StephenKMackSD's Blog

Great quote from the obit:
'For Mr. Granger, the live audience was what made theater superior to filmmaking. “I love getting laughs,” he said in an interview in 1982, in the midst of a substantial run as a replacement Sidney Bruhl in “Deathtrap” on Broadway. “Next to sex, laughs are the best things in the world.” '

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-dark-side-of-andrew-roberts-1765229.html

Thank you to two posters at Truthdig: Inherit The Wind and monthofsundays for the link to Johann Hari’s indispensable article on the British Historian Andrew Roberts.  Now Pretty Boy Reactionary has a friend and helpmate, who also can help fan the dead embers of the once blazing fire of the British Empire:  issuing lengthy tracts, rationalizing the necessary bloodletting attendant upon the care and maintenance of those necessary outposts of British Civilization. Below is a link to Mr. Robert’s latest effort at the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703529004576160371482469358.html?mod=WSJ_article_related

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-03-29/obamas-speech-presented-his-vision-of-american-exceptionalism/

My American Political Theology is better than your American Political Theology might be a better title for these hasty jottings of Cogitating Peter (CP). It echoes of a schoolyard taunt. How many times will be treated to 'patriotic thinkers' falling into political line with the current occupant of the White House? We have spent our political/moral capital on Afghanistan and Iraq, not to speak of our young people in uniform and our national Treasury. What form of institutional thuggery have we not tolerated in the name of American Interest, in the name of our sub rosa Empire? Even when a just cause presents itself to our vision: we are trapped by our own mendacity and bad faith!

I first read a review of  the book Newman’s Unquiet Grave in the December 23, 2010 New York Review of Books, that was both interesting, even challenging by Eamon Duffy. I read the review twice and then purchased the book. I identify as queer and was interested, even curious about Newman’s platonic romances with men. Thinking on the possibility of other forms of human relations outside the, now, usual frames of the late 20^th Century America. Continue reading →

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-03-20/niall-ferguson-obamas-indecision-about-libya/

We know two things about Pretty Boy Reactionary (PBR) that he is a cultivated gentleman of the eighteenth century and that he has, like most of his colleagues on the right, a fascination, even a romance with men and women of resolute political action. One could interpret that as an expression of an unconcealed flirtation with the jackboot. One can also interpret the long quotation from Macbeth as evidence of his cultivated sensibility. Who need he convince of his status as Philosophe? But this is mere introduction to a matter of grave political import: Why did President Obama delay in his aid to the Libyan rebels? Is the President’s irresolution a sign of political weakness?  One finds the answers to these pertinent partisan questions to be predictable, at the least. A quotation from the essay is demonstrative:

‘Obama, a novice in foreign affairs, is a president without a strategy. Once a critic of American military intervention in the Middle East, once a skeptic about the chances of democratizing the region, he now finds himself with a poisoned chalice in each hand. In one there are the dregs of the last administration’s interventions: military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan that he is eager to wind down. In the other is a freshly poured draft of his own making.’

A  possible response to this set of conjectures is that the blind actions of ‘History’ has filled one of the President’s cups, without defending or attacking his ‘irresoluteness’, as argued by PBR. Yet, the honeyed tone of his council, to the President, is laced with a palpable irony, even a certain unconcealed political malice.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?hp

Here in the good gray New York Times, the American paper of record, is a report that will warm the hearts of all the, now, sub rosa Freemarketeers: in vivid detail we are presented with compelling evidence of the machinations of  one particular corporate citizen. GE will pay no taxes for the year 2010, in fact, it will claim a tax credit of $3.2 billion. Compare the average American household in 2006 paid 20.7% in federal taxes. The Supreme Court has granted corporations the status of persons ,in law, it appears that one of these ‘corporate persons’ is through manipulation and bad faith not living up to its civic responsibilities. Can anyone feign surprise at this example of ‘creative accounting’ blended with ‘aggressive lobbying’ and just plain political opportunism by a member of the House of Representatives? That would be naïve in the extreme! The argued social/political responsibility of the ‘Free Market’ is an absolutely unknown, un-experienced actuality. In fact, the cultivation of civic republican virtue and the imperatives of ‘Capitalism Unbound’ are antithetical!  Although , ‘The Free Market’ was trumpeted as indispensable to the realization of human freedom, by the likes of the false prophet Milton Friedman, and his acolytes and various intellectual  frauds, some employed by the New York Times as ‘Editorial Writers’ and ‘Opinion Writers’. ‘The Free Market’ concept is now in eclipse, but fear not, for the forces that brought you the Great Depression and the World Wide Market Collapse of 2008 will bide their time, until the Historical Memory of the populous has faded sufficiently, to make the concept of the “Free Market’ again palatable to  an audience hungry for something ‘new’ on the political scene; not resembling the disfavored ‘New Deal Nostalgia’.