StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8358.html

Are you weary of the literary critic who draws his inspiration, indeed, his reason d’être from the laboratory, as if literature were a specimen, to be dissected using the instruments of  a science that creates itself, as it proceeds with its analysis? (But one must be aware always of the dense even unfathomable vocabulary of this procedure, this philosophy, this ‘science’, of this criticism.) Literary Theory: the hybidity of Existentialism, Structuralism, Semiotics, Deconstruction, Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Marxism, born in France in the middle of the 20th Century. The literary critic dons the lab coat, armed with an indecipherable jargon to explicate not the great works of literature, but those at the margins, a la Barthes or Derrida. Only these two thinkers fancied themselves Philosophers and Thinkers comparable to the Auteur. But, please, cast any unnecessary worry aside, for the book under review is The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Miserables by Mario Vargas Llosa, a writer not given to the casting of the spell of literary science, as practiced by the Theorists of a, now, fading theoretical past.  But an artist concerned with texts and contexts, of Literary History and the grand project of Literature, without apology. Read Mr. Llosa’s book in full confidence of the reliability of his power of explication, to cast light on this great text, marvel at his ability to bring the story and its writing into its’ literary, political, even psychological context of the literary giant, Mr. Victor Hugo; with a passion that makes the reading of this book a pleasure from beginning to end. I devoured this book in large chunks, putting it down only when sleepfulness and the late hour made resistance impossible.

American Litterateur

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/08/the-major-roadblock-to-muslim-assimilation-in-europe/243769/

In reply to Mr. Shadi Hamid’s Atlantic article:

Here is an excerpt from a December 17,2009 New York Review of Books article by Mr. Malise Ruthven entitled The Big Muslim Problem!: in it are reviewed Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West by Christopher Caldwell and What I Believe by Tariq Ramadan:

“While the figures-and the methodologies used to arrive at them –vary considerably, the conclusions to which they point is that Muslims do not greatly differ in their religious behavior from Europeans. For example, a French study in 2001 found that only 10 percent of Muslims were religiously observant. A study by the demographer Michele Tribalat the same year found that 60 percent of French Muslim men and 70 percent of women were ‘not observant,’ though the great majority respected ‘cultural attachments’ by abstaining from eating pork or drinking alcohol and by fasting during Ramadan.”

 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/dec/17/the-big-muslim-problem/

To be up front about myself I’m a queer atheist with absolutely no interest in defending any branch of the benighted Abrahamic Tradition: that being said the information that Mr. Ruthven supplies in his review raises some questions about the exact nature of the closely beliefs of the Muslims in Europe, if any real determination can be made of such a diverse population, we are left with statistical data. How many European Muslims believe that stoning of female adulterers and the cutting of the hands of thieves falls into the category of the normative? Could the promise of Europe, to the immigrant, be the advantage of living a life free of the restrictive tribalist ethos of an indigenous Islam? Not willfully forgetting the myriad problems that Muslim immigrants face. Mr. Hamid supplies some statistical data of his own but one is doubtful, skeptical about an area of inquiry so fraught with prejudices and ideological baggage: I include my own set of beliefs, and prejudices in that, in the hope of resolution or, at the least, a pragmatic accommodation: which is one of the central constructs and practices of the modern secular republic. The larger question of the number and power of conservative Muslims in Europe remains open. Mr. Ruthven recommends two books in his indispensable article:

Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence

Edited by Aziz al Azmeh and Effie Fokas (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Islamic Challenge:  Politics and Religion in Western Europe

Jytte Klausen (Oxford University Press, 2005)

Political Observer      

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/2011816104945411574.html

As we watch the historical unfolding of the Financial Crisis of 2008, to forget that the Financial Reform of 1999 is here the root cause of the crisis of 2008 is,of course, verboten in the language of the popular press and its repetition of establishmentarian cliche, and solemn warnings about the dangers of ignoring the new intellectual mirage known as Austerity. Forgotten in all this low grade hysteria,a perennial in American politics, is the fact that 'The Market' is simply a mechanism: it is not an arbiter of political conduct nor a guide to moral/ethical action, despite the concerted campaign of Political Romantics masquerading as economists and other forms of literary endeavor. Friedman, Hayck, Mises, and the redoubtable pamphleteer and apostle of unalloyed greed Ayn Rand, represent the central 'thinkers' whose unrelenting propaganda, aided by a network of think tank hacks, and their allies have trumpeted this political theology as 'The Answer' to all questions. We have seen the recovery of record profits for Wall Street, but jobs for us ordinary folk remain out of reach. The Market advocates and their allies in both political parties have no real answers, as we face economic prospects that are unrelentingly dismal.We can only watch as the Republican Party continues to manifest the political irrationalism that 9-11 spawned: raising the question, where are the Republican moderates? If any dare raise their voices amid the din of kleptocratic apologetics. President Obama has shown himself to be an advocate of IMF Structural Adjustment, without apology or explanation to his 'Progressive' followers. We are in need of leadership, but both Parties are failing miserably.

