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

Mr. Jones writes an interesting essay, yet he confines himself to strategic questions alone, like the good policy intellectual, who seeks to avoid the ethical question of a protracted bombing campaign, against a country that is engaged in nothing that could be considered as beyond the norm. And the IAEA report is the empirical evidence, that renders Mr. Jones’ careful, yet ethically vacuous essay, irrelevant to a serious policy debate, but gains him high marks with his fellow ‘policy analysts’. But this is not a debate about policy approach but about The Party of War and it many advocates and rationalizers: see the latest essay by Edelman, Krepinevich,Montgomery in Foreign Affairs, dated November 9, 2011, for a more carefully framed set of arguments for an unprovoked attack on Iran, as necessary to protect us against the irrational Iranian Menace. The cliche is recast as needed ,with the appropriate actor of the moment. The cost of war are here irrelevant: in this debate human life is not germane, which should places a particular variety of strategic thinking under a rigorous ethical interrogation.

Political Observer

I found this article from Foreign Affairs in a tweet by Glenn Greenwald , a thank you to him. What is very fascinating about this opinion piece is that, for being so brief, it has three people credited with it’s writing. That must have presented some logistical problems about who wrote what, it sounds a bit like the old Abbott and Costello routine. As Mr. Greenwald pointed out in his tweet, this seems like the standard Party of War rationalizations for attacking Iran, but perhaps the authors Eric S. Edelman, Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr. and Evan Braden Montgomery were attempting to demonstrate rhetorically that a consensus exists about such a policy. When, in fact, it doesn’t exist except argumentatively, as a postulate of the authors. Words are powerful, as we’ve all seen in the endless propaganda barrage before the assault on Iraq. But more important are the voices used to deliver the message; the men who deliver the messages must be public men with a certain prestige, a standing in the world of policy intellectuals, that lends weight to their case. Mr. Edelman, as Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs (2001-2003) is such an establish figure, along with his companions Mr. Krepinevich Jr. and Mr. Montgomery. But these are the same people that led America to brutally attack Iraq, in the name of an impending ‘mushroom cloud’, a manufactured rhetorical mirage. So it’s the same old crisis, that demands immediate decisive action, against a foe that is beyond the reach of rational argument: this has become the brutalizing,destructive, shopworn political cliché of the Party of War, and it’s coterie of Liberals, Conservatives and Neoconservatives.

Political Observer

Should the zygote be granted the status of a person? This is the burning question of our present age, while millions of human beings,once zygotes themselves, go hungry, have no shelter and whose futures are, by any measure, utterly bleak. If the zygote is a person, then what of its constituent parts, ovum and semen, are they equally in need of a protected status? Should the spilling of semen outside the confines of the marriage bed , in the act of procreation, be punishable as a capital crime? Is menstruation and the expulsion of unused ovum another instance of the need to harvest these nascent life forms, to save potential persons? These are matters that need our immediate moral/political attention. The status of the zygote must and will take center stage in the right to life movement, whose followers trample on the living in the name of a theology, a belief about what human life is or might be. Civic republican actors need a bit more empirical evidence before the steps here described can enacted in good faith.

Ghost of Aquinas