The latest in a long line of Conservative political farragos may also be the most bizarre. No doubt at this moment the Prime Minister is muttering "tabernac" sotto voce - please, pardon his French.
SACRISTIE-MERDE UPDATE: Wafergate hits the big time. (You'll notice that while the PMO asserts that the host was indeed consumed, they never quite categorically state when).
It's a shame, though, that the whole sordid contretemps is drawing attention away from the other religious fracas consuming Ottawa at the moment.
Showing posts with label This person needs to read Aquinas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label This person needs to read Aquinas. Show all posts
08 July 2009
Hostie!
06 April 2009
Postmodern Wha?
I hadn't had the dubious pleasure of reading anything by James Poulos, an apparently prodigiously prolix (or prolixly prodigious?) young conservative blogger, until Andrew Sullivan (whom I generally like and agree with surprisingly often given our respective political leanings) linked to one of his more recent essays, suggesting as he did so that it "prods the left." Since I'm feeling a little understimulated at the moment I decided to take a finger in the midsection and give the piece a read.
Doing so has given me a welcome opportunity to complain, so I guess I've been duly prodded.
The piece in question decries the fact that liberal "legalism" has blurred the line between public and private space while accentuating the urges of of the lower bodily strata (to use a Bakhtinianism) through repression in the cause of political correctness. Money quote - I think:...our public obsession with security and health parallels our ‘private’ tastes for risk and self-poisoning, and our loving, de-eroticized pieties concerning Respect for All grow apace with our beastly appetite for erotic impieties.
Right. Right?
In the face of all this, small-l liberal politics largely bites its lip. The ultimate hero of our civilization is a sixteen-year-old sexpot who saves Darfur and bitchily destroys her rivals, all in a day’s work — Lolita Borgia in a reality-TV production of Legally Blonde 4: Barely Legal Bottle-Blonde Beasts of Prey.
I'm not going to deny that pinching some late-70s Foucault and throwing in a dash of crypto-titilatory prurience dredges eyeballs- at least, I think it does? - but what all this has to do with "small-l liberal politics" is beyond me.
Poulos is right that the realms of public and private are problematic at the moment, and our capacity to communicate often outstrips our capacity to act maturely - I don't think you'd find a liberal or progressive who didn't agree with that assessment. But does the proscription of public conduct make private conduct worse? And why is said proscription a small-l liberal phenomenon?
Part of the trouble here is that "liberal," "progressive" and other political descriptors are so contested by all sides that I'm at risk, as is Poulos, of making erroneous analogies left, right and centre - if you'll pardon the pun. But I think Poulos has constructed a straw man in the person of the sixteen-year old Darfur-saving, Lindsay Lohan-trashing sexpot - because in whose eyes, other than perhaps those of a coke-addled TV pitch writer desperate not to lose their job - would such a person be attractive?
Let's be clear: the worst aspects of our human natures - those closest to the animal - are now broadcast and rebroadcast, available at any hour for almost anyone to see. But it's the paradoxically distancing and binding effect of the electronic media - disengaging us from the reality of the images or words before us yet connecting us to an amorphous world of fellow viewers - that separates us from the full consciousness of the extent of our culture's abdication of its progressive responsibilities, not the attempts made by progressive politicians, educators and authors to soften the savage breasts of chidren with a little empathy.
If Poulos had read his Foucault carefully, he would know that the rise of the legible citizen - the citizen free to exercise whatever libertinage is permitted by the central power, be it the state, its capitalist symbiotes, or both - is older than the political Left broadly defined. And I would add that liberals and progressives, far more often than conservatives, have sought to curtail power's hold over the individual while harnessing authority's capacity to create the conditions for social and economic improvement.
In other words, I sure as hell am not biting my lip.
Poulous' postmodern conservatism seems, at least from this particular article, to amount to a hyperloquacious plea for the good old days when pastoral power was transmitted through the patriarchal, mystifying and often repressive suasions of official religion instead of through the (at least nominally) democratic mechanisms of the state. The latter is a little - only a little - better than the former, but to imply that the exercise of public power over private mores didn't take place before the era of Big Government - and that our contemporary vices are a direct result of liberal democracy's avowed acceptance of diversity - is sloppy.
I think few actually on the ground attempting to do progressive work - in government, schools, NGOs, wherever - are blind to the challenges posed by our human appetities. To tar these people as misguided at best and hypocritical at worst misses the real problems with power and authority that we, both left and right, face.
18 September 2008
This Just In: Palin Needs To Read Aquinias
Why, you ask?
Well, moveon.org has a few nice talking points. My favorite: she was a Buchanan supporter in 2000 (you know, the year that George W. Bush was running). Needing to read Aquinas, by association?
30 July 2008
Klassic Komedy Kuote
"We don't govern by statistics in our government. We're governing by what we told and promised Canadians."
-Federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, explaining the Conservative focus on crime and punishment despite the fact that crime is at a 25-year low.
11 April 2008
20 March 2008
Mirabile Dictu
This is incredible. Start around 3:22, unless you enjoy the inane, sycophantic fatuousness and queasily peppy crypto-racism of Joe Scarborough. Maybe Mike Huckabee is just angling for the Vice-Presidential nomination. But incredible nonetheless.
As an aside, Huckabee has a not-unreasonable point about sermons coming out wrong in the heat of the moment for preachers of any stripe. I would challenge him, though, to show that the actions of the Rev. Wright on fostering social justice (which apparently included arranging for white students to attend his services), actions that seem to speak louder than his words on race, can be matched by, say Jerry Falwell's outreach efforts to gays and lesbians. Someone, it doesn't seem quite the same.
08 March 2008
Sweet Land of Bigotry...
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa 5th) indulges in a great American pasttime:
Transcript (hat tip - Crooks and Liars): I don’t want to disparage anyone because of their, their race, their ethnicity, their name - whatever their religion their father, father might have been.
I’ll just say this that when you think about the optics of a Barack Obama potentially getting elected President of the United States — and I mean, what does this look like to the rest of the world? What does it look like to the world of Islam?
And I will tell you that, if he is elected president, then the, the radical Islamists, the, the al-Qaida, and the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11...
It does matter, his middle name does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world, it has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They will be dancing in the streets because of who his father was and because of his posture that says: Pull out of the Middle East and pull out of this conflict.
So there are implications that have to do with who he is and the position that he’s taken. If he were strong on national defense and said ‘I’m going to go over there and we’re going to fight and we’re going to win, we’ll come home with a victory,’ that’s different. But that’s not what he said. They will be dancing in the streets if he’s elected president. That has a chilling aspect on how difficult it will be to ever win this Global War on Terror.
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