StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Chait,

Here’s the bad news on Conor Lamb:

‘Meantime, Democrat Conor Lamb, the apparent winner in that race, had an Israel moment in the race. It was exposed that he had written in 2002 of an Israeli attack on Gaza– which killed a woman in her 40s and a 14-year-old boy: “If this latest attack is not terrorism, I don’t know what is.” Lamb was then 17 and a student at the University of Pennsylvania; but the Free Beacon later reported that he worked hard to privately assure Jewish supporters about his stance on Israel, and even said he had no memory of writing those words. Here’s why he did so: because newby Democrats get their policy positions from AIPAC.’

http://mondoweiss.net/2018/03/someone-elevation-neoconservative/

Or can all this fit under the rubric of ‘youthful indiscretion’ ? Since all New Democrats must pay obeisance to AIPAC, Mr. Lamb might be called before a Tribunal of AIPAC Patriarchs, to confess his ‘deviationism‘. And testify to his ‘re-education’ in light of his political victory. To express it in Maoist terms!

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/democrats-can-run-the-connor-lamb-strategy-over-and-over.html#comments

 

As reported in The Financial Times:

…

Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s president, formally nominated Mr Smolii this January after having previously considered other candidates. Nearly a year of political horse-trading delayed the appointment of a new governor. Support for Mr Smolii’s candidacy swelled in recent months, not least because the central bank under his leadership demonstrated independence and bold adherence to anti-inflation targeting in adopting a series of unpopular rate rises.

…

Look to the notion of a  ‘bold adherence to anti-inflation targeting’ as the maladroit  apologetic for Austerity , not to speak of the twin notion of ‘anti-corruption’. The quoted  comment by Timothy Ash ’emerging markets strategist’ or in plain English Vulture Capitalist, is telling!

…

“[Mr Smolii] has performed admirably in the job . . . indeed, I think the NBU is currently a reform beacon, where other reforms seem to be lagging,” Timothy Ash, emerging markets strategist at Bluebay Asset Management, wrote in a note.

…

The reader also must note that the comments section for this ‘news item’ is not enabled. Never a surprise, as the editors of this ‘newspaper’ fear more than anything the withering contempt of their regular readership!

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/13488b5c-2850-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0

John Stoehr adopts the chatty and dismissive style of so much political writing done for the Popular Press! He and Tomasky are as one in the use of this vulgar rhetorical gambit. And their shared distaste for the heretical New Dealer Sen. Sanders, as New Democratic supporters of Mrs. Clinton.  Stoehr scolds the Democrats for not endorsing New Democrat Feinstein, who he pictures as not perfect, but a part of the bulwark against Trump and Trumpism, the NRA and other ‘political evils’!

Such is this writer’s desperation, he even quotes from the Saul Alinsky’s classic ‘Rules for Radical’ as an antidote against what Mr. Stoehr considers to be an excess of ‘political purity‘, on the part of Democrats who unlike Sen. Feinstein haven’t gotten their ‘hands dirty’ with actual politics. The voice of the Party Hack is heard! The fact that the New Democrats were part of a political class, that were and are the Midwives of Trump: whose Free Market Ideology produced economic/political catastrophe, that has yet to produce the Self-correcting Market as the fulfillment of its theology, is beyond the ken of Mr. Stoehr. Or more likely this is about self-exculpation!

Yet what he leaves out is Sen. Feinstein’s impeccable Neo-Liberal credentials, and her support for the crimes, not just the predations of the American National Security State, and its War on Terror. But not to forget her demonstrable  ‘courage’ on Torture Report, that she ‘valiantly crusaded’ for! If she had chosen to act on her dissatisfaction, she could have simply taken what she had, fragments and or whole sections of the actual ‘Report’, and gone on the Senate floor, and read it into the record without fear of legal action. The members of the House and Senate enjoy immunity from prosecution for their comments on the floor of their respective houses of Congress.

But Sen. Feinstein is a member of long standing of the ‘Boys Club’, and its due deference to each other, that is the hallmark of the Feinstein’s attention to that actual imperative: she would have never taken such a radical step, that would have taken her outside the area of Senate good citizenship! This makes Sen. Feinstein the perfect candidate according to the imperatives presented by Mr. Stoehr!

