I don’t think the administration would blink twice about abandoning the entire Iraq adventure if sunk costs were the only issue. But the stakes are obviously a lot higher than that. Putting empire ahead of democracy (bases ahead off security and stability) would seem like a recipe for a even bigger disaster down the road. But walking away could leave an Iraq in chaos — or, even worse from an Israeli-American point of view, an Iraq that slides steadily deeper into Iran’s orbit.
Back to Main
July 1, 2005
WB: Democracy or Empire?
Comments
But DeA,
Its good to have a little Penn&Teller around, amusing even though we know its sleight of hand, or word I guess.
Posted by: anna missed | Jul 7 2005 5:07 utc | 201
razor- you’re thinking of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
Here’s a cached article related to her book Mother Nature.
Her work is somewhat different than you remember.
and just to note…her reserach concerns one type of primate that is less genetically-related to humans than bonobos or common chimpanzees or gorillas.
here’s one review of her work in Mother Nature:
What is the greatest shortcoming of Hrdy’s text on Mother Nature? It is this: the failure to indict the theistic/patristic cultures of modern Homo sapiens, which keeps the female of the species unequal and subordinated to the power and authority of the male of the species, particularly with respect to the free and autonomous expression of her sexuality. The role of the theistic/patristic religions in this process are the great enemies of woman qua woman and woman as mother and ultimately man, himself–as allofather and egalitarian.
…patriarchy at its most basic is male control over female sexuality that becomes more “natural” as it is reinforced by religious beliefs and by economic systems.
in other words, the abortion issue is an issue of patriarchy not because of when a blastocyte becomes a human, but because there is no social/economic structure in place that makes it possible for females to raise children as single mothers in a way that is beneficial to her offspring…limiting the amt of children one has is the only logical solution to a Hobbesian social system.
patriarchy makes it impossible for the female to be honored because all reward is geared toward a male strategy that “abandons” children in order to not be burdened with the economic consequences of raising children, rather than creating a world in which childcare and work co-exist…in other words, those bonobo mothers with their sons on their backs are also out there foraging, not sitting around eating bonbons and watching soaps in their hermetically sealed suburban harem of one.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 7 2005 5:33 utc | 202
Deanander: I don’t know what “more to the left” means today, but historically people making the critique of Marxism I have been making have been considered further to the left by the Marxists. c.f. Lenin “Infantile Marxism” and Trotsky “Their morals and ours” since you want footnotes. These critiques, as I have noted, far pre-date the “right wing wurlitzer”, but I think Razor is right and there is no percentage in discussion here. I will point out as a final note that all the best lies rely on a kernel of truth and someone who can write something like imho razor suffers from a common contemporary deficiency of discourse: thinking that any idea s/he disagrees with or dislikes can be made to disappear merely by speaking of it with shallow and unfootnoted contempt, mocking its specialised vocabulary with antischolastic glee, and generally being rude. and, since I am fatigued by reading this lengthy round of captious provocations and your doggedly serious responses thereto, I will add: rather boring. might, I repeat, might, want to think about whether complaints about elitism are totally invented or not.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 7 2005 13:38 utc | 203
Sun Tzu – The Art of War
When in difficult country, do not encamp…. Do not
linger in dangerously isolated positions.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 7 2005 14:04 utc | 204
The above was me, and yes it is directed to citizen k.
ck, you often purport to be offering sincere and concerned critiques of how the left screws up American public discourse by sucking up all the critical oxygen. Yet when DeA notes how your rhetoric dovetails nicely with rightwing rhetorical guides on how to smear the left unjustly but effectively, you avoid debate.
Posted by: citizen | Jul 7 2005 14:17 utc | 205
The above was me, and yes it is directed to citizen k.
ck, you often purport to be offering sincere and concerned critiques of how the left screws up American public discourse by sucking up all the critical oxygen. Yet when DeA notes how your rhetoric dovetails nicely with rightwing rhetorical guides on how to smear the left unjustly but effectively, you avoid debate.
