Killing Me Softly
john posted in politics & culture on June 1st, 2007
In a remarkable early-morning melange NPR on the car radio summoned up images of the post-modern, the Victorian, and the evangelical invasion this morning. I was already mulling over the perverse statement from the head of NASA, Michael Griffin, that
Quoting from NPR website:
“I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.”
Mr. Griffin also insists we abandon scientific missions in favor of a quixotic manned base on the Moon. That’s a bit like a victory of the Hardy Boys over the grown-ups or a dose of magical realism in the halls of engineering. I believe we can assume this represents the fall-back position of Bush administration political hacks, ‘first you have to prove that climate change is a problem by showing us some disasters’ then of course it will be too late to act.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin from NPR site photo by Karen Bleier from AFP/Getty Images
After the dumbed-down administrator, NPR ran a story on the special train and entourage that carried Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a visit to his childhood home, complete with butterflies, banana groves and lush nostalgia. Cheering crowds with bands greeted the Nobel Prize-winning Marquez in the shanty-towns along the route. Because of the danger, he was surrounded by a detachment of soldiers.
Marquez with crowd AP photo
Last, KCRW announced a forum from hell, four hours of discussion at the contemporary art museum on “Art, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis” celebrating, I suppose, art that borrows the numbing rhetoric of gender politics, and the imagination of antique psychology. Or maybe they just love to hate the Picasso of their childhood.
Suddenly a magical memory novel seems like an island of reason in the middle of an intellectual shipwreck.
On the editorial page this rather good piece ran over some of the same ground, from the perspective of Bush power politics, the land beyond the teleprompter where everybody drinks the kool-aid and believes “I can behave like a Colombian Colonel if I want to.”
Words in a time of war
A sobering reality check on the Iraq war for an administration that once said it could create reality.
By Mark Danner, MARK DANNER, author of “The Secret Way to War,” is a professor of journalism and politics at UC Berkeley and at Bard College. The full text of this address is available at Tomdispatch.com.
June 1, 2007This is an edited version of a recent commencement address at UC Berkeley.
**
BEING INVITED to deliver a commencement address to the Department of Rhetoric is akin to being asked out for a romantic evening by a porn star. Whatever prospect you might have of pleasure is inevitably dampened by performance anxiety — the suspicion that your efforts, however enthusiastic, will inevitably be judged according to stern professional standards. A daunting prospect.
Yet I agreed to do so today because if ever there was a need for a “disciplined grasp” of the “symbolic and institutional dimensions of discourse” — as your Rhetoric Department’s website puts it — surely it is now. For today we are living under a presidential administration that not only is radical — unprecedentedly so — in its attitudes toward rhetoric and reality, toward words and things, but is also willing, to our great benefit, to state this attitude clearly.
Here is my favorite quotation about the Bush administration, a description of a conversation with the proverbial “unnamed administration official” by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’ ”
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An analysis of the Bush Administration’s deranged point of view follows.
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