StephenKMackSD's Blog

das Man  (the They) the internalized external ,the guide to conduct and thought about self and other, albeit in a state of blind obedience and absolute un-reflective conformity to social convention, as argued by Heidegger: but if Dasein is, in fact, a questioning being, a being questioning it own existential situation, searching for authenticity or simply questioning its own nature, the questioning of the internalized value of everydayness is an inevitability, and so Heidegger’s not so benign description of das Man . The super-ego of Freud is its corollary. But the stage is set for the search for authenticity, prima facie, by the very existence of Dasein as being. Heidegger makes das Man, very nearly, a paranoid fantasy of sinister control by the other: this being fully congruent with his Political Romanticism and its war on civic republican virtue as practiced in the West.

You recall the ‘Dollar a Year Man’ from several generations ago? The concept has been re-engineered for the New Century, re-imagined by one Matt Miller. Mr. Miller and his New Democratic allies have reworked the Dollar A Year Man into the ‘500,000 Dollar a  Year Man’ the friendly, engaging bureaucrat that will manage the affairs of the populous, in the capacity of a pseudo-philosopher king – Plato reworked for the advantage of  a select class of benevolent  American public intellectuals. Political paternalism is the key construct here, framed as an, almost, ‘pro bono publico’: an idea as purely self serving; synonymous with particular instances of political opportunism.

Mr. Miller is also a proponent of the political notion of the ‘Radical Center’, a borrowing from Emancipated Reporter (Thomas Friedman). The Radical Center is a public relations gambit, to rescue the ‘image’ of the Center from stodgy and unimaginative, to somehow active, dynamic and alive with the ‘New’ in political ideas and practice. The Center could be defined as the meeting place where compromise is made: the imperative of the political. But Mr. Miller is immersed in ‘image management’; he loses sight of the necessary compromises of political life, as a demand of the exercise of civic responsibility and public virtue.

The casual observer of the American Political Scene must come to the conclusion that all the Pundits that infect the media today, never, ever go away. No matter how muddleheaded their prognostications, their support for endless war and its domestic corollary constitutional usurpation.

From his perch on ABC The Great Will (George F. Will) sours the airways with his maladroit imitation of Edmund Burke as moral/political arbiter of our great national moment:never letting an opportunity pass to genuflect in the direction of the unenlightened oligarchs and political Know-nothings that now crowd out any voice approaching public reason, in the Republican Party.

Charles Krauthammer has succeeded over a career of a quarter century, as one of the many American Likudniks. A      man who never fought a war, but with an appetite for blood that rivals any vampire. He likes to make war against every manifestation of 'Socialism' that he deems to exist as actual, as real. His rhetoric is always overheated and he is given to a style of argument that successfully mimics shouting. The power of the raised voice is one of his core beliefs.

Emancipated Reporter (Thomas Friedman) is a writer and thinker always on the hunt for a serviceable idea, perhaps because he is bereft of any of his own. The inventor of such memorable phrases as 'suck on this': he channels the spirit of Borscht Belt Comedian, a much missed character in our national life: he was, at least, funny and in his way wise. Walter Lippmann he is not!