If you are looking for some political entertainment while the Republic self-destructs, amid the clamor and bad faith of career politicians, that stumble over themselves,and each other, trying in vain to prove their fealty to that modern hybrid, the National Security State: here is The Great Will spewing invective in several directions, but mostly at one of America’s favorite politicians, Newt Gingrich. It’s like one old intellectual prostitute calling another a whore, although not filled with any real insight into the character of the poverty stricken Mr. Gingrich, but filled with irresistibly quotable one liners, perfect for the waning age of television and the triumph of the Internet:

“Gingrich, however, embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive.”

“Granted, his grandiose rhetoric celebrating his “transformative” self is entertaining:”

“His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a “historian”), to say, “If you want to put people in jail,” look at “the politicians who profited from” Washington’s environment.”

“Gingrich, who would have made a marvelous Marxist, believes everything is related to everything else and only he understands how.”

Mr. Gingrich is perennially making his political comeback- recall the New Nixon, but in halting endlessly repetitive stages, and always with a new consort.

Truly yours,

Myra Breckenridge

David Brooks in his latest essay titled The Spirit of Enterprise inhabits the spirit of a besotted lover, but the love object is Capitalism and the villains are the lowly, lazy Southern European countries of Spain, Italy and Greece. It reads like the many and varied complaints of Anglo-Saxons about their good-for-nothing relatives, from those dissolute southern climes. Mr. Brooks can with difficulty contain his indignation, even contempt, for those lazy,shiftless southerners. Who do not share the Teutonic gene of self-sacrifice and iron discipline of their northern neighbors. The central concepts of both Capitalism and Protestant Christianity is the idea of sacrifice and self-blame, in pursuit of a hoped for salvation and Capital accumulation plays the part of the earthly salvation, a precursor to the salvation of the spirit that awaits the soul. Mr. Brooks has turned to the Christian Theology of Calvin and Luther for political inspiration and sustenance in this time of the continuing failure of Capitalism. This polemic rehearses the themes of the No-Nothings of America’s nineteenth Century,during the mass immigration of southern Europeans:but argued in the rhetorical register of economic profligacy. It reeks of the aroma of a selective xenophobia wedded to a protestant ethical mainstay, of self-loathing directed at another: here Mr. Brooks acts the part of the amiable ventriloquist.

Almost Marx        

Max Boot in his December 1,2011 column for the Los Angeles Times titled The Iran Threat fully commits himself to the analogies of the rise of Nazism and the dithering and equivocations of the politicians, who should have been more prescient about the danger of a mad man and his allies, posed to the Democratic West and to the fate of European Jews. This is the rhetorical frame within which he constructs his latest piece of political hysteria mongering, with Iran as the central protagonists, as historical stand-in for Hitler and the Holocaust. Mr. Boot pulls out all the stops- he makes manifest the notion of crisis as real and present – the Holocaust waits in the wings, as another political generation equivocates and rationalizes the existence of the political toxin of the Iranian Revolution, and it’s pernicious ambition to acquire atomic weapons. Now, the fact of Israel’s production and possession of from 100 to 400 atomic weapons is not relevant to the project that Mr. Boot undertakes: which as a Neo-Conservative is about the political imperative of war making as a policy of first resort. The choice of enemy as being Political Islam as the natural antagonist to the Zionist project, an integral part of the the Neo-Conservative political mythology and it founders Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol. If one had any doubt of this abiding political/theological connection one need only consult Mr. Murray Friedman’s friendly history of the this political creature, The Neo-Conservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy. Mr. Boot is only one of the many voices that can be heard in the Establishment Press calling for a ‘preemptive strike’ against Iran in the name of the crisis: one is reminded of the of the virulent Cold Warrior’s calls for ‘preemptive strikes’ against the Soviet Union in that, past, benighted age. One can also see, in the caricature of Iran sketched by Mr. Boot, the perfect reflection of the Iranian Revolutionary propaganda of the ‘Satan of the West’. Any attack on Iran will not be confined to the ‘region’ but will engulf the world, a prospect that Mr. Boot and his allies, among them the braggart and bully Mr. Netanyahu, have failed, in their limited strategic thinking, to realize the danger of their own ideological and perceptual blinders. Even the act of consideration of the existence of such impediments, of checks on possible actions, seems beyond the ken of these political actors. There is the danger, the inability to consider an alternative, to consider the possibility of another course of action, predicated on a different view, of the perceived political alternatives. Or are we, the readers of this essay, to come to the conclusion that Mr. Boot is simply another propagandist for The Party Of War?

