StephenKMackSD's Blog

Corrected

I first heard an interview with Professor Khrushcheva on Live From The Left Coast with Ian Masters on KPFK, some years ago. Mr. Masters is an informed and intelligent questioner, he is without doubt the best I’ve listened to. And the interview was a fascinating look at Russian politics through the lens of literature, with a person with a wealth of knowledge about both aspects of Soviet and Russian life,she even adds to our idea of what it means to be an American, while maintaining her cultural roots in her homeland . The advantage of her dual citizenship and her ability to bridge that gap between the two disparate but contiguous worlds, makes this modest book worthy of the time to read and reflect on, not to speak of the pleasure of wonderful writing, full of insights into Russian,Soviet and American lives,values and the intersections of these in the person of Vladimir Nabokov. Prof. Khrushcheva, while telling her story, also gives the reader a glimpse into what one variant of an emergent American cosmopolitanism might look like, in our benighted era, this is an aspiration that borders on the unpatriotic, as conceived by the ascendent No-Nothings.But Prof. Khruscheva brings this practice into vibrant life, on the page, as she quotes from the writings of Nabokov and a long list of Russian writers. Here is Nabokov’s struggle, his metamorphosis from writer in Russian into English, an adaptation necessitated by his leaving Russia and eventually settling in America, as teacher,literary critic and author. Here is a book that demonstrates to the reader the possibilities of remaking the self, while maintaining what could be called a dual identity. This book is rich is relevant quotation that brings into focus the struggle to build bridges to a plurality of worlds, a project, a challenge that now faces us all, even though not as sharply focused, whether we choose to engage or ignore is perhaps the ethical challenge of the 21st Century.
Stephen

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-half-trillion-plan/2011/07/21/gIQA0gnhSI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

Here is Charles Krauthammer’s latest collection of statistics proving that President Obama is a liar and that The Republican Party is the Party of Political/Economic virtue.  Should any reader of this bold, even impudent, political essay be at all impressed about the statistical data that he so glibly fashions into an indictment of the fiscal sincerity, indeed the fiscal probity of a New Democrat, who surrenders before the battle begins? This President is not Franklin Roosevelt but rather Bill Clinton: a leader who has taken the Gospel of Markets and the political ascendancy of Wall Street as a necessity over the welfare of The Republic, The People. The New Democrat has willfully forgotten the New Deal as excess baggage, while the manufacture of a happy nostalgia for that time yields votes, simply put. All this is but the New Democratic party line on the way to power, for power is all there really is, heavily garnished with a re-manufactured New Deal: expressing the demands of a new time and place and the new realities of global corporatism.

Almost Marx         

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sustaining-the-unsustainable/2011/07/21/gIQAI6mtRI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

 

‘The Tea Party, the most welcome political development since the Goldwater insurgency in 1964, lacks only the patience necessary when America lacks the consensus required to propel fundamental change through our constitutional system of checks and balances. If Washington’s trajectory could be turned as quickly as Tea Partyers wish — while conservatives control only one-half of one of the two political branches — their movement would not be as necessary as it is. Fortunately, not much patience is required.’

‘Thanks largely to the Tea Party, today, more than at any time since Reagan’s arrival 30 years ago, Washington debate is conducted in conservatism’s vocabulary of government retrenchment. The debt-ceiling vote, an action-forcing mechanism of limited utility, has at least demonstrated that Obama is, strictly speaking, unbelievable.’

Mr. Will in his latest column of political opinion makes it abundantly clear, please see the above quoted paragraphs, that The Tea Party Jacobins are in full control of the Debt Ceiling debate, all accomplished with a breathtaking précis of recent Conservative  Political History, narrated as the victory of The Goldwater Insurgency transmogrified  into The Reagan Revolution, following in a great linear path to The Tea Party Jacobins: all completely self-serving, in the manner of political propaganda by the numbers. But then he asks the Jacobins to think and act on that knowledge in a politic way, which is antithetical to their raison d’être, to the very central tenet  of the practice of ‘insurgency’, as opposed to the practice of governance. There are a great number of garnishes to enliven this rather stolid recitation of Conservative Triumphalism blended with the tone of a hectoring pep talk: a standard that the great authoritarian Mr. Will has perfected over time, as the possessor of some superior knowledge that the rest of us find baffling, as being in the province of theology rather than that of political science. In this episode, President Obama remains the Great Socialist Vampire sucking the lifeblood out of the Republic, a standard trope of the No-Nothing Republican Party, and Mr. Will presents himself as the good gray Professor Van Helsing, with some strategic advice for defeating this inhuman monster.