Old Socialist

https://www.thedailybeast.com/democrats-have-reasons-for-dumping-dianne-feinsteinbut-none-of-them-are-good?ref=scroll?ref=wrap

 

The new casus belli for a war with Russia, and its Putin The Terrible, will be the ‘highly likely’ ? The fading political career and ‘leadership’ of Mrs. May will be rescued by launching a Trident? Or its equivalent as itemized by loyalist Mr. Rachman? Mrs. May’s pronouncement of the weak dogma of ‘highly likely’ is almost comparable to the political naif Colin Powell’s UN address? Without the fanfare, that was the nadir of his career and established in the public mind his utter gullibility! The battlefield and the world of politics requires an Eisenhower ?
The New Cold War advances by the self-delusions, better yet lies, constructed by a political class across Europe and America. Whose political necrophilia is fueled by a Neo-Conservative coterie of Porcine Spartans like Wm. Kristol and Robert Kagan financed by Sheldon Adelson and Paul Singer. But beware, this ‘War’ against Russia will at the same historical moment require a ‘Second Front’ against Iran!

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/0ff58722-2623-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0

Austerity is the rallying cry for an utterly catastrophic collection of Free Market dogmas! But it also acts as the slow poison to what remains of the Welfare State. The collapse of 2008 and the ensuing triumph of the 1% and the immiseration of the 99%, has produced Mr. Corbyn: in sum, ‘The Rebellion Against the Elites’ as it was named by the FT.

The rise of Corbyn and his re-invigoration of Labour is the political inevitability that now faces the Thatcherites, and its twin deities The Iron Lady, Hayek heavily inflected by the poison of Oakeshottian contempt, for the political ambitions of a lower order of beings: the Labour Party under Corbyn!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/014a1754-2526-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0

To The Financial Times editors :

Your unstinting advocacy of the Neo-Liberal swindle, from The Iron Lady & Reagan to the dismal present of Macri & Macron, and its ignominious collapse and consequent immiseration of the 99%, again announces the watershed of the catastrophic nature of that economic romanticism ! More hand-wringing about The Rebellion Against the Elites, rhetorically transmogrified into the latest iteration of  FT Speak as the Populist Menace!

Almost Marx

 

Read these paragraphs and know the true nature of Dr Pangloss’ political/moral quietism! If not his political usefulness, to the apologists for the predations of The American National Security State. He is the anti-intellectual intellectual!

‘Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bien-pensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class—the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

An entire lexicon of abuse has grown up to express their scorn. If you think knowledge can help solve problems, then you have a “blind faith” and a “quasi-religious belief” in the “outmoded superstition” and “false promise” of the “myth” of the “onward march” of “inevitable progress.” You are a “cheerleader” for “vulgar American can-doism” with the “rah-rah” spirit of “boardroom ideology,” “Silicon Valley,” and the “Chamber of Commerce.” You are a practitioner of “Whig history,” a “naïve optimist,” a “Pollyanna,” and of course a “Pangloss,” a modern-day version of the philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Professor Pangloss, as it happens, is what we would now call a pessimist. A modern optimist believes that the world can be much, much better than it is today. Voltaire was satirizing not the Enlightenment hope for progress but its opposite, the religious rationalization for suffering called theodicy, according to which God had no choice but to allow epidemics and massacres because a world without them is metaphysically impossible.

https://lithub.com/the-world-might-not-be-as-disastrous-we-think-it-is/

Our reading of Voltaire’s  Dr. Pangloss is wrong, or so pronounces his contemporary incarnation. But more to the point of Pinker’s unbridled ‘optimism’, See Chomsky Responds to Steven Pinker on Violence:

See also Pinker, as a self -described Hobbesian , in reply to Chomsky as  Anarcho-Syndicalist romantic , as opposed to his own pragmatism, awash in man’s natural acquisitiveness, selfishness. Is the human being in a ‘State of Nature’ self-seeking or a co-operative collaborator?  If that isn’t overstating Pinker’s economically framed argument. The evolution of the family family and the tribe are examples of what? Noam Chomsky’s Misreading of Human Nature:

There is much more to consider in Dr. Pinker’s essay, my comments can serve as a beginning, to address the rampant anti-intellectualism of his polemic. His quietism is of the most pernicious and dangerous kind!

