StephenKMackSD's Blog

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011106068.html

There will be no careful platonic abstractions as in David Brooks (CP) or the self-cultivated superiority and contempt of the Great Will: for the Good Doctor (GD) is through and through a Neo-Conservative zealot, incapable of anything but the killer instinct, in matters political. War is reducible to the idea, the reality of friend/enemy, a durable political insight of Carl Schmitt. And here that lesson is not lost on the GD. In his column he is settling old scores with his enemies, and the list is long on transgressors; who might dare to question rhetoric as related to actual behavior, rational or irrational, to persons rational or irrational.  That GD lacks a certain intellectual finesse is given a full exposition: GD never misses an opportunity to attempt to annihilate his opponents, for failing to recognize his exceptional nature, of being and thought. The myopia, even the bad faith, exercised by his opponents is the subject of his extreme sanction; one might argue that he cannot emancipate himself from his faith in his unwavering moral/political rightness.     

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/opinion/11brooks.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss 

Cockeyed Platonist (CP) loves the great overarching abstraction: they make the world of randomness ,of the sometimes irrational somehow understandable, intellectually manageable; there is an orderliness of intellectual constructs that the human world sometimes, but not always demonstrates. But the events of Tucson have thrown that orderly pattern of explanation into the chaotic province of the irrational. CP finds the human world of chaos manageable only by constructing his fables of explanation outside the dimensions of time and space, in the more comfortable world of cerebral constructs. But most importantly today his fellow conservatives stand falsely accused of a contributory negligence, regarding their eliminationists political rhetoric, as contributing to and exacerbating  a political atmosphere of  toxicity : although CP will argue against any direct causation, or any demonstrable link.  He, of course, is offended by this obvious untruth and seeks to blunt the attack of his political rivals with a highly rationalized intellectual argument.  Can there be a direct relation between the level, the pitch, of political discourse and human action? CP argues against such a relation, as any good partisan would. Is the demonstrable rabble rousing of the Tea Party, the Minute Men and Neo-Nazis in the Tucson area connectible to the violent actions of an irrational individual? Continue reading →

One is uncomfortably and forcefully reminded of Hegel in the Phenomenology of the Spirit( #178-196) of the sections on Lordship and Bondage and even the interminable examination/analysis by Alexandre Kojeve of the slave/master dialectic, while reading Mr. Will’s column of January 9th. Although Mr. Will’s brief precise of the human aspiration to explanation, of the seemingly inexplicable, random, extreme human behavior, in his column, ‘The charlatans response to the tragedy in Tucson’ is intellectually foreshortened: deformative at the least, a vulgar burlesque, a version of the human search for ‘explanations’ pitched to his readers philosophical prejudices, if not their pretensions to an intellectual sophistication; that is non-existent in both his reader and he as writer . But that merely acts as rhetorical frame to his rationalization of his own parties self-indulgent and careless employment of eliminationist rhetoric; thinking not one moment, of its consequences, but merely an example of a careless political opportunism. Certainly this is absolutely in line with the post World  War ll trajectory of the Republican Party, engaging at every opportunity in hysteria mongering: Nixon, Mundt, McCarthy and their fellow travelers were active and effective; to deny or ignore this political actuality is to ignore history. But most assuredly the political climate of Tucson is the most salient issue here, and that being the toxic confluence of Tea Party, Minute Men and Neo-Nazi’s: without that location in political time and space the incident remains inert,inexplicable. So it might be best to avoid mention of that very real meeting of these politically volatile forces, and focus on the more diffuse national manifestations of this rhetoric, therefore rendering a rational sounding defensibility within the realm of the possible.