Political Observer         

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22brooks.html?_r=1&hp

 

This Dramaturge, this master of Platonic essences, confects for his readers amusement another installment of The American Political Melodrama set against the imminent collapse of the The Empire’s good faith and credit.  This essay resembles thinking as a form of schematics, all intersecting lines and angles as in an architectural blueprint, a demonstration of his idiosyncratic formalism.  And, I might further speculate that the abstract nature of his thought, of his reductionist stance leads to a demonstrable ignorance, even a self-willed blindness, to any notion of nuance, political or historical. There are the names of the significant political actors pinned at their places of intersection but this is inert, static yet imbued with an ideological energy. The title, The Grand Bargain Lives, is a bloated , capacious  metaphor, filled with historical portent.  As if Wall Street, the ultimate paymaster, of the whole of the political establishment, would allow a default to interfere with their obscene profit taking. Is it naïve of Mr. Brooks to assume that a default is even possible? Or simply a dreaded eventuality, that adds a certain frisson, in terms of the melodramatic action.       

What escapes the notice of Mr. Brook is the basic conflict between the Establishment Republicans and The Tea Party Jacobins, but that is of no interest to our writer, since the imperatives of the political propagandist takes the lead.  The dismantling of what is left of The New Deal and The Great Society is the commitment of the Right, as a matter of policy, this time under the banner of ‘reform’ of ‘austerity’ of living within our means: as an antidote to the unlikely possibility of an ascendant  Neo-Keynesian government policy, a checkmate ,as it were. After positing the existence of Leftist Democrats and Tea Party Jacobins as the extreme positions in the debate, it is easy to congratulate your confreres on the fine art of compromise, which is the heart of democratic governance, while staunchly maintaining your Conservatism as synonymous with the National Interest. But as usual with Mr. Brooks,  it simply too tidy, too well managed, for the political world as it is, for human actors as they are. It glibly imitates reasonable discourse, it takes it’s measure inaccurately, of lived reality and revels in its’ inaccuracy, as demonstrative of its’ correctness. Can thoughts, completely disembodied and nebulous, ideas as separate entities, with the capacity to act in historical time, while maintaining a separation from the beings who conger them, then make history?

Political Observer           

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/18/debt-ceiling-crisis-gop-has-double-amnesia-on-deficits-regulation.html

Here is one of Mr. Beinart's best, most informative, most rigorously argued columns, that I can recall. Really worth your time,attention and most importantly food for thought.
Political Observer 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/calling-jim-demint–to-warn-gop-on-debt-plan/2011/07/18/gIQA4d2zLI_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

This opinion piece by Mr. Marc Thiessen demonstrates, if there was ever any doubt, that the Debt Ceiling debate is about the internal conflict between The Wall Street Republicans and the Tea Party Jacobins. Mr. Thiessen presents Mr. Jim DeMint as the Establishment Republican willing and very able to challenge all the those who follow the political lead of Mitch McConnell, and vote for compromise: an absolutely verboten concept to the Tea Party. The speculation that Mr. DeMint will use his Senate Conservatives Fund to campaign against any who might be tempted by the political mirage of compromise,although inherent in the very notion and practice of politics is the centrality of idea compromise, this fact has escaped the notice of these political purists. Mr. Thiessen and his allies Mr. DeMint and The Tea Party should more aptly be called Robespierreists or Maoists rather than the Tea Party, for the state of permanent revolution,of insurgency as politically viable, has proved to be calamitous, without question. So what is left to us as readers to consider, of these strategic speculations, is that the Debt Ceiling will be passed and that the Wall Street Republicans will win, and that the purists will continue to practice their nihilistic, purest politics within a Party already deeply fractured, but undaunted in it's cultivation of the American perennial, political hysteria and it's permutations.
Political Observer