StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/03/08/AR2011030803149.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

‘In September 1941, Japan's leaders had a question for Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto: Could he cripple the U.S. fleet in Hawaii? Yes, he said. Then he had a question for the leaders: But then what?

Following an attack, he said, "I shall run wild considerably for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence" after that. Yamamoto knew America: He had attended Harvard and been naval attaché in Japan's embassy in Washington. He knew Japan would be at war with an enraged industrial giant. The tide-turning defeat of Japan's navy at the Battle of Midway occurred June 7, 1942 – exactly six months after Pearl Harbor.’

The grand historical frame is a habitual practice of The Great Will (TGW) and he never tires of demonstrating his ‘expertise’ on all questions, with an emphasis on a close reading of the relevant historical precedent. Were any of his readers in doubt as to his self-regard or his ability to find historical analogies to the present, to unprecedented historical events? Though these events induce an actual perceptual vertigo in citizens who do not partake of the ‘clarifying wisdom’ available to our thinker.

The idea of a no fly zone over Libya and the practice of that military operation are fraught with risks, which TGW presents with his usual dispassion:  a simple argument that a country waging war on two fronts in two different parts of the empire is overcommitted ,or at the least, its’ resources are leveraged to a maximum. TGW offers a set of questions and conjectures that are compelling. Could these arguments, in part, have made a difference in the decisions leading to the wars we are now fruitlessly waging or have reached stalemate?   Will the forces of an interventionist foreign policy be moved, convinced by his forceful set of arguments? Is it possible that an empire and its thinkers be moved by the persuasive analysis presented by one of their own? Is that enough to curtail military intervention, and let the people of Libya make their own history? Is the painful prospect of American passivity, as political actor, too much for neo-imperial policy makers? The list of imperatives as presented by TGW might have been asked in the matters of Afghanistan and Iraq: these questions were, nor are, less valuable or germane. The salient question of all this argument and solemn conjecture is; at whom is he aiming this essay, Citizens or Policy Makers? Will this column play its part as mere introduction, after the indecisive policy decisions of the Obama administration, a touchstone with which to abuse and subvert confidence in the leadership of the President and his advisers?      

“In order to have a society in which public issues can be openly and vigorously debated,it is not necessary to allow the brutalization of innocent victims.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/opinion/08brooks.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB

Cockeyed Platonist (CP) posits ‘The New Humanism’, whatever that might be. How does he define his re-imagination of this concept? Is it both theory and practice? The answers will astound! As CP seeks to redefine ‘Humanism’ in a newspaper column! His reductivism, not to speak of his intellectual aspiration, is astounding. Thousands of years and the greatest thinkers of the Ages have attempted this act of definition: remaining at the point of failed, although noble, attempts. But have no fear a newspaper deadline has, here, a metaphysical weight that drives our thinker into new breathtaking insights, not available to past, nay, even present thinkers, writers and cogitators on the existential condition of Homo sapiens. Here are the players in CP’s sketch, a Dramaturge’s notes toward an Intellectual Melodrama:

Human Capital

The French Enlightenment

The English Enlightenment

David Hume, Adam Smith (although neither is mentioned, their ideas are present and central)

Attunement

Equipoise

Metis

Sympathy

Limerance

Sigmund Freud

I would assert that the answer to his own question bears all his intellectual and moral weight, but questions remain in the reader’s mind: has he answered any question, even his own? I will let you be the judge. I hesitate to prejudice my readers as to right or wrong, success or failure in our thinker’s attempts to do what no other mortal has ever done, in a stunningly brief 802 words. Bravo!