StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/opinion/26brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Here is David Brooks and his latest political column ‘The Big Disconnect’: the pleasures of the great overarching metaphor. Some have dubbed him Cockeyed Platonist for his love of forms and ideas rather than commenting on the world as it is. But in this particular essay he makes the argument that American politics are both stagnant and fragile and that both political parties represent products made in Soviet Production Facilities A and B: one can only laugh at this utterly weak argument as representative of stale Cold War thinking, reeking of easily manufactured fear of The Great Satan, The Soviet Union. Mr. Brooks is subject to these spells of self-styled political prescience, which pass, but not as quickly as his readers might hope for. Here is a long quote presenting his rotting beams and pillars, structural problems argument:

‘This cracking and rotting is originally caused by a series of structural problems that transcend any economic cycle: There are structural problems in the economy as growth slows and middle-class incomes stagnate. There are structural problems in the welfare state as baby boomers spend lavishly on themselves and impose horrendous costs on future generations. There are structural problems in energy markets as the rise of China and chronic instability in the Middle East leads to volatile gas prices. There are structural problems with immigration policy and tax policy and on and on.

As these problems have gone unaddressed, Americans have lost faith in the credibility of their political system, which is the one resource the entire regime is predicated upon. This loss of faith has contributed to a complex but dark national mood. The country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless and defensive.’

Loss of faith, complex but dark national mood, the country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless and defensive: this is rot of an intellectual kind, a phenomenon fully known by the regular readers of Mr. Brooks’ political chatter, which regularly dons some of the garments of serious thought. Mr. Brooks and his Free Market Fellow Travelers have never publicly admitted that their faith in their manufactured Economic Theology failed in 2008, with disastrous worldwide consequences. And even after the bailout of Capital by the government and the obscene profit margins of 2010, Capital has not created the necessary jobs that might bring prosperity back, or even something resembling that elusive economic good. Might that be a more rational explanation for the ills Mr. Brooks enumerates with such assiduity? At least following the Law of Parsimony! The structural problems argument is a replacement for a necessary mea culpa, a mea maxima culpa, even sackcloth and ashes, that might be expected from an honest, candid, thinker and writer.  Instead, Mr. Brooks has positioned himself, in terms of a propaganda offensive for 2012, and the victory of the next Sclerotic Old White Guy, whoever that might be. Leaving no doubt that this highly garnished essay, abundant in jargon, and statistical quotations, is just a part of that campaign.

Almost Marx      

Below I have quoted an excerpt from Professor Gary Gutting’s book Thinking the Impossible. His very useful analysis has opened the way for me to achieve a greater understanding of Derrida’s work; which  seemed repetitive and pointless, a highly rationalized intellectual meandering. But the insights that Professor Gutting offers here makes me hopeful about coming to a new level of understanding. To  re-read Derrida with a new sense that the seemingly endless questioning has a methodological validity that had previously escaped my grasp. I had read French Philosophy of The Sixties by Ferry and Renaut, Introduction to Phenominology by Dermot Moran and Profits of Extremity by Allan Megill, all offering valuable insights and historical/philosophical analysis. Professor Gutting offers another view of the History of Philosophy, that enhances my understanding, as each one of these other books has.

‘It is not that Derrida is shy of direct criticism of other philosophers. He was quite forthright in his attack on Foucault’s treatment of Descartes in The History of Madness, and we shall see that he had no reluctance in confronting what he saw as Sartre’s philosophical failings. But Derrida distinguishes between two types of thinkers. On the one hand, there are those for whom “a certain kind of rigorous analysis could render their texts accessible and exhaustible”. These include “the great French thinkers”, who have, he says, his “profound respect”, but whom he would obviously have no hesitation in criticizing based on a thorough understanding of their views. On the other hand, there are thinkers (Greeks and Germans, it seems) of whom he says that, when he reads them, “ I feel that I am confronting an abyss, a bottomless pit in which I could lose myself”. He explicitly mentions Plato and Heidegger, but would surely have in mind Hegel (and Nietzsche). Regarding such thinkers, there is for Derrida never a question of decisive refutations; there is only an interminable process of probing deeper and deeper, suggesting new questions and new responses. To any easy dismissal (or any ultimate dismissal at all) of philosophers such as Hegel or Heidegger, his response is always, “But it’s more complicated than that”. With them, we never escape from the abyss.