American Writer

 

 

 

I have removed my essay of March 3, 2018 because of my own inexcusable lack of attention, to the responsibilities that being a writer means. The title was: ‘Peter Van Buren vs Andrew Sullivan on ‘Russiagate’ and its ersatz hero Robert Mueller. Political Cynic comments (Revised)’ My apologies to Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Van Buren, and to my readers: mea culpa!! StephenKMackSD

The reader marvels at Andy Divine’s latest essay , after some introductory remarks, a commentary on a ‘deeper American story’ that segues into this description of America’s Opioid Crisis:

The scale and darkness of this phenomenon is a sign of a civilization in a more acute crisis than we knew, a nation overwhelmed by a warp-speed, postindustrial world, a culture yearning to give up, indifferent to life and death, enraptured by withdrawal and nothingness. America, having pioneered the modern way of life, is now in the midst of trying to escape it.

Mr. Divine briefly mentions ‘the economic stress the country is enduring’ as the briefest description of the Crash of 2008, and ensuing Depression that is still with us in 2018. That  Crisis has led, ten years later, to an endemic cultural,existential, political despair about the present and the future. The corporation that is the capitalist model of our present and future is Jeff Bezos’ new Sweat Shop called Amazon. Mr. Divine avoids, at all costs, his advocacy and apologetics for the revelation of The Free Market, that has ended in catastrophe. He avoids the obvious reasons for the Opioid Crisis, except for ‘our own collapse in morality and self-control’ , this merde an integral part of the Neo-Conservative obsession with ‘Decadence’! The moral, political melodrama is framed :

The scale and darkness of this phenomenon is a sign of a civilization in a more acute crisis than we knew, a nation overwhelmed by a warp-speed, postindustrial world, a culture yearning to give up, indifferent to life and death, enraptured by withdrawal and nothingness. America, having pioneered the modern way of life, is now in the midst of trying to escape it.

Mr. Divine then asks the burning question: How does an opioid make you feel? He then spends six paragraphs explaining to the reader how the user feels, and names some of the celebrated users  ‘ including the poets Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Baudelaire, and the novelist Walter Scott including the poets Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Baudelaire, and the novelist Walter Scott — were as infused with opium as the late Beatles were with LSD.’ That Opoids and Hallucinogens are two distinct kinds of drugs is of no concern to this writer.

This followed by a potted history of The Poppy in American life, and other pressing matters like this about Neo-Conservative Daniel Bell:

It’s been several decades since Daniel Bell wrote The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, but his insights have proven prescient. Ever-more-powerful market forces actually undermine the foundations of social stability, wreaking havoc on tradition, religion, and robust civil associations, destroying what conservatives value the most. They create a less human world. They make us less happy. They generate pain.

Or this ‘if’ on Marx, that Bret Stephens found to be eminently quotable:

If Marx posited that religion is the opiate of the people, then we have reached a new, more clarifying moment in the history of the West: Opiates are now the religion of the people. A verse by the poet William Brewer sums up this new world:

Where once was faith,

there are sirens: red lights spinning

door to door, a record twenty-four

in one day, all the bodies

at the morgue filled with light.

Not to be missed is Mr. Divine’s last compellingly readable paragraph, in which he dons the Prophet’s Robe, imagine the scene, starring Charlton Heston, in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 Hollywood blockbuster Biblical kitsch ‘The Ten Commandments’:

We have seen this story before — in America and elsewhere.
The allure of opiates’ joys are filling a hole in the human heart and soul today as they have since the dawn of civilization. But this time, the drugs are not merely laced with danger and addiction. In a way never experienced by humanity before, the pharmaceutically sophisticated and ever more intense bastard children of the sturdy little flower bring mass death in their wake. This time, they are agents of an eternal and enveloping darkness. And there is a long, long path ahead, and many more bodies to count, before we will see any light.

Political Observer

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/americas-opioid-epidemic.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Melani McAlister doesn’t just recite the Party Line on Billy Graham, she constructs an apologetic for this Old Time Religion Entrepreneur, whose religion and politics were equally banal and utterly conformist

Billy Graham, who died Wednesday at the age of 99, may have been “America’s Pastor,” but he was also a man of the world. From the early days of his ministry, when he visited U.S. military forces in Korea, to his quiet message of healing at Washington Cathedral in the aftermath of September 11, Graham was a frequent commentator on—and participant in—global politics. He used his status as the most important American religious figure of the 20th century to help lead American evangelicals into a more robust engagement with the rest of the world. He was also an institution builder who was deeply invested in Christianity as a global faith.