Political Observer

Dearest Tina,

This morning I opened my e mail from the Daily Beast to find two essays, one by Peter Beinart and one by Leslie Gelb. Mr. Beinart’s contribution is titled Obama’s Foreign Policy Doctrine Finally Emerges With ‘Offshore Balancing’. Well Tina, Mr. B. outdoes himself in the realm of self-congratulatory rhetoric,as is usual for this deep thinker and full time apologist for the the Empire, of the New Democratic persuasion. Not to speak of the use of such literary/political gems as ‘offshore balancing’ and ‘zero sum’, all very technical, and reeks of the mastery of the vocabulary of the accomplished technocrat,although not demonstrating any real competence: a specialty of Mr. Beinart. Then Mr. Gelb’s essay, The Republican Party Is Losing Its Grip on Foreign Policy,a withering polemic against the demonstrable incompetence of the Republican Party’s front runners in the arena of Foreign Policy, but here is the telling first paragraph:

“Americans can learn more about foreign policy from The Real Housewives of New Jersey than from Republican presidential hopefuls. At least the shrieks of the housewives speak to reality. The Republican wolves howl about a mostly bygone world of dire military threats, a world inhabited by global ghosts to be thwarted by waterboarding and wars. Most of them just don’t see that the old right-wing rhetorical bromides that once scared Americans and dominated campaigning won’t win future elections.”

The Real Housewives of New Jersey? Surly, an insertion by you or some sub-editor in order to make Mr. Gelb’s usual serious tone a little more palatable, for a reader addicted to the lurid, the gossipy tone of less serious but bestselling magazines? Mr. Gelb does indulge in his usual finger pointing at The Republican Party’s political irrationalism, while loudly and at length, proclaiming the sanity and probity of he and his political allies, hardly noteworthy, but, well, predictable . Tina, my morning would have been complete had you had the foresight to include an essay by my favorite reactionary thinker and imperial apologist, Niall Ferguson, that would have been the realization of a powerful triad of thinkers-would they qualify as the New Intellectual Trinity of the Politics of Empire? With you as it’s midwife, the thought is heady, in fact dizzying!

Sincerely yours,

Myra Breckenridge    

October 19,2011

I’ve just read a review from Philosophical Investigations of October 1993 by Mary Midgley of Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. I received an e mail from Wiley-Blackwell with free access to a selection of their publications, and the review of Murdoch’s book was in this issue. So part of my Saturday morning was spent at the storage space happly opening my boxes of books, while searching for the book. And rediscovering all the treasures that were there, and bringing home two boxes of those,  along with the Metaphysics. Then off to the library to finish reading Ms. Midley’s review and to re-read Chapter 9 Wittgenstein and the Inner Life. I read the Metaphysics in 1995 or there abouts and had forgotten what a superb writer Ms. Murdoch was. She was the inquirer and thinker par excellence.

October 23,2011

Just finished reading Chapter 7 Derrida and Structuralism, an engaging, beautifully written and argued critical evaluation of the thought of Mr. Derrida: expressing a faith in the viability of Philosophy to be the legitimate bearer of it’s ethical and moral heritage, without surrender to determinism of whatever variety. Yet she does not engage in mere fruitless polemics but intellectually engages with his thought, as a form of serious inquiry, and in the process gives him his due. I had forgotten how superb a writer Iris Murdoch was, this is a book of great writing on philosophy, a particular pleasure read. To engage with the thought, the writing of such a learned philosopher is to be reminded of the power of lucid and edifying discourse, Hegel remark notwithstanding.

American Litterateur 

The comic potential of The Great Will(TGW) is not wasted, here, as he fulminates about the virtue-less posturing of Newt Gingrich,sounding all those Calvinist notes of the inherently sinfulness of man, as located in that egregious perennial candidate. In quick succession, with his usual scowling,glowering dismissiveness of the Head Master, he makes quick work of the former Speaker. All very Dickensian, to awkwardly mix my metaphors. But certainly worth the price of admission. TGW is America’s Great Fake Political Moralist with a rather untidy history of his own, although that remains hidden behind that carefully stage managed personae.

