I know who Mrs. Cain was. We don't talk about her or her family much, but things just wouldn't have been paradise without her or them. She was one of the many illegal immigrants in Paradise that did the actual work of tending the Garden of Eden--you know, the hoeing,…
The Bill passed by congress on the detainee and interrogation issue is one of the more frustrating examples of Democratic cowardice and political expedience. It does not substantively change anything. Personally, I feel the only utility in having a law in the first place is to use as a cudgel…
A follow up, answer, another viewpoint…
The title is somewhat rhetorical. Hate–in its undiluted, culturally-disseminated form has only one reason–the perpetuation of local power–for the individual, the power to insist that he/she is right and refuses to countenance criticism, implicit or otherwise; for the state, the power to maintain power in the face of outside insistence on change. . If those against whom the hatred is directed are unfortunate enough not to see how they play into it, then the issue becomes complicated. What we now see in the Middle East and many other parts of the world is a hatred based on local potentates (single rulers, committees, vested interests, or cultural hegemons) desire, need, hunger to maintain a privileged position in their section of the world, something that became more and more untenable int he aftermath of World War ll.
Can that really be? After the decades of beating ourselves (namely, the West, which includes Europe, North America, and certain isolated pockets here and there and may now, paradoxically, include Japan, but certainly includes Australia, and may in time include India…) for our “responsibilities” in causing global problems (such self-recrimination soundly based on the legacies of a colonialist past), maybe it’s time to revisit some of that surplus self-loathing and see where the responsibilities actually lie.
The current exacerbating events of the current mess are all from the same source–the end of the second world war and the onset of the Cold War. Lest we forget, WW ll was …
I’ve been thinking about this since the initial post on our biases and all the responses. In the course of trying to come up with an “appropriate” response to the world, we often find ourselves caught up in endless exception-making, fudging, attempts to shoehorn certain proclivities and habits into convenient moulds so we don’t go through our days constantly flinching at our inadvertant insensitivities.
Does it do any good? The flinching? I mean, after the Sixties, one had to have been living on Mars for half a century not to be aware that there had been a Big Shift away from what might be called Gross Cultural Reliance to a more nuanced approach which has been (often derisively) termed Political Correctness. The former is a condition wherein one “borrows” wholesale from the culture to make associational choices. It doesn’t occur in this instance to question the wisdom of the culture–it’s what it is, and we are part of it, ergo…
But we realized that the Culture At Large was in many ways an Idiot. It stepped on people. It made too little room for variation. It tried to be all things to all people, but it was necessary that all people somehow be The Same in order for that to work. Those with a vested interest in keeping everything the same mightily resisted movement to change the rules.
We never did come up with a solid formulation that allows for prejudice.
You have to, you know. What we ended up …
The mainstream media missed another big story recently: The President has been screwing around with our Constitution and the nation's largest association of lawyers has called him on it. On August 8, 2006, American Bar Association, a national association of 410,000 lawyers, condemned President Bush's widespread practice of writing exceptions to…