StephenKMackSD's Blog

If you are summoned to be a juror in an American Court, the last thing the judge says to the assembled citizens, just before the individual interviews begin, is that the law court is above morality! When I was summoned to jury duty 3 years ago, I exercised my right to speak to the Court on that very matter: I simply said that the law court was not an historical singularity but operated as part of a republican whole and did not and could not lay claim to some lubricious notion of moral exceptionalism. And I recited the most egregious failures of that claimed exceptionalism: Dred Scott, Buck v Bell, Korematsu, Hirabayashi etc. and was summarily excused from service, not by name, but by my number 15.
Is there no other group of citizens that enjoys the self-proclaimed status as arbiters of ‘Law’ and ‘Morality’, not to speak of the ‘Majesty of the Law’ endlessly harped on in courtrooms? This pretension is so evident that Shakespeare is the one literary reference that cannot be gainsaid, at least by the aspirants to unimpeachable bourgeois respectability. And Judges don’t like to be spoken to as civic equals, nor do they like to hear repeated, in open court, the voluminous record of the failures of a Law they worship as preeminent.

American Scribbler

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2016/01/literature-and-law#commentForm

Franklin Graham learned evangelical politics from his father Billy. Graham pere, a former tent preacher, on the road to bourgeois political respectability engaged in a more adroit sub rosa politicking. Some might identify this as a lack of courage or even hypocrisy. See this Wiki entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Graham
Under the headings Politics and Controversy
Billy preferred working behind the scene,Franklin prefers a more open yet guarded practice of politics, avoiding overt endorsement of candidates, protecting his religious tax exemption.
Billy’s White House commiseration with Nixon on ‘the Jews of Hollywood’ was an object lesson, not lost on Franklin!
Evangelicals are steeped in their self-created myth, of themselves as victims of an utterly corrupt and godless secularism. The Old Time Religion of both Billy and Franklin has a deep visceral attachment to Neo-Confederate/Originalism of the Republican Party from Nixon to the Party of the present and its self-destructive nihilism.

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21685457-christian-right-sees-2016-chance-elect-one-its-own-white

The cult of Reagan is all the Republicans have! The warm cuddly Conservative? The 1980 Nashoba County Fair speech that opened his first campaign for President is an example of his ‘kindness’ and political flexibility?

‘I believe in state’s rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.’

The speech is available on YouTube (sound quality not the best). A transcript by The Nashoba County Democrat:

http://neshobademocrat.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=297&ArticleID=15599

This speech delivered just miles from where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered. The choice of place and the rhetoric chosen, on that occasion, can be attributed to the political savvy of the Reagan staff, who were acutely aware of the power of symbolism! States Rights was stand in for The Southern Strategy of Nixon, utterly surprising that Reagan would be so bold! Although, some of us are old enough to recall ‘Welfare Queens driving Cadillacs’ although not directly  attributable to Reagan in his 1976 campaign, that became a part of the Conservative political lexicon.

Another Source on the Reagan presidency is available here:

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/27/behind_the_ronald_reagan_myth_no_one_had_ever_entered_the_white_house_so_grossly_ill_informed_2/

The title of the essay: Behind the Ronald Reagan myth: “No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed”

A telling excerpt:

‘No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. At presidential news conferences, especially in his first year, Ronald Reagan embarrassed himself. On one occasion, asked why he advocated putting missiles in vulnerable places, he responded, his face registering bewilderment, “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.” Frequently, he knew nothing about events that had been headlined in the morning newspaper. In 1984, when asked a question he should have fielded easily, Reagan looked befuddled, and his wife had to step in to rescue him. “Doing everything we can,” she whispered. “Doing everything we can,” the president echoed. To be sure, his detractors sometimes exaggerated his ignorance. The publication of his radio addresses of the 1950s revealed a considerable command of facts, though in a narrow range. But nothing suggested profundity. “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.”’

William E. Leuchtenburg evaluates Reagan in an unflattering light! My use of it is as a rebuttal to Mr. Jacob Weisberg’s carefully laundered Reagan apologia, if not of the whole of a Republican Party, in the grip of a contemporary self-destructive nihilism.

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/38d44b32-b5fb-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51.html#axzz3wlRLdCH0

Gone are the beguiling aphorisms of Mr. Ganesh’s tribute to Lynton Crosby of December 28,2015.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a40adeb4-a973-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879.html#axzz3wlRLdCH0

The politics of a special kind of fear, except for the maladroit dismissal of Jeremy Corbyn as politically inconceivable- how a variety of inevitable triumphalism is foundational to the Ganesh act of political clairvoyance. But to finish my thought, Mr. Ganesh’s blindness to the rise of Mr. Corbyn, or someone like him, to avoid erecting a cult of personality, in the face of the utter political/economic catastrophe of the Neo-Liberal Experiment is empirically evident, to all but our writer.