Publius

I was not acquainted with the name of Matthew Continetti until I listened to Left,Right and Center on Friday November 18,2011 where he was the substitute Right Wing thinker. He seemed a bit supercilious,a bit too taken with himself, in the way of that phalanx of thinkers that crowd the airwaves and blight the very notion of serious thought. I came across this essay at The Weekly Standard by Mr. Continetti, titled Anarchy in the U.S.A: The Roots of American Disorder via a tweet from RJCHQ . Mr. Continetti can write with style,verve and he can be very persuasive. He is the true intellectual heir to the mantle of Irving Kristol, one of the creators of Neoconservatism. Mr. Kristol’s son William, the inheritor of that mantle by birth, is not in any way a writer, but a nearly competent but plodding propagandist. Mr. Continetti has a gift to put it succinctly. Now, he shows an ability to easily manifest contempt and disdain for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators, and the Utopians that appear in his essay as actors in his historical vignettes, to demonstrate the vacuity and nihilistic character of the Anarchists movement and the danger of that Utopianism. While he roundly condemns the ‘Left Utopians’, he leaves utterly blank the ‘Right Utopians’ in his very readable comments: that Right Wing iteration of Utopianism are the believers in Free Market Economics from Thatcher and Reagan to our present historical moment.And the intellectual advocates of this ‘Right Utopianism’are the familiar ones of Hayak,Friedman, Rand, to name but three. And the political actor who codified the notion of Free Market Economics was the Utopian New Democrat, Bill Clinton. The power of that Utopian delusion was that it eventually infected both political parties. Mr. Continetti in his essay writes a self-consciously selective history of Utopianism, a self-serving history that attempts to smear and defame those who disagree with his Utopian delusion, i.e. the viability of Free Market Economics as the totalizing answer. The Anarchists and Utopians have come to prominence because of the world wide economic collapse of 2008 and the economic stagnation that is our present condition. The bitter and unacceptable news, of the failure of the Free Market as idea and practice, as his own untouchable Utopianism, is at the very core of the denial of Mr. Condinetti, although his disdain and contempt have an entertainment value, they are, in the end, the malicious servants of his propaganda assault on the newest manufactured enemy of the moment. Here is a list of some of the many protagonists that people this long but fascinating screed:

Kalle Lasn , Robert Owen, New Lenark community, New Harmony,Charles Fourier, Daniel Guerin,Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, IWPA,Weathermen,Zapatistas

American Litterateur

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/opinion/brooks-lets-all-feel-superior.html?…

One can read Mr. Brooks latest essay as proof, if one were needed, that the myopic Mr. Brooks has a perceptual problem. There was no ambiguity in the report of one of his assistant coaches that he witnessed the anal rape of a ten year old boy in the showers at Penn State. What was ambigious was the nonresponse of Mr. Paterno, ex post facto.Teachers,educators have a special legal resopnsibility as reporters on the welfare of children, absolutely no ambiguity there,none.  This provides fake moralist Mr. Brooks with the opportunity to exibit his contempt for the other fake moralists, in print and other media, in essence to show them to be less than he as moralists. With the welcome additions of the indicies of moral decay as Abu Ghraib,Madoff and ‘The Wall Street Follies’. Well, Mr. Brooks policy hand can be seen by his regular readers in at least two of the cases cited. He ought not to advertise his mispalced faith in the War in Iraq or the Free Market Delusion, but then again he is careless, cavalier and self-congartulatory.

Queer Atheist   

American Capitalism in the 18^th Century was about the trade in slaves, tobacco and molasses, to foreshorten the actuality. We have progressed, but the feudal mentality of the 18^th Century entrepreneur remains a constant in the present age of the failure of Capital. Here is an instructive essay on the business practice of Mitt Romney, rather impressive, but not quite the portrait of the wise Captalist, who builds instead of tearing down. The facts are at odds with the public relations clap trap of this perennial candidate. Hardly a surprise, but the level of mendacity, the bad faith that Mr. Romney entertains is quite striking, even for a modern day Republican.Here is a quote from the great man himself:

“Sometimes the medicine is a little bitter,” he said, “but it is necessary to save the life of the patient.”

Publius