i have this desire to reach out and touch this piece. maybe it’s the appeal of physiognomy, as at least two beings manifest themselves to me. maybe it’s the relief. while i find it difficult to describe this connectivity, or even fully grasp it, this is a captivating work, anna missed, and has kept me coming back to it. thank you for sharing this w/ us.

Posted by: b real | Dec 20 2005 16:18 utc | 3

Very nice.
As for Spengler, he’s a weird fellow. I’ve read some of his other articles there, and I agree with him on some points, like the coming changes in Muslim world, or to some extent the desperate fight when war is lost that occurs so often. But he and the few insane mullahs dreaming of global theocracy and islamisation of Europe are in for a very nasty shock. They’re totally clueless. Yes, Europe is a bunch of pacifist weenies apparently; that’s because they’re fed up with internal fighting. It didn’t stop them from fighting in Algeria or Falklands.
He’s probably thinking that the French riots show that France is doomed. Well, he didn’t see the polls. And we aren’t even at the next presidential elections, which will be very nasty, I fear.
I said it before, but people shouldn’t forget that we’re speaking of some of the more ruthless and bloodthirsty people of the last 3500 years, who perfected genocide both inside and outside Europe to a point unheard of. When you’ve sent 10 mio people into gas chambers, having to deal with 25 mio emigrated Muslims isn’t that difficult. Though of course his “25 mio unemployed young Muslims” simply won’t come to Europe – who’s building its own version of the Iron curtain, or Great wall, to keep people off. And if I were he, I’d worry about the *100 mio* unemployed young Chinese, which are more likely to walk straight to Tokyo if not LA.

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Dec 20 2005 17:21 utc | 5

anna missed – I think the layers that you have added to this piece REALLY take it to another level. The two side by side would be interesting as a sort of way to see what we see according to how the world is presented to us by others.
In response to Spengler (who takes his name from a person I think was a bit…German-nationalist centric…
there is the idea of The Wisdom of Crowds. (here’s a conversation b/t the author and the the guy who wrote Blink.) It’s hard for me to accept some of this, considering history, but also possible, considering history…were the uprisings after the initial French Revolution ultimately a good thing? the terror was a response to the “wisdom of the crowds” who didn’t want what certain members of the Committees wanted?
How much of the wisdom of crowds is led by propaganda and someone else’s agenda?
anyway, here’s the idea presented as a ‘biz model.’
From a brief glance at Spengler’s article, he does mention the idea of the wisdom of crowds, but then it seems he equates Islam with war…by the idea of jihad.
This idea of jihad via Islamic fundamentalism is no different than the political position of certain sectors in America who say we were founded as a “Christian nation.” (a lie…this place wasn’t an idea of a nation for white immigrants until the Enlightenment made it possible to separate church and state and belief in a powerless “underclass” –as in not the king and court…
anyway, Islam came some 600 years after Christianity, and both are the children of Judaism…and both, as such, began to argue over their inheritance. Muhammed dreamed he flew over Jerusalem and it became a sacred place and thus the location of a Mosque…but Mecca and Medina are *the* sacred places of Islam. Muhammed’s gift to the Arabs was a system of laws and a written doctrine…the same sort of thing Judaism and Christianity, as other monotheisms, contributed to their societies…and writing down a religion makes it very different than relying on oral tradition alone.
that digression to say that history is still playing out the conflicts of those years, in many ways. The exception now is that back then, the Islamic states were more enlightened than the Christian ones, were amenable to Jews, they worked jointly to translate Greek and Latin texts and introduced them to the west via the Islamic library in Toledo…they made the Renaissance possible for Europe.
There is no inherent animosity between Muslims and Jews…or Muslims and Christians, for that matter.
To claim that jihad is the defining feature of Islam is to state that crusading is the defining feature of Christianity…well, I suppose that depends on how enlightened those religious ppl are about the meanings of their beliefs beyond the historical period in which they were formed.
Jews from the Middle East and southern Europe moved to Spain with the conquest by the Muslims and lived in peace together. With the forced conversions of Jews when Christians re-took the area, Jews fled to Poland because the king had a Jewish mistress who helped to create a sanctuary for them. From there, they spread into Germany and Russia and were no longer considered Sabra, but rather Ashkenazi, it seems, and for that reason, they are no longer acknowledged by Muslim leaders who have an easy target with Israel, to distract from the problems of their own oppressive regimes in a world in which women are no longer considered unclean and education is not to indoctrinate into warriors, in the best use of education…where education is now seen as a way to breach the walls of cultural difference with words, not weapons.
The current Islamicists, in other words, are recidivists who are hindering the spiritual and mental enrichment of their people…whether they are the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia or the current hate-mongering Iranian leader.
I agree with Emmanuel Todd, and maybe Spengler, that this is the last gasp of a dead ideology…a reactionary response to power-sharing, and a form of terror after the relative freedom of puppet govts.
As far as Israel, to me they have as much right to exist as a nation as any other nation in the middle east. None of the borders have anything to do with a “natural order” or a pre-iminent claim since they have all lived and conquered in the region for thousands and thousands of years. Where do you start? where do you stop?
Each group had its moment of imperial power and destruction of other cultures, plundering, killing, destroying…and that’s true of every culture everywhere, as far as I can see.
We have to start where we are, it seems, to create peace by considering all claims and acknowleding validity in all of them..and then work toward a solution that will have to involve compromise AND, so importantly, the willingness on all sides to agree to the right of the others to exist.
After reading Persepolis, I often wonder how many Iranians, student especially, are sick of “revolution” and anti-western diatribes. But I also know that the worst thing any western nation could do would be to “support” the students. These chanegs within nations have to come from the nations themselves.
This is why I cannot see how Bush’s plan can work out like he dreams. It will be something else in Iraq, but not what he wants.
The biggest example now, which others have noted, of the reason to respect others’ finding of their own destiny is in South America. They, not the U.S. seem to offer hope to the rest of the world at this time.
I do go on, but I am sick of the “clash of civilizations” meme as anything more than an attempt to replay the mistakes that prolonged the “dark ages” and kept perspective from western europe…and not only in art.