Mr. Ganesh, in this essay,  is all nuts and bolts of the savvy political operative, in the mold of Karl Rove: Mr. Crosby being his clone. Reading Mr. Ganesh’s essay the attentive reader still finds a limited number of apothegms/aphorisms that provide a kind of literary solace.

‘The ancients believed that forecasts were an affront to the gods. But we are impudent post-moderns now: we can venture a speculative account of Britain in 2016.’

‘A good clairvoyant must also foresee that which does not happen. Non-events can be as shocking as events, and one stands out this year.’

‘Causing mayhem out of pique at the result is a political dead end.’

Political Observer

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/2c81881a-b2de-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51.html#axzz3wfOM16f7

Read Pankaj Mishra’s essay titled ‘A generation of failed politicians has trapped the west in a tawdry nightmare‘ here:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/01/generation-failed-politicians-elite-liberal-values?CMP=twt_gu

On Tony Judt, who is the central thinker in Mr. Mishra’s essay, see these two essays: Dylan Riley’s Tony Judt: a cooler look, in The New Left Review:

http://newleftreview.org/II/71/dylan-riley-tony-judt-a-cooler-look

Geoffrey Wheatcroft‘s Professor Judt changes trains, in the TLS:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1239882.ece

Political Reporter

One has to read almost the entirety of Dominique Moisi’s essay before one reaches something that resembles political rationalism, instead of respectable bourgeois political hand-wringing.

‘More seriously, if France wants to continue to present itself to the world as the country of liberty, equality and fraternity — and it should probably add “security” if it is serious about protecting the democratic nature of the French republic — those in charge have to answer fundamental questions.

The most important of these concerns the progress that the authorities have made in trying to regain control of the republic’s lost territories — the deprived suburbs of France’s biggest cities where young people, enmeshed in crime, drugs and violence, have become the foot soldiers of jihad.

In order for France to remain resilient, it needs to offer a vision of progress for all its citizens and not simply to react to attacks and provocation in knee-jerk fashion.’

The majority of the essay is devoted to: what is defended,explained and advocated is the more invasive political imperatives of the French National Security State.

Two of the salient questions that might have been asked: how many French citizens participated and aided the perpetrators of the murders? And what of the pressing question of the 2005 riots in the banlieues? And of the integration of marginal immigrant communities into full fledged participation in French political/civic life?

A selection of essays at The Economist on the banlieues:

France’s suburbs, Two years on- http://www.economist.com/node/10105050

Africa and France, Beyond the banlieues – http://www.economist.com/node/9163543

French banlieue film, Chronicles of the years of fire: http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21651155-new-film-set-frances-poor-housing-projects-mines-rich-seam-chronicles-years

A possible answer provided by The Guardian from 2015:

‘Nothing’s changed’: 10 years after French riots, banlieues remain in crisis. Despite years of emergency assistance, residents of the suburbs that erupted into violence in 2005 are still waiting for things to improve’

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/22/nothings-changed-10-years-after-french-riots-banlieues-remain-in-crisis

Another matter that remains unaddressed is that Charlie Hebdo used degrading cartoons of The Prophet, as a stand in for a politically  vulnerable minority in the name of laïcité, Enlightenment values, as the modern voice of the Deist Voltaire: author of The Philosophical Dictionary and  La Pucelle d’Orléans.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/eacc8592-b462-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51.html#axzz3wTlbih75

Keeping hope alive? According to a report at Reuters Ukrainians in the year 2015 experienced an inflation rate of 44%! Up 24.9 % from 2014!
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-centralbank-inflation-idUSKBN0UC0PR20151229

‘Ukraine’s central bank governor said on Wednesday that inflation this year had hit 44 percent, up from 24.9 percent in 2014.
Valeriia Hontareva also said that foreign exchange reserves had remained roughly stable at $13.3 billion from $13.1 billion as of Dec. 1 and reiterated that the bank planned to gradually remove currency curbs.’

Or this Gallup poll, shared at Global Research, however  uncongenial the source to the Economist readership. And worthy of quotation:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/gallup-ukrainians-loathe-the-kiev-government-imposed-by-obama/5497679

‘On December 23rd, Gallup headlines “Ukrainians Disillusioned With Leadership,” and reports that “nearly nine in 10 Ukrainians (88%) say corruption is widespread in their government, and about eight in 10 (81%) see the same widespread problem in their country’s businesses.” 8% of Ukrainians now say they “have confidence … about the national government.” 17% approve of the job-performance of their President, Petro Poroshenko. While the pre-coup President, Viktor Yanukovych, was in office, 2010-2014, that figure had been averaging about 23%, and was never as low as Poroshenko’s is now.