Posted by: citizen | Jul 7 2005 14:18 utc | 206
@ citizen k – Amazing that all those immigrants were willing to come here and face this xenophobia after having enjoyed the blessing of more advanced civilizations.
well you’re not really very deep then, mate.
Posted by: b real | Jul 7 2005 14:52 utc | 207
citizen:
What’s to debate? A “left” that finds a 0.01% market share for “Democracy Now” to be a validation of smarter audience, a left that produces tracts as densely worded and as empty of content as the Marxist academics cited by Slothrop (“I say, it’s paradoxically the very reified bullshit that fetishes a tenure track and publications in Memoires of Journals of Null Dominance that assures, ironically, the blah blah”), a Democratic party that cannot produce a candidate who can be as truthfully plain-spoken and non-condescending as FDR (who was more upper class than Kerry) and so on – has a serious problem. The ability of the right to sieze on this “cultural elitism” to sell their economic program, as documented by Frank is painfully obvious. It’s easy, although taboo, to apply class analysis to the leading groups that make up the US left-liberal spectrum and get a sense that their “methods of class reproduction” to use the stupid jargon, pushes them to develop precisely the informal guild structure one sees in practice. It’s also possible to react defensively and insist that any criticism is in fact an argument for right wing ideologies, but the dismal objective status of the world, the triumph of fascism in the guise of empire, market-worship and fundamentalism and the utter absence of popular resistance is an unmaskable indication that the left is doing something very wrong – unless just defending its own class situation is its objective.
b real: No doubt.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 7 2005 15:05 utc | 208
densely worded and as empty of content as the Marxist academics cited by Slothrop
c’mon. Even you don’t believe “intellectual” social critique is the cause of “liberal” political impotence.
You’re freaking out.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 7 2005 15:27 utc | 209
An attempt to focus and simplify some of this discussion:
The Rove/Cheney/WaPo/NYT machine has succeeded so far in emasculating the libruls by rigged elections, intimidation and blackmail.
Add to that some mind control techniques that are hard for Joe Blow to comprehend, and you have created a world in which the truth does not matter.
I am praying that Fitzgerald is old-fashioned and truly immune to threats from the machine, but I’ll have to see it to believe it.
Posted by: rapt | Jul 7 2005 16:06 utc | 210
The “elitist” academism you assume exists here at MoA is probably a partial fantasy. What you imply by this continuous accusation is that bluecollar folks couldn’t possibly waste their time by reading “densely worded” critique. This view of yours is class contempt, ck.
If it were not for some strange detours in my lifecourse, I would not have obtained effete advanced degrees. But, I would be banging nails and reading marx. I’m sure of that.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 7 2005 16:09 utc | 211
What you imply by this continuous accusation is that bluecollar folks couldn’t possibly waste their time by reading “densely worded” critique.
ok, thou not blue collar it’s difficult for me to keep up w/ this, but am i trying to following it, hell yes. i have been reading and rereading this thread for days
Posted by: annie | Jul 7 2005 17:26 utc | 212
What you imply by this continuous accusation is that bluecollar folks couldn’t possibly waste their time by reading “densely worded” critique.
ok, thou not blue collar it’s difficult for me to keep up w/ this, but am i trying to following it, hell yes. i have been reading and rereading this thread for days. this is not posting, i’m trying again, hope it doesn’t duplicate
Posted by: annie | Jul 7 2005 17:28 utc | 213
You just have to be very very patient today Annie with the posting time delay thingie.
