StephenKMackSD's Blog

Let us boldly re-imagine, in the spirit of Richard Rorty, this maxim of the great Donne as, any persons death diminishes me, for I am human and cannot ignore my stake in the world of my fellow creatures. How would this apply to the death of Mr. Richard Holbrooke the American diplomat? His death will be old news by next week, hardly a startling observation. So, the question is when do we have an honest forthright discussion of his record as public man and American advocate? Do we engage in the un-reflective hagiography dictated by our homage to custom? For an antidote to this politically respectable chatter, this trivializing chatter, I have provided a link to Professor Stephen Zunes’ enlightening article at the Huffington Post.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/richard-holbrooke-represe_b_796447.html  

Definition: Charles Krauthammer = A Neo-Conservative writer and theorist,  who worships at his inner shrine to these three deities: Nihilism, Chaos and Strife. These are the gods of masculine privilege and power, without mitigation. Mr. Krauthammer is a physician who, in practice, finds the Hippocratic injunction against doing harm unnecessary baggage, in the quest to annul the liberal ascendancy and to enforce the American will to power, as part of our historical destiny.   

Definition: George F. Will = In the weedy field of The American Republic stands the singular effloresce that is Mr. Will. He presents himself as the channeled spirit of Edmund Burke, the great English parliamentarian. Burke was a man and a thinker with a largeness of spirit and humanity, a defender of hereditary power as demonstrative of an inherent benevolence. Although Mr. Will has never demonstrated the breadth and depth of the Burkian political/moral sensibility, he continues to strike politic poses garnished with the apt quotation from his intellectual master, without, in the least, demonstrating any coherent understanding of Burke, the man, the moralist, the politician, except as a handy rhetorical prop to enrich his political nay saying.