Letters to the Editor
-
@ IngSoc
Class is rarely used by anyone these days when analyzing the political motives of Americans with wealth or power. This is only partly to avoid being tarred with the Marxist brush. Class is a genuinely tricky concept in America.
The existence of a class system in the U.S. is beyond serious question, but it has never looked like the traditional class system of Europe. It's far less formal, for one thing, and for another, its membership has been far more fluid. Interestingly, though, it's lower levels are more visible, especially since the rise of the so-called military-industrial complex, and bear an uncanny resemblance to the New Class of Milovan Djilas, or to Fanon's description of the native inheritors of the class system left in place in post-colonial Africa by the departing Europeans.
Henry Kissinger, for example, could easily be one of the upwardly mobile apparatchiks described by Djilas, or one of the native bureacrats left in Kenya when the British finally went home. He did, after all, begin as a client and protegé of the powerful, and end as one of them himself, at least in instrumental terms. The same might be said of Colin Powell, Diane Feinstein, or even Bob Woodward or Howie Kurtz. The British would call them life peers; we would call them enablers. (Or worse.)
Whatever you call them, though, not very much has been written about them as a recognizable class, and yet to me it seems undeniable that they're part of a new species of courtier, and how that species is created might very well tell us a lot about more about those it serves than we know now.
-
This and that
I'm late to the thread though I've been reading off and on since yesterday. Others had far more insightful things to say here than I do even now -- I always get such an education from the diversity of perspectives here that, like kovie, I am quite grateful to all of you for your participation in that education. I am in awe in some of the minds at work in this place. A Bayesian network analysis on the efficacy of the ticking time bomb theory -- could we please have people with this level of insight and dedication running our federal government some day? :-)
I'd also like to add my salute to contributors and lurkers who have served this country. Yours is a sacrifice I would wish in my most idealistic heart that we would never have to call upon another living soul to make. It's tough to see yet another Veteran's Day come around knowing the U.S. is still squandering such a gift on such a misguided "cause," and I know it pains some of you here who have served on a level I will never be able to fully appreciate. May you (and we) know peace again.
I post now, though, because I confess to finding myself irritated in the last two days of threads at the "realpolitik" shout down of the angry voices of protest in here. I'm neither young nor naive, and I do appreciate the need for patience and realistic understandings and expectations. It's also tough to keep my own chin up in these trying times. I didn't post again after WITNESSING the Mukasey vote the other night because it just sapped my spirit and I needed to take bebop-o's advice to get out and enjoy the beautiful weekend and help put it in some perspective. So I understand that some find the doom and gloom cries wearying and, in their own way, oppressive. I just want to say that I appreciated those who took the opportunity to bring light to answer all that heat. I wish some of those who took a more heated tone of their own in preaching patience might exercise a little more of that same virtue here as they would wish "the end is near!" folks might.
Finally, for my action step, I'm thinking of kicking Richardson a few bucks for showing up for the vote and making noise about the fact that other Presidential candidates didn't in a similar vein of sentiment to the earlier Dodd support on his FISA stand. It may be a "dog training" way to approach politics, but we are all animals of a sort. Maybe we could eventually get a message through to the more-likelies by constantly supporting demonstrations of PRINCIPLED ACTIONS in this field.
-
hrh
While I didn't participate in any recent "shout down" of voices of protest and anger here, I have done so in the past, and, speaking only for myself, the reason that I sometimes do this is because it often just seems to me as redundant and unhelpful. I.e. I get it, they're evil, they're ruining our country, Democrats are gutless enablers, we're headed off a cliff, etc. And when you hear and read it every single day, it just gets old, boring and unhelpful.
So instead of hearing yet more of this litany of rage and frustration, I'd rather take part in some effort to try to figure out WHY this is happening, and what we might be able to do about it. My frustration is less with the legitimacy of such rage, as with its redundency and unproductiveness--we are in a major crisis and need to actually DO something about it, instead of merely complaining about it.
To which I readily admit at least two caveats.
One, people who are only now just waking up to these horrors are constantly entering the discussion, and it's not fair to expect them to "get up to speed" right away. They have a right to have their moment (or twenty) or rage and despair, and most likely need it, emotionally. We all started out like the figure in Munch's The Scream, before we collected ourselves and started trying to make sense of it all and find a way out of this mess.
And two, even us "old timers" who've been at this for a while occasionally succumb to moments of rage and despair, and can and should be forgiven for expressing it online. It's simply not possible to confront what's going on without having strong emotional reactions to it sometimes, no matter how disciplined one tries to be. It's when one no longer has such emotions that one really has to worry about oneself.
Still, when those of us who've tried to move beyond ONLY feeling this rage and despair--and to a certain extent have done so--come across expressions of it, it does tend to grate and irritate, but in ways that no one should read too much into. We're all on the same basic path, I think, but at different parts of it. I hope this doesn't come across as condescending or patronizing. It's not meant to, really. Anyone who stills cares, however their concern manifests and expresses itself, is helping, in their own way, by simply refusing to let this all happen without a proper response. It's all those Britney-obsessed fools out there who don't seem to get what's going on or really care who truly worry and bother me. WTF?!? Britney is more important than torture?!?
We should all be angry. But we also need to move beyond just anger alone--in our own way, and at our own pace, of course--if we're to ever move past what's happened to our country.