Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Quote of the Day
At the end of this campaign I intend to reveal my identity in order to make a fool of Adam Goldenberg, who seems to think that movement conservatism will always be around. He and students like him will learn PRINCIPLES in the next month.
—Standing Eagle, from the Mitt Romney post below
Will the mystery finally come to an end? Will the world really learn Standing Eagle's true identity? Or is the winged one just toying with us?
And what the hell do Adam Goldenberg and movement conservatism have to do with anything? (Though it must be said that he got pretty close to Charlize Theron.) ¶ 7:46 AM
—Standing Eagle, from the Mitt Romney post below
Will the mystery finally come to an end? Will the world really learn Standing Eagle's true identity? Or is the winged one just toying