Gallup reports, “fewer Ukrainians now say their leadership is taking them in the right direction than before the revolution,” but that statement calling this coup a ‘revolution’ embodies the propaganda-lie of one of Gallup’s main clients, the U.S. government itself, which calls the U.S. coup in Ukraine in February 2014 a “revolution,” when every honest and knowledgeable person now knows that this U.S. government claim — that it had helped install democracy instead of having ended it in Ukraine on 20 February 2014 — to have been a lie. Even the founder of the “private CIA” firm Stratfor has called the overthrow of Yanukovych “the most blatant coup in history.” It had been that because it was the first coup to be videoed by numerous people from many different angles with their cellphones and by TV cameras, uploaded to the Web by even anti-Yanukovych countries such as the UK’s BBC; and those videos, the best compilation of which is here, make clear that this was, indeed, a coup d’etat, no authentic revolution at all, such as the U.S. government claims.’

‘…rooted in European Christian civilisation…’ or  more likely rooted in an utterly bankrupt Neo-Liberalism, politically allied to US/EU/NATO political adventurism ?

Political Reporter

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21684765-why-struggle-ukraine-key-europes-future-keeping-hope-alive

Here is Gideon Rachman,at The Financial Times, from his column of December 28, 2015, in the grip of an almost unmanageable rhetorical hysteria, the title gives the game away,

‘Battered, bruised and jumpy — the whole world is on edge’

and then the the sub-title,

‘Not one global power is optimistic and even in America, which should be cheering, the mood is sour’

but be prepared for what reads like Mr. Rachman at his most unhinged! The opening paragraph is worthy of full quotation:

In 2015, a sense of unease and foreboding seemed to settle on all the world’s major power centres. From Beijing to Washington, Berlin to Brasília, Moscow to Tokyo — governments, media and citizens were jumpy and embattled.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c523a45a-a973-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879.html#axzz3wHln4LUZ

Compare this to Mr. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard’s essay,dated December 30 2015, Mr. Evans-Pritchard is International Business Editor of The Daily Telegraph, titled,

‘The world’s political and economic order is stronger than it looks’

and its sub-title ,

‘Stefan Zweig tells us in The World of Yesterday what it feels like when the wheels really do come off the global system’

The opening three paragraphs of  Mr. Evans-Pritchard’s essay strike a measured,  if not optimistic tone:

‘Readers have scolded me gently for too much optimism over the past year, wondering why I refuse to see that the world economy is in dire trouble and that the international order is coming apart at the seams.

So for Christmas reading I have retreated to the “World of Yesterday”, the poignant account of Europe’s civilisational suicide in the early 20th century by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig – the top-selling author of the inter-war years.

From there it is a natural progression to Zweig’s equally poignant biography of Erasmus, who saw his own tolerant Latin civilization smothered by fanatics four centuries earlier.’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12074226/The-worlds-political-and-economic-order-is-stronger-than-it-looks.html

Can history offer insights into the present?

Political Observer

One marvels at the number of stunning aperçus in Mr. Ganesh’s essay:

‘Mr Crosby specialises in what his simpering victims call the “politics of fear”. ‘

‘He cannot make people fear anything they do not already fear, but merely for taking their existing fears seriously…’

‘Playing on people’s fears is not just effective, it is also right. ‘

‘Fear is a respectable emotion that is hard-wired into us as a design feature, not a glitch. We are meant to feel it.’

‘That some of our fears are misplaced does not make the emotion unsound, or electoral appeals to it somehow sordid.’

Mr. Ganesh makes the case for fear, not just as a good that makes us wary in our everyday lives, but of fear as a political good, yet he doesn’t quite discriminate between rational fear and politically inspired fear e.g. fear of ‘the outsider’, although this player in his political melodrama gets the briefest of walk-ons , but the usual cast members, such as blacks, Jews, Muslims, Gays and here at the Financial Times the dreaded Populists of both Left and Right are left unmentioned.

‘The politics of hope has a spurious respectability but reeks of snake oil. It elides good intentions with good outcomes and treats the status quo as a baseline that can only be improved on. For normal people in the actual world, the status quo is superior to many plausible alternatives. Things can be made worse not just better by well-meaning politicians.’

Mr. Ganesh on the ‘politics of hope’ echoes the Lee Atwater and Karl Rove perspective of cynicism/opportunism that Mr. Crosby has brought to British politics. The rough hewn Australian brings a masculine bravado to the effete world of British politics, as narrated by our writer. In sum, Mr. Ganesh is having an unseemly romance with political necromancy, because it has brought victory to his Party! Call it the victory of The Faustians.

Political Reporter

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a40adeb4-a973-11e5-955c-1e1d6de94879.html#axzz3vqc2kkyM