Posted by: rapt | Jul 7 2005 18:11 utc | 214
@ck, I’m the first person on either side of my family who ever went to university… for a BA only. and I spent some of my earlier years railing at, and publicly mocking, the kind of PoMo navel-gazing and JIR-worthy obfuscation which you satirise fairly ably above. I am not, as it so happens, an academic — merely the hired help for academics, and not in the humanities at that — and this tendency in the academy was one reason for avoiding graduate studies and working in the hard sciences (paying the rent was also an important consideration).
in my own writing I’ve always tried to stick to what I consider the most important aspect of the dialectic: material conditions, or (roughly) “show me the money.” this however doesn’t make me scorn or mistrust those who wade deeply into the formal literature and bring back exotic specimens, and I find slothrop’s attempts to explain how theory fits the facts to be interesting and relevant — even though I am not a Marxist, I just play one on MoA 🙂
my point I suppose is that one should not assume that literacy unerringly reveals class background or academic creds/rank. one of the best-read, most hyperliterate friends I have spent his working years as a brakeman with Union Pacific organising and trying to integrate the union; another terrifyingly well-read fellow started out working-class and Army, and taught himself pretty much the whole canon of marxist/socialist lit by solitary study during the long moments of boredom during deployment. autodidacts are everywhere! very little of my current geopolitical knowledge base was gained “in school” and this may be true for more barflies than one realises…
I was once copy-editing a volume of short stories for a friend who came from a dirt-poor Wisconsin farm family. one of the characters, in a semi-autobio narrative, talked about “preparing” the potatoes for the evening meal. I flagged it and later asked whether this oddly formal usage was appropriate for the dialect of the farm family, whether it sounded natural. my friend looked at me sharply and said, “Just because we were poor didn’t mean we didn’t try to speak properly.”
—————————
meanwhile I have been thinking about Agre and the conclusion I reach is not that razor and ck are on the wingnut payroll or that the Mighty Wurlitzer has managed to synchronise their brain rhythms like ITT [M L’Engle, ITT is the totalitarian force dominating the planet Camazotz]… but that the wingnuts’ resort to the word games mentioned by Agre is similar to tactics that anyone from other political positions might use precisely because of the Enlightenment consensus that they are trying to unravel and destroy.
the Enlightenment consensus plus subsequent democratic talking points: elitism is bad, populism is a force for good, aristocracy is not to be trusted, common folks are the backbone of the nation, authoritarian religious hierarchies are bad, privacy and personal autonomy are good… and so anyone seeking to mark an opponent’s point of view as negative may seek to associate it with “religious oppression” (They persecuted Galileo!), intrusive government meddling, elitist condescension (They think they’re the aristos), etc.
it’s fascinating how the wingnut noise machine can do this while being run by some of the richest people in the permanent overclass, and while playing footsie with very authoritarian religious extremists. one reason they can get away with it I fancy is that the religious metaphors are interpreted as anti-Catholic (the oppressive religious establishment of the Old Era) to which many Protestant denoms (specially the holy-roller types) still imagine themselves to be a fresh, rebellious, closer-to-god alternative. so the religious metaphors may not be taken by the wingnuts’ evangelical supporters as anti-Church or anti-Dominionist so much as anti-Catholic (just a guess). [it’s also kind of amusing historically that vitriolic anti-Catholicism and anti-Communism often coexist in the same rightwing discourse, proving that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend after all…]
so I think that the resort of the wingnuts Agre describes to anti-ecclesiastical and pseudo-populist rhetoric speaks strongly for the robustness of the post-FDR American consensus. even as they try to dismantle it in favour of a new aristocratic age, they are compelled to speak in its own metaphors…
Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 7 2005 20:13 utc | 215
Citizen K- as DeAnander knows, I’m no fan of jargon…which I just learned, btw, comes from the 13th C. in France and designated the language of “crooks, dregs and wandering itinerates devoted to begging.” –sounds like the MLA to me. 🙂
anyway, you also ignored my suggestion that you volunteer to make Democracy Now a better program, and instead simply choose to believe that money available for broadcasts has no bearing on them…but I still have to say that I enjoy DN because people, for the most part, have a chance to speak in something other than sound bites, people who do not get air time on commercial radio get heard there, and issues, not celebrity b.s. or dead white women, are featured.
I also grew up in a family in which my grandparents never had an indoor toilet. My mother left school in third grade to work and my siblings and I were the first generation to attend college.
As far as a viable candidate: Howard Dean. but he was slammed by the media for his enthusiam with his young crowd, even to this day the democratic power structure doesn’t like him, and so, even tho he was poised, imo, to change the democratic party in a grassroots way…that was not acceptable.