Political Cynic           

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jfks-berlin-blunder/2011/08/12/gIQAGOcxBJ_story.html

 

Here is The Great Will at war with the legend of John F. Kennedy, with a generation of historians, mythologizers, political cronies, and all the thousands of hours of television dreck that Camelot and it's violent and bitter end produced. Not to speak of the endless number of books, by a host of friends, who loved the idea, the romance of the Kennedy years and who profited handsomely by their careful loving cultivation of that thousand days, as indicative of momentous historical change. But Mr. Will has drawn a miniature of Mr. Kennedy as a drug addled political naïf, unfit to engage in a battle of wits with Khrushchev on Cuba or Berlin. Was Kennedy a weak man, sometimes given to tears, a man completely unequipped to do battle in the Cold War, against more cunning and amoral men, as Mr. Will portrays him? Mr. Kennedy may have been inexperienced and something of a novice and maybe an ineffective leader; but if we are to take his portrait as drawn by Mr. Will, as a reflection of the man, it is rather a portrait of the politician, as viewed by one who hopes to change our view of that man, as reflecting the act of political revisionism, of redrawing the past in the political lens of present, to meet certain ideological ends, certain felt political necessities. Mr. Will provides the counter myth to Camelot in polemical terms, because his column is pure polemic, from first to last. There is a certain pathos that is evoked by Mr. Will’s seemingly gratuitous act of political revisionism, which is in sum not at all gratuitous, but a calculated act of rewriting history for political ends. This is, of course, his right as a political commentator, but Mr. Will has deformed the practice of polemic, to the extent that it seems the mere bandit attack of a party hack. Yet the savage hatred at the core of this text evokes a haunting dark music.

Political Cynic

              

It is always revelatory to read my favorite Neo-Conservative thinker, in the pages of the ultra-respectable Financial Times. That frame of respectability seems a bit more tarnished each time I read the attenuated but, as always, complex little fables that Mr. Caldwell constructs, to make concrete his authoritarian world view. His column dated August 12, 2011 is based on his assumption that the Bobby is an outdated anachronism in the civic life of London, given the wave of riots that has swept that capital in recent days. But Mr. Caldwell fails to mention an important bit of information that might be of interest to his readers: the city of London is monitored by more than 12,000 live video cameras which adds what to the crime fighting potential of the Bobby?(The Bobby could be considered the very most important link to the very successful practice of community policing.)  That is a good question. According to the Evening Standard of September 19, 2007 80% of crimes go unsolved with the cameras, at a ten year estimated cost of 200 million pounds.
Here is the link:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-tens-of-thousands-of-cctv-cameras-yet-80-of-crime-unsolved.do

One might conjecture given these statistics,if they are correct, might leave the Bobby as the main source of convictions? Where does Mr. Caldwell find his model for effective police work? Chicago 1968, hardly surprising given the conservative romance with the jack boot. The dismal history of political collusion between Mayor Daily and the Chicago police to suppress dissidents at the Democratic Convention, of that year, is well documented. But this is a minor matter in the larger question of how policing of a society should be thought of and conducted. Mr. Caldwell is a firm believer in the power of the fear of the police, as a deterrent to the natural criminal tendencies of it's citizens, all very Hobbesian in its cultivated paranoia about the governed. Mr. Caldwell does not even broach the subject of the epidemic of police violence that afflicts American communities: it is, in fact, no concern to a thinker and writer whose absolute faith in authority figures is unshakable.
Eternal Skeptic

     
  

http://davidharvey.org/2011/08/feral-capitalism-hits-the-streets/

From this great article:

“Nihilistic and feral teenagers” the Daily Mail called them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and desperately hurling bricks, stones and bottles at the cops while looting here and setting bonfires there, leading the authorities on a merry chase of catch-as-catch-can as they tweeted their way from one strategic target to another.

The word “feral” pulled me up short. It reminded me of how the communards in Paris in 1871 were depicted as wild animals, as hyenas, that deserved to be (and often were) summarily executed in the name of the sanctity of private property, morality, religion, and the family. But then the word conjured up another association: Tony Blair attacking the “feral media,” having for so long been comfortably lodged in the left pocket of Rupert Murdoch only later to be substituted as Murdoch reached into his right pocket to pluck out David Cameron.