Posted by: fauxreal | Dec 20 2005 18:22 utc | 7

merci & merci anna missed & b

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 20 2005 20:53 utc | 9

what is happening in your country, anna missed, is beyond belief
& hidden, the bloody horrors of iraq, afghanistan & the wars to come
these crimes that they do not even attempt to hide from us -the mockery they make of man, rights & laws paraded proudly as if some perverse pantomime
the older me sd stand up & fight but today i can understand why a deanander would simply just want to leave while that possibility existed
these last 12 months we have all posted here thinking what happened the week before is the bottom & in the next week we find a new bottom & the way it is going – it appears – infinite

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Dec 21 2005 3:10 utc | 11

@Uncle $cam I have been hitting the links but like
Magorn suggested there is a bit of outrage fatigue about.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 21 2005 12:05 utc | 13

Quoting from r’giap’s linked Bloom – real food for thought:

Contemporary America is too dangerous to be laughed away, and I turn to its most powerful writers in order to see if we remain coherent enough for imaginative comprehension. Lawrence was right; Whitman at his very best can sustain momentary comparison with Dante and Shakespeare. Most of what follows will be founded on Whitman, the most American of writers, but first I turn again to Moby-Dick, the national epic of self-destructiveness that almost rivals Leaves of Grass, which is too large and subtle to be judged in terms of self-preservation or apocalyptic destructiveness.
Some of my friends and students suggest that Iraq is President Bush’s white whale, but our leader is absurdly far from Captain Ahab’s aesthetic dignity. The valid analogue is the Pequod; as Lawrence says: “America! Then such a crew. Renegades, castaways, cannibals, Ishmael, Quakers,” and South Sea Islanders, Native Americans, Africans, Parsees, Manxmen, what you will. One thinks of our tens of thousands of mercenaries in Iraq, called “security employees” or “contractors”. They mix former American Special Forces, Gurkhas, Boers, Croatians, whoever is qualified and available. What they lack is Captain Ahab, who could give them a metaphysical dimension.
Ahab carries himself and all his crew (except Ishmael) to triumphant catastrophe, while Moby-Dick swims away, being as indestructible as the Book of Job’s Leviathan. The obsessed captain’s motive ostensibly is revenge, since earlier he was maimed by the white whale, but his truer desire is to strike through the universe’s mask, in order to prove that while the visible world might seem to have been formed in love, the invisible spheres were made in fright. God’s rhetorical question to Job: “Can’st thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?” is answered by Ahab’s: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!” The driving force of the Bushian-Blairians is greed, but the undersong of their Iraq adventure is something closer to Iago’s pyromania. Our leader, and yours, are firebugs.

Posted by: citizen | Dec 21 2005 16:01 utc | 15

Thanks all for, the comments — and the links, which can be a provocative comment in themselves. Like that Bloom link, which draws upon the most significant indices as to the the american identity, and renders the conclusion beyond any doubt that the darker compulsions of america are in full bloom. And it is especially tragic and debilitating that this transformation has used american exceptionalism (whether you agree with it or not) as its Trojan horse. Which, excluding all the dire external consequencws, leaves internally, in its wake, a lifeless and spent casing, the ghost of its former pride and distinction (whether you like it or not). At this point the danger of becoming, has been eclipsed by what we have already become, in the present tense.

Posted by: anna missed | Dec 21 2005 19:37 utc | 17

just want to say that ‘absences’ here are nothing to be too concerned about – as uncle seems to be on another thread
i know that at the end of year it would be surprising if we did not feel intellectual, moral & physical exhaustion
& espêcially b & all the others who really do the work of linking & it is a work, for me a substantial work – it directly feeds my day to day practice
like beq – the quietness sometimes – especially after moments of fury or confronted as we are often by the sordid scandals of this administration – is also a kind of comfort -your presences – those too of deanander & outraged – feed me, constantly
& for that i give thanks & know i am in your debt
(to everyone’s no doubt boredom with the subject i am at work on a meditation of mr dylan for moon)

Posted by: r’giap | Dec 21 2005 23:07 utc | 19