The dems are not the left at all. They are the middle…and some of them are the equivalent of Northeastern Republicans while others (Zell Miller) are the equivalent of Bull Conner.
Anyway, instead of complaining here about the fondness that slothrop and rgiap have for certain theoreticians, and the secret society of jargonistas, why not go out and do something to create the world you want?
That applies to all of us, of course.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 7 2005 20:38 utc | 216
Agre’s work is one of the more interesting things I’ve read lately, and I thank you for bringing it to our attention, Comrade.
What is really scary is not that these people can turn a word on its head. It’s that six months or a year later, the media is using the term, and everyone has become so used to the term being used in this way that no one objects.
Bunker Hunt’s or Georg Bush is the salt of the earth, and Jerry Brown or whover is an “elitist”.
This is powerful PR. Almost like brain-washing.
You folks take care.
Just dropped by to pick up slotrop. We’re going fishing this afternoon with Fredo Corleone.
Posted by: L. Beria | Jul 7 2005 20:59 utc | 217
The ability of the right to sieze on this “cultural elitism” to sell their economic program, as documented by Frank is painfully obvious. It’s easy, although taboo, to apply class analysis to the leading groups that make up the US left-liberal spectrum and get a sense that their “methods of class reproduction” to use the stupid jargon, pushes them to develop precisely the informal guild structure one sees in practice. It’s also possible to react defensively and insist that any criticism is in fact an argument for right wing ideologies, but the dismal objective status of the world, the triumph of fascism in the guise of empire, market-worship and fundamentalism and the utter absence of popular resistance is an unmaskable indication that the left is doing something very wrong – unless just defending its own class situation is its objective
i don’t think we can rely solely on philosophers of the past to procure solutions for the future.the same way i don’t think we can measure success w/our old models. i don’t agree the right are ‘winning’ as we are in shambles,they are just in control. and i question whether they have us ‘sold’ as i am not buying it and it’s more like they’ve shoved it down our throats or stolen the power. but the left is foraging on new ground simply because the world and globalization presents a whole new set of problems . braudels global vision of history, if applied to the future would require new questions. what is prosperity? we may not be able to survive without downsizing and changing our models.
“we started with Billmon’s observation that at least some of our Masters seem to really believe some of their theories and Annie’s note reminded me that the powerful are often as easily suckered as anyone else. How did the corporate masters of Annie’s company find themselves between pseudo-private contractors of the homeland security state and the dangerous economics of outsourcing if they are so powerful?
it’s just good cover for a little old-fashioned fraud and fornication! (billmon)
they are both the pseudo-private contractors and homeland security and have created the dangerous economics of outsourcing because they have decided the risks are worth it for the empire.
Posted by: annie | Jul 7 2005 21:25 utc | 218
slothrop
i’m banging thos nails & i think razor & citizen k would like to think that for a person like me with a hammer – everything looks like a nail
& yr correct -the most sophisticated conversations i hav here are with people the society at large marginalise from a totured man from conakry; a foreign legionnaire from bretagne &a chinese labourer from mongolia
& no difficulty is beoynd them. on the contrary we need to destroy they mystification of knowledge – not is organic mystery
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 7 2005 21:42 utc | 219
Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.
and i’m emerging from my hole to go into the sunshine and get a life for a few hrs. thanks ya’ll. tis like aschoolin fer me.
Posted by: annie | Jul 7 2005 21:43 utc | 220
@DeAnander,
Thanks for elaborating on our larger rhetorical unity of ways to criticize.
I take it this doubles as advice to refrain from criticizing blindly because we might simply end up saying the same nasty words to anyone regardless of what they’ve actually done. Critique wisely, eh?
btw – heard just this moment on a radio interview about the London bombings, “A critic is someone who comes out after the battle is over and shoots the wounded.”
guess people should watch what they say. ..
Posted by: citizen | Jul 7 2005 21:58 utc | 221