Thank you, David Harvey!!!!!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/britain-tackles-the-welfare-state/2011/08/09/gIQAMpMJ7I_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Here is another installment of the great Manichean Melodrama that Mr. Will produces regularly, in which the primary protagonists are a Virtuous Capital and an Evil Government, and the necessary Conservative political actors to animate the proceedings. The permutations of this perennially told tale are many and varied, always sounding the central theme that Mr. Will cannot emancipate himself from, although he would never try.  But the setting is new, London, and he focuses on George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a central actor and protagonist in this particular episode, that might be aptly titled Dismantling the Welfare State. But let us not forget Mr. Osborne’s impeccable ancestral credentials, as part of the titled nobility with an equally impressive education at the best schools and a large cash reserve. Nothing appeals to Mr. Will like good breeding, education and a Conservative political disposition, after all Mr. Will’s great political hero is Edmund Burke. So he might be considered an Anglophile with discriminating, even faultless political tastes: one could argue that Mr. Will fancies himself an American aristocrat, if such existed. Mr. Will even demonstrates his credentials as an aristo with a cutting aside on the rioting rabble of London and the facile Liberals who manufacture excuses for their destructive actions, while genuflecting to Mr. Osborne and paying obeisance to the notion of Austerity as the way toward a brighter future, for some.

Political Observer

        

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/10/standard-poor-s-was-right-to-downgrade-u-s-debt.html?om_rid=De4wA2&om_mid=_BOQu76B8ctQ-Xa

Here is Tina Brown trying to rescue The Daily Beast from a richly deserved obscurity, by having one of her paid right wing hacks ,her contract workers write an ‘opinion piece’ on the Standard and Poor’s downgrade of the credit of America. Although it’s hard not to see Mr. Carter as just another economic fundamentalist raging at the President for having transgressed against the God of the Market, thereby setting in motion a calamity of Abrahamic proportion. He thunders his contempt, a la the American fixture of the tent preacher, for the infidels who would dare to disrespect the Great God. He even quotes Hernando de Soto on the ‘The Mystery of Capital’ an analogy to the 'Mystery of Transubstantiation', perhaps? There is no real mystery to Mr. Hernando de Soto Polar’s fealty to a demonstrably failed Neo-Liberalism, notwithstanding Mr. Carter’s genuflection. What Mr. Carter misses is that what was accomplished in the Debt Crisis is a Structural Adjustment, a Monetarist economic tool used by the IMF to bring the recalcitrant economies of the world to heel: meaning to bring an economy into the benighted 21^st Century and its romance with retrograde politics masquerading as economic theory and practice. Or, perhaps, Mr. Carter thinks that this settlement does not go far enough.Mr. Polar is here historically invested as political ally of The Chicago Boys and other forms of Capitalist apologetics, fully in line with Mr. Carter’s own faith in The Holy Market.

Should we as readers, given this information, be even the least suspicious of the motives of Mr. Carter? That is of course a rhetorical question, but in sum, Mr. Carter being a true believer asks us to rely on the ‘Wisdom of the Market’ as a fact of economic life: but given the performance of The Market in the last  three years, I cannot place my faith in this patent delusion, this unwarranted ,capricious act of faith in an obviously failed notion, abetted by Republican Party manufactured hysteria. The idea of Austerity is the new idea that the Free Marketeers have adopted after the failure of the Economic Reform of 1999 to foreclose any further attempts at Keynesian  or Neo-Keynesian economic/political redress. And Mr. Carter engages in the time honored rhetorical ploy of the political operative by a self-presentation as the voice of reason mediating between the extremes.

Almost Marx   

 

 

 

       

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-im-mad-at-obama/2011/08/10/gIQAhEPi6I_story.html

Is Matt Miller a bit of a drama queen?  Well yes! But for Mr. Miller to chatter almost endlessly on, at least to this reader, about the political sins of Obama seems so out of place, after all Obama has proven himself to be a New Democrat in all things. So why should this IMF inspired Structural Adjustment, the Neo-liberal monetarist answer to every economic crisis, i.e. Austerity, come as any surprise, to anyone who might consider themselves a conscious observer, of the deeply held political beliefs of this President except, of course, the willfully blind. That the Republicans have become absolute political nihilists is beyond question, except for the defenders of that destructiveness as a matter of politics, as matter of strategy, aside from the issue of abiding by any notion of public morality, long since discarded. But here is Mr. Miller caught in his own little melodrama of disillusion asking his audience to join him in his act of public mourning, for the loss of the True Leader, the rhetorician extraordinaire who became a continuing  disappointment, and worst of all a reminder of one’s own bad judgment.          

Political Cynic