Wednesday, 10 December, 2003

Lights out (take 2) I want to take a moment and revisit the post I wrote last evening. One problem with trying to finish posts late at night is that you don't always nail things down the way you thought. I had in mind three types of conservatives. The type I saw growing up: TV bigots reflected in the media from Hollywood, or from around the corner in South Boston. Even down at the end of my own street. This sort of dull reactive conservative always struck as being a day late and a dollar short. Later in college I met some of the second type. The type Berube writes about in the Chronicle article. Brighter, far more outspoken and possessed of an enormous staggering sense of entitlement they seemed only able to identify in others. Happy tutor is talking about a third type. On Political Visuals and the Decay of Lying He is talking about those who stayed in higher education for the longer haul. The layers of post-graduate education. Who absorbed the manner and methods of post modern criticism, the critisism of the new left. Those who do not find a place in the walls of acadame, find themselves left beyond with a very particular way of viewing the world. Government and Politics at Maryland, having decided not to hire Bertell Ollman to chair the department, didn't traffic much along postmodern lines. It was at the point of asking my professor what ought to be looked into along the line of modern thinkers, that he indicated I would be better off not going down that road, that I would find no answers to any genuine questions there and suggested reading Allan Bloom and sticking with Plato and Rousseau. Its true I never finished school. On the other hand, I never switched majors. Those who (unlike me) stepped off (or is it 'off along') the road to serfdom find themselves in a position, situated to fill an critical niche role, marshalling or managing and neutralizing this market place of idea's, no one is better situated to read the signs and aspirations of the people in massed multitudes, to show them what can be regarded as meaningfull, even as meaning as a catagory lies hollowed, When social justice lies flat on the table as empty as it is spoken of, because the values that fill it, community and obligation. Obligations external, internal, and obligation to the good. All these things that never seem to have the solidity, clear shape or utility as does privilege. 11:53:09 PM    comment [];trackback []; Redistricting There is a good gloss on the current wave of aggressive redistricting at the Tom Paine site TOMPAINE.com - The Gerrymander Moment. The Supreme Court has a chance to take a pass at this today with a case out of Pennsylvania Vieth v. Jubelirir. NPR also did a piece on this on Morning Edition today. 10:58:18 AM    comment [];trackback []; Lights Out. I read through Happy Tutors post Postmodern Neocon Supermen with interest. I read it last Saturday and have been trying to focus on it since. We draw such a nice straight line, clear and dark from the Greek democracies and the Greek demos, through to our day that we believe that it is all part of one obvious continuous narrative. The story of democracy and the hardy band of democratic stalwarts who have nurtured it through history, on the banks of the Tiber in Cato's day (and presumably in Domitian's as well), on the common green of a thousand english villages. The reality is that while the idea of democracy - the open society - may have existed as an idea, along with a range of opinions about it, all along. The modern democratic structures and institutions of our democratic republics (us and whoever we admit to the club) owe more to the compromises and adjustments attendant to the emergence of mass societies in the 18th and 19th centurys. Polities having 10s and 100s of millions of subjects required adjustments. A body of individuals possessing special skills and knowledge were needed to steer these ships of state through the technological revolutions. A marketplace of ideas was opened to the quicker bourgeois to effect this and by the force of amorphous opinion and gradually increasing sufferage, a normative reflection, from this group onto themselves, they forced a competitive vision of the state, to that of the operators of the state itself. The battleground of this struggle (and lets go ahead and call it a struggle) are those means the people use to share and exchange information and attitude. The marketplace of ideas in both its material (the media) and intrapersonal planes. I use intrapersonal to try to capture both the sense of the ideas and theories we group our reason and experience under; and the manner, symbols and representations we use to communicate them. Before this current administration pushed its neoconservative vision and cast of exemplars on me my thoughts on neoconservatives were limited to the Young Republicans I encountered on campus through the mid 80's and 90's1, and tales of similar sorts holding court at Dartmouth. I didn't know much about these people, but I could see their intense envy of the passion and (apparent) effectiveness of the new left and its historical echoes. I had a teacher at Maryland, Charles Butterworth, who was the only teacher there I ever paid any attention to, or took more than one class from. He urged me at one point to read a book written by his mentor at Chicago called Closing of the American Mind. I read about three quarters of it before stopping. I was at turns sympathetic, but often instinctively dubious of what I thought he was saying. In truth I just didn't know enough to make anything of it, and didn't care for the exercise unless I could. Tutor, (H) looks at the full cohort of Neoconservatives both in the administration and in the supporting institutions and believes he sees a generation of elites who made a careful study of everything they didn't like and thought wrong, who probably read all of Bloom's book and made notes in the margin, and read many other things as well. And who now use a reflection of the postmodern to build a wall around an increasingly proprietary use of state power. And for the end of ameliorating the effects of a generations old necessity of shared governance with the middle class. So whoever is the Last Man standing remember to turn out the lights. 1. Here is an article from a recent Chronic which shares that experience. 1:19:32 AM    comment [];trackback [];

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