Why isn’t the media wetting itself wondering who McCain’s VP will be? Obama’s VP choice had them in a sweat for days. How come they aren’t camped outside Joe Lieberman’s & Mitt Romney’s houses? I am praying that McCain will exhibit stupidity “of biblical proportions” & choose one of these two goobers.
Monthly Archives: August 2008
It Was Only a Joke
That’s what the radical right always says when somebody actually calls them out. Classic bully behavior. But in any case, how fucking delusional can you be? These people have a pretty exalted view of their place in the world & their relationship to the divine; but then I knew that, I grew up with the creeps.
The Facts about John McCain
Kathy G. produces the facts, with sources, about John McCain’s life. It is ironic, but not at all surpriosing, that the utterly phoney McCain has to attack the authenticity of a person who has actually had to work for a living.
Dogwood
When I look raise my eyes above my computer monitor & look out the window of my study I can see the branches of a dogwood tree with upright clusters of dark blue berries. (This is the tree the warbler I mentioned a couple of days ago has been hanging out.) When the a shaft of sunlight shines on the dogwood the red stems look like they are filled with pulsing blood. Again & again the world reminds me lately that I am not the only living thing or even the most important. Such human bias is inevitable, I suppose, & is a bias no doubt shared by warblers & chipmunks & crows; still, human being, dasein, carries with it the potential for imagination, for ecstasy, for seeing outside ourselves. Not many people cultivate this aspect of their nature & even those who think about such things (disreputable poets, mostly) rarely have the ability to sustain the perspective for long. I’ve long been reluctant to grant human consciousness any superiority over various other forms of consciousness — certainly we have no moral claim that reaches any higher than a crow’s or dogwood’s — but there is, I think, the difference granted us by our language: the ability to imagine others’ minds. That is, we have the ability to entertain the reality of other minds even if we cannot fully understand or enter into them. This seems to be our gift, though we may share it with the crows. In any case, the crows’ dasein would have to be different from our own: they can fly.
Two Bad Wars
Going to war in Iraq was such an obviously bad choice I’m still amazed that some otherwise rational people supported it. The choice to go to war in Afghanistan was — to me, at least — more difficult & I initially supported it, with reservations. (Based mostly on my sense of the deep tarpit of evil at the heart of the Bush administration.) I am now convinced that the decision to go to war in Afghanistan was as bad as the decision to go to war in Iraq. (In retrospect, at least, I don’t agree with Quiggin that the Afghan war was inevitable & understandable because the US needed to “lash out.”) This was all brought into sharp focus for me while reading this post by John Quiggen at Crooked Timber & the responses to it. I recommend the discussion:
Perhaps with more competent management the Taleban could have been defeated by now, and Al Qaeda put out of business in the region. But they haven’t been and it is time to admit that a military victory over the Taleban insurgency is now unlikely whether or not it might have been achieved in the past. As with the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, it’s time to look harder at offering both a part in the political process and plenty of cash to those willing to abandon the insurgency.
Quiggen begins by noting that things have been going “better than expected” in Iraq over the last year & this is the narrative that the Bush administration & the McCain campaign have carefully built around “the surge,” with the implication that they had been right all along. It’s an attractive & even natural narrative & one that is hard to counter, even though it is untrue. Things are “better” in Iraq, compared to what? Police recruits are still regularly targeted, markets are still bombed, many Iraqis still can’t return to their old neighborhoods because they have been ethnically segregated. And what do we have to show for the effort? Thousands of American dead & an unstable country that is concluding oil contracts with China & Russia even as they give us a timeline for getting out. So, even if one were to approve Dick Cheney’s realpolitik approach, we’re fucked.
This is going to be the main problem faced by the Obama campaign* over the next two months — what is the alternative narrative (and how do you advance it) in the face of such an attractive although untrue story? The “we’re fucked” narrative above does not play to the electorate’s predilection for chest-thumping self-aggrandizement & sentimental militarism.
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*Note: Despite my various disappointments with Obama’s politics, the alternative is simply too grim to contemplate. Watching closely over the last three weeks or so, it is possible to predict that the first & most pressing foreign policy problem that a McCain administration would take up would be the question of whether to go to war first with Russia or Iran.