Opinionator Emeritus (OE) in his latest essay demonstrates the seeming aimlessness of The Empire at permanent war, its only real business, after the fall of its nearest competitor and nemesis the Soviet Union, in the World Historical Melodrama called The Cold War. OE manages to maintain his chatty rhetorical style, while speaking of the lives and deaths of very distant Others, as if talking about the latest nugget of Washington gossip. There is a certain comfort to this sort of opinionating pitched to the prejudices of a dwindling bourgeois readership: the last vestiges of a generation brought up on the quaint notion of civic republican virtue, synonymous with the central idea that being informed was an ethical responsibility not to be ignored. OE is adroit at maintaining his stance as an Old Policy Hand providing a longer view than his less seasoned fellow observers.
Almost Marx
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