StephenKMackSD's Blog

I know that you are tired, by now, of the nonstop crowing on all the 'respectable television networks' as the celebration of the death of the great Satan bin Laden is endlessly recounted and embroidered with details, as they become available from government sources. Ah! the pleasures of listening and watching the thugs and chicken hawks of both wings of The Property Party  celebrate this little victory over the evil mastermind: so utterly reminiscent of Saturday matinees at the movie houses of old. It plays upon that ever present nostalgia latent in The American Political Melodrama just waiting to be accessed by the canny pol. But here is some actual reporting, done by a master of that now dying craft. Read and savor it as a touchstone for what others might do or could do, if only!

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-was-he-betrayed-of-course-pakistan-knew-bin-ladens-hiding-place-all-along-2278028.html

Here is a brilliant piece of political observation and commentary by Michael Blim. Mr. Blim deserves a wide readership just on the strength of this particular essay, alone. But here is hoping that we will be able, on a regular basis, to read more of his essays.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/05/american-liberalisms-middle-class-fetish.html

http://www.thenation.com/article/160344/ghost-bin-laden?rel=emailNation

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-03/osama-bin-laden-killing-erases-democrats-and-obamas-weakness-stereotype/

 

 

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-03/osama-bin-laden-killing-erases-democrats-and-obamas-weakness-stereotype/?om_rid=De4wA2&om_mid=_BNv-RuB8ayywm2

Cogitating Peter (CP) is here caught in the act of celebrating the new martial spirit of President Obama. The factor that will win 2012 for him against the ill positioned Republican Party. CP attempts to cloak his partisan glee at a victory secured well in advance of the campaign itself. Is it a bit too soon to claim victory? Can one even speculate, amid the din of victory cries, that the martial spirit and its corollary the spirit of vengeance, is the mortal enemy of civic republican virtue, the sine qua non of the modern constitutional secular state? Or are such questions unappealing in the celebrations accompanying the death of The Great Satan, Osama bin Laden? CP is content, at this point, to count his chickens.

Publius

Osama bin Laden has been killed, so let the tribalist chants of USA begin (one tribalism mirrors another) , as an expression of the political irrationalism that has brought three wars, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. To what end? Our Imperial Wars simply came home to us in another form, replete with a shocking, savage brutality, on September 11,2001. A reality hard to face from a citizenry that considered themselves invincible,untouchable,exceptional !
Was there not a point at which the Grand Architects of American Foreign Policy even conjectured that the power that was wielded by America would ever be challenged, by powerless troglodytes financed by a rich Saudi, in the name of a re-imagined militant Islam, that followed the lead of The Muslim Brotherhood. The severe myopia of the great minds and the pretenders to a prescience, that did not exist, but was predicated in the propaganda freely espoused by  the acolytes, the intellectual parasites in the vulgar press, that somehow a day of reckoning would not come, even if it might be insignificant. What we get is the same old tired triumphalist chatter in and on all the the mainstream bourgeois ‘News’ outlets. But Bin Laden and his idea and his money have fueled the concept of resistance to the American Juggernaut, framed in Islamist terms, and has spawned a thousand children and resistance is rife worldwide. We are in a corner. We freely make a twofold war: we make war on our own political traditions of the Constitution and The Bill of Rights and we make wars on an ever increasing  number of fronts. How long can it continue?Is our treasury inexhaustible? Is a state of permanent war, on fronts domestic and foreign, the inevitability that Imperial America faces?

Almost Marx

“The New York Times [after-party] used to be free, but apparently there’s a cover now,” Meyers said, alluding to the Times’ new Web site paywall. “So like everyone else, I will probably go to the Huffington Post party. And the Huffington Post is asking people to go to other parties first and steal food and drinks.”

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/

Here is Johann Hari’s beautifully written and observed piece on the life and philosophy of Ayn Rand. He manages to make thoughts on compassion directed toward her almost convincing. She was a completely destructive person, subject to her own nihilism as a psychological predisposition. Her problems were deep seated and only exacerbated by her experience in Russia and her addiction to amphetamines and her self-aggrandizing philosophical/literary pretensions: a potent amalgam of forces.

I recall seeing The Fountainhead in my late teens on television and being absolutely fascinated with this philosophical melodrama. The long soliloquies spoken by Gary Cooper were to me mesmerizing, I was an intellectually naïve  American teenager : it was the first time I’d heard anyone speaking in a ‘philosophical’ mode regarding their and others conduct and it impressed on my childlike mind the importance of ideas as related to human action, even though it was stilted and artificial. Movies have a seductive psychological power, it is the perfect tool for propaganda. Mr. Vidor’s movie was a beautifully realized piece of early Cold War Anti-communism. It had the raw power of spectacle in modern dress heavily garnished with pedestrian rationalizations for greed, an idée fixe of Ms. Rand’s.  In fact the apotheosis of greed is her only idea: her need was so deep and all pervasive, that the acquisitive urge replaced the gamut of human emotions and needs , that the rest of us take for granted, in our daily interactions with others, the significant ones and the merely transitory. I have no interest in reading  Ms. Rand’s work, although I have watched the Mike Wallace interviews with her that he conducted in the late 50’s, posted on YouTube. She didn’t play well in front of a television camera, she doesn’t evoke any sympathy: she is shifty eyed and appears uncomfortable and worst of all she seems to lack passion and commitment when she expresses ideas that are very dear to her.  Although being a good television performer is no real measure of the truth, falsity or efficacy of ideas badly presented.