There were other people who taught more missionaries, and some who reached more people on television; there were even those whose preaching events rivaled Graham’s in size. But no one else did as much to turn evangelicalism into an international movement that could stand alongside—and ultimately challenge—both the Vatican and the liberal World Council of Churches for the mantle of global Christian leadership.

In Graham’s early days, he was known as both a straightforward anti-communist and a crusader for souls. “Either Communism must die, or Christianity must die,” he famously said, “because it is actually a battle between Christ and the anti-Christ.” When the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association organized the World Congress on Evangelism in 1966, they chose to hold it in the divided city of Berlin, which Graham called a “symbol of freedom and democracy.” For Graham and his people, the Cold War and the expansion of American-style evangelicalism were two sides of the same coin. This was a vision that held sway among American evangelicals for the next two decades, although it would also soon be challenged by the very globalization of the church that Graham sought to champion.

Ms. McAlister presents this:

Graham also understood, and celebrated, the fact that the future of the evangelical movement lay with leaders in the Global South.

And then this about the Global South, and the utterly un-mentioned Catholic Liberation Theologian, Gustavo Gutiérrez :

One faction, led by Graham, saw evangelism as their single most urgent priority. The other, led largely by a contingent of social-justice minded Latin Americans, believed that evangelicals must make a commitment to “social concern” for the poor and oppressed. Their list of evangelicalism’s failings was long and political: We have frequently denied the rights of the underprivileged, they said; we have distorted the gospel and offered simplistic answers to complex problems; we have been partisan in condemning totalitarianism but ignoring racism. The group saw themselves as offering a fundamental challenge to the American-style evangelism embodied by Billy Graham. Graham never came around to this view, but he did come to recognize that the future of the evangelical movement lay in the Global South.

Mr. Graham was a political moral conformist whose stances on Nixon, the War in Vietnam, Apartheid and The War on Terror, LGBT rights and Islam were completely predictable, dominated by his need to seem within the ‘political mainstream’. Franklin is a reactionary theocrat, a mirror image of the Iranian mullahs. Billy was just an Empire Builder for Christ in the Age of the 21 inch black and white screen.

Ms. McAlister almost constructs a believable critique of Graham, while maintaining, at all costs, her bourgeois academic respectability.

For readers old enough to recall Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay from the New York Review of Books of August 16, 1979 titled The Portable Canterbury, in which she reviews these three books:

Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness

by Marshall Frady

Little, Brown, 546 pp., $12.95

Billy Graham: Evangelist to the World

by John Pollock

Harper & Row, 324 pp., $10.00

Angels: God’s Secret Agents

by Billy Graham

Doubleday, 175 pp., $4.95

The David Levine caricature is irresistibly evocative portrait of Mr. Graham. Some long, but eminently readable, selective quotation from Ms. Hardwick’s essay are both tellingly observed and elegantly written. Ms. McAlister is, to put it charitably,  an American provincial of the Neo-Liberal Age.

…

The long, hectic pilgrimages, or “crusades” as the preferred word has it, to India, the Soviet Union, South Africa, Australia, Korea (South), and even to the foreign territory of Madison Square Garden: these are his biography. And Graham himself is a sort of double emanation: he is both the pilgrim and the shrine, the portable Canterbury to be visited and experienced. For God’s Star it is an iron routine, with the shape and the form of the appearance settled and unchanging, except for various scriptural texts read out and briefly connected to a generality, and sometimes for conservative political asides suitable to the nation under the siege of the crusade. This is, as it must be, a long-running play, sustained by the inspiration that comes to Graham, as it does to gifted actors, from the presence of the audience.

…

In Graham’s life and in his enterprise, it is as if one were to make a large foot-print with one’s initials on it signifying a single choice under which all the rest of experience would somehow be subsumed. This in many ways makes Graham a resistant object for Frady’s intense contemplation. First of all, if Graham is in a sense deprived by the habits of his mind, cut off from the vitality of struggling language, Frady is all language and flowing connection. Fluent sentences and paragraphs, a streaming abundance of imagery, a Faulknerian enchantment with the scenery in which these bare lives flourish. Frady’s biography of George Wallace¹ and the present large work on Graham are outstanding works of literature, not quite like any other in their intention and quality.

Imaginative saturation, a special kind of interest and intelligence, much that is quirky and novelistic, high creative ambitions are brought to bear on his charmless, driven Americans, Wallace and Graham. Wallace’s nastiness and gift of tongues almost accumulate in Frady’s fascination with speech rhythm and anecdote into a kind of charm.

…

Validation by the powerful and well-known is a natural wish of one absorbed in number, one for whom any remaining pocket of smallness or obscurity is a defeat. And this need for validation will multiply in those lives that are marked by the exploitation of personality. Graham is anything but an exception. His “vulnerability was that, while he contended that he looked on all his associations now in government and commerce as mere openings for a fuller propagation of his ministry, at the same time he also was given to a compulsive entrancement with all those larger affairs and offices of the world.”

Current evangelism is as far as one can go in the pursuit of faith without works. Graham has brought to perfection the notion of a global parish, that is, no parish at all. He is relieved of the need to make private visits, to gather boxes of old clothes in the church basement, to perform weddings, bury the dead, to encourage rummage sales and pie-suppers. Not only is he relieved, but the saved are also, if they like, outside the demands of works in community with others. With their salvation kits, they are like patients making a single visit to a clinic and who are thereby recorded in the cure statistics. The commitment does not require one to attend Mass or to go about ringing doorbells, selling the Watch Tower, refusing blood transfusions and military service, making hasty recalculations of the procrastinating Day of Judgment.

…

In speaking of demonstrations, he was inclined to promote his own large gatherings. “I have been holding demonstrations myself for fifteen years—but in a stadium where it was legal.” At a meeting with Martin Luther King, he said, “So let me do my work in the stadium…and you do yours in the streets.” Perhaps Graham feared some usurpation of his authority and of the national attention as the cameras directed themselves to the hymn-singing “fellowship” in Selma and other southern cities.

Marshall Frady, with his high sense of American scenery and his creative ordering of the meaning of character as it displays itself in history, writes about Graham and King that they were “like the antipodal prophets of that continuing duality in the American nature between the Plymouth asperities and the readiness for spiritual adventure, between the authoritarian and the visionary.” Of King: “The genius of his otherwise baroque and ponderous metaphors was that they were the rhetoric of the human spirit gathering itself to terrific and massive struggle.”

…

To the numb and static vocabulary of Graham, the bad language of the Nixon tapes was a personal affront and a spiritual distress of the first order. Or perhaps it was the first and last order. The will to power cannot be admitted by Graham, who in his own driven will falls back upon the “stewardship mentioned so many times by Christ.” And what did he decide when he could no longer fail to name something askew in Nixon? “I think it was sleeping pills. Sleeping pills and demons.” As Frady expresses it, “Thus he has made his final peace with it: it had all been an exterior, artificial, demonic, chemical intervention. The fault had lain, not in Nixon, but in the dark stars and dark winds of the underworld.”

As the emblem to the Graham biography, Frady quotes from Billy Budd. And he returns to this theme in the matter of Nixon, telling of a visitor to Graham reading out Melville’s passages on Claggart’s evil. The visitor must have been Marshall Frady himself. Who else? In thinking of Graham, he writes: “There was also something about his equally abiding eager innocence throughout his relationship with Nixon that somehow strikingly evoked, more than anything else, Herman Melville’s moral fable Billy Budd.”

…

The television ministry: “the means of Graham’s greatest single impact on his own country.” It is “a massive closed system with its own vision and terms of evaluation and its own independent dynamic for self-preservation.” Almost impossible to recall the lonely and stricken aspect of the old evangelical tent and street corner, the listeners with hangovers and prison records, the hand-organ performances on a desolate evening, the forbidding, charitable soup kitchen. Or the rural gravity of Dinah, the anxious refinement of the elder Gosses.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1979/08/16/the-portable-canterbury/

Ms. Hardwick’s essay is behind a pay wall, but for $4.95 you can read her essay with its unmatched insights and translucent literary style: a breath of fresh air from 1979!

American Writer

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/billy-graham-globalized-evangelicalism/553886/