However, the very act of finding interminable complications in a thinker is not only a way of elaborating and appreciating the richness of that thought. It is also a way of challenging its “mastery”’

You recall when Pretty Boy Critic (PBC) used to everywhere. I know you do, you’re just pretending to be twenty years younger than you are. Your plastic surgeon and your hairdresser both conspire to hide those two decades, but you’re looking like Joan Rivers. But back to PBC and his ubiquitous rein on all those ‘talk shows’ of the 70’s like Merv, Mike, Dick and Johnny and all of the clones of clones, that appeared and disappeared with astounding regularity: all with the same guests endlessly recycled, old faces, even some new faces resembling old faces, hawking their latest bestseller, movie or Vegas appearance or just playing the old Show Biz buddy routine. Sound familiar? Well PBC would come on in full makeup, false eyelashes, pancake and rouge, dressed like your flamboyant unmarried uncle, and dish about his latest interview with a movie star, who lit up a joint during the interview (gasp from the audience)  in that southern drawl, that almost resembled a purr. He was, in his salad days, everyone’s darling; he even did summer stock with Jacqueline Susann. Well, time has caught up with PBC, no more escorting those aging Hollywood beauties to various events, adding a much needed patina to his un-likability. He’s been reduced to reviewing movies and exclusive cabarets for a trendy New York publication, printed on salmon colored paper. Time has not been kind to the once luminous beauty that he so carefully attempted to enhance, yet he brings a style and finesse, dare I say dignity and maturity, to his writing that makes him worth reading.

Literary Hack     

‘First, Hyppolite gave up Hegel’s claim that philosophy could culminate in a “totality” that synthesized and reconciled all oppositions, and instead presented philosophy, as, Foucault says, Husserl did , as “an endless task, against the background of an infinite horizon”. Second, Hyppolite replaced the finality of absolute knowledge with the idea of “continuous recommencement”, thereby transferring “the Hegelian theme of the end of self-consciousness into to one interrogation” (recalling Kierkegaard’s category of repetition). Third, rather than absorbing all non-philosophical experience and knowledge into the absolutes final philosophical synthesis , Hyppolite , in the manner of Bergson “reestablish[ed] the contact with the non-philosophical” in a non-reductive manner. Fourth, the irreducibility of the non-philosophical led Hyppolite to look back, like Fichte rather than Hegel, to the question of how philosophy might find its beginning in the non-philosophical. Specifically, (and this is the last alteration), Hyppolite invoked the challenge of Marx, and asked , “if philosophy must begin as absolute discourse, then what of history and what is the beginning which starts out with a singular individual, within a society and a social class, and in the midst of struggle?” This invocation of the “singular individual” also refers to the fixed point of French philosophy throughout the twentieth century, the irreducibility of the free individual, which had always stood as the fundamental obstacle to a French appropriation of Hegel’s thought.'  

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/opinion/22brooks.html?_r=1&hp

Does one ever tire of the jottings of America’s premier spokesman for bourgeois heterosexual conformity, in all of its manifestations, including a penchant for the reification of the benighted tribalism known as the Abrahamic Tradition? Mr. Brooks is the apologist that propagandists could only hope for, as he frames his latest essay with the title of ‘Creed or Chaos’, an absolutely false dichotomy but a politically useful trope, in the lexicon of the professional religious apologist. Do you ever wonder why atheists become militant, obnoxious, insulting in their addressing of the dull-witted apologetics of rationalizers like Mr. Brooks? Mr. Brooks considers himself as an enlightened person, perhaps even superior to lesser beings, who do not share his religious enthusiasms: as a guide to actions in all areas of life. Now the bloody history of the Abrahamic Tradition is there for all to examine, if they will. Yet Mr. Brooks manages, like most of his fellow travelers, to focus on the very carefully chosen bits that emphasize ‘tolerance’ rather than the actuality of the authoritarian male abusing his power in the name of whatever ‘God’ is expressive of a necessary and demonstrable opportunism. In Mr. Brooks’  worldview the choices are simplistic in the extreme, almost like elementary arithmetic. Let me state my prejudice forthrightly, the American male heterosexual is utterly incapable of comprehending the notion of nuance in any of its permutations

Queer Atheist.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gop-sends-in-a-marine-for-education-reform/2011/04/19/AFsQaMEE_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

One thing The Great Will (TGW) cannot resist  is the heady perfume of the jackboot, it provides a frisson that suffuses his latest essay titled ‘The GOP sends in a Marine for education reform’. And the object of TGW’s latest Political Romance is Rep. John Kline, a Minnesota Republican with 25 years in the Marine Corps and on his fifth term as a congressman. But Rep. Kline is no mere means to an end, but a friendly witness, for TGW’s  attack on Public Education and Teachers Unions as the bearers of the mantle of political obstructionism, and a pernicious self-seeking, self-aggrandizing politics of civic irresponsibility: even of an unseemly display of public immorality, framed in the inimitable Political Theology of Conservatism. It is a fight between moral good, Rep. Kline, and the inherent evil of the modern Public Sector Union, teachers, in this case. TGW likes to work the most oblique angles of the latest policy questions, made fully congruent with his  ideological belief, so as to appear more deeply knowledgeable than even his political confreres.  And his rhetorical frame embraces one of consistent themes of The American Political Melodrama, David verses Goliath , albeit re-imagined as a visionary congressman  attempts to reform a sclerotic, malfeasant  bureaucracy under the  banner of ‘Education Reform.’