)

Jonah Goldbrick, grown weary of his lead in off-Beltway's The Little Shoptalk Around "The Corner", is quitting Simpsons punditry to blog from the vantage of his true calling - furniture sales - launching Couchfiles.com.(6)

Retro on the Metro: female Beltway interns respond to the tight job market with time-tested tactic no less so: wearing tight sweaters braless (tit: Petite Perky Pundette).(7)

Andrew Sullivan argues that same-sex weddings performed by gay Army chaplains will both reduce prisoner abuse (8) in the military and strangle recruiting efforts by Islamist militants, while encouraging Catholic ecumenical outreach (9) in softening the heart of Pope Benedict.

Christopher Hitchens says: you lost me after the Islamist-recruiting part.(10)

1.http://whoseafraidofthebigbadwolfblog.net/
2.http://ibetyouwerexpectingreallinks.heh/
3.http://tradeandmarkbeardedcoughdroppundits.box/
4.http://swissarmylozenges.ch/
5.http://atleastwithoneviewerheoutdidmcenroe.dude/
6.http://whatsunderthecushionstaysunderthecushion.org/
7.http://www.lsmft.bra/
8.http://hellosailor.net/
9.http://kumbayamlud.rcc/
10.http://ecrasezlinfame.encyclopedie.fr/>