Allan Bloomsday
What the right doesn't know... This post is intended as a small commentary following on from last weeks post and concerns with the current leadership. It centers on some specific misgivings I've had. Issues of world view and education. Despite the considerable educational credentials this administration marshals. Despite the centered (midwested) gravitas they claim to speak from. They display in practice an amazing degree of incompetency, ignorance, and seeming inability to tell right from wrong. There is no deep questioning of morality and justice despite constant trading on that discourses emotional appeal. Merely a reflexive take on justifications, and justice. A superficial ownership view of (being) right. We are the good, all we do is right. The unexamined life in a gilded frame. There are some who have told us all along that is is not happenstance as much as revolution as Paul Krugman suggested in the introduction to a few years of collected columns
The great unraveling : losing our way in the new century" and as Sidney Blumenthal has outlined recently
Upending the Mayberry Machiavellis | Salon.com. I recall reading a particularly self serving column from David Brooks a few years ago One of the things that inspired me to simply stop reading Brooks. He attempted to make the claim that Conservative are natural philosophers. They refrain from reacting emotionally, instead dispassionately reason and weigh the costs to benefits to arrive and the 'right answer. For my self it is almost enough to proceed by rejecting this vapid conceit utterly. A number of years ago I read Allan Bloom's book
The closing of the American mind : how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students I read the book on the suggestion of a teacher Charles Butterworth who, I believe, had studied with Prof. Bloom and greatly admired him. My sister Ann bought me the book for Christmas. I can see the book even now on the book shelf across the room. I have no temptation to get it down. I found the book mordant, by turns, turns against what he didn't like. Just so many boo's and yea's. I found it pedantic, didactic, just plain ick. It, despite ordered erudition, pushed me away from its main thesis that there was something wrong with the American Academy and it was turning out generations of morally relativistic and ethically crippled leaders. I was, for what its worth, troubled by this because Bloom had edited the definitive political science edition of Plato's Republic
WorldCat: The Republic and it is very good. And he was prominently placed in the Chicago School, land of neo conservatives and Leo Strauss. The revolutionaries; however, are not just coming out of premier institutions no matter how conservative. They are the prelaw twits at state colleges, become law welps made good. small college bible belted soldiers prized not for their knowledge or scholarship but for loyalty and willingness to overstep boundaries. This is the Bush administration and the bankruptcy of the conservative mind. Not possessing the academy, a school, a curriculum they owned saved them from themselves early on. As soon as enough of them gathered together under one purpose to form a de-facto academy they self destructed. In power they demonstrated only a pathetic grasping after empire. Seemingly quick to corrupt because they already were corrupt -- without moral center. Being in power gave them power, and wealth. And they discovered that was all in fact they cared about. Paul Wolfowitz who as he informs everyone he deals with knows everything there is to know about the evils of corruption . Except how not to be corrupt himself
AFP.com | Wolfowitz fights on as World Bank split over scandal. Apparently that was not taught him. Though some such as Christopher Hitchens try desperately not to understand this
Why Wolfowitz did nothing wrong.. I suspect that in time the Conservative movement will attempt to sever the populists from their midst and attempt to reframe the movement as balance between primitives and sophisticates. I will only ever see it as an even smear of of elite opportunists within the greater boundaries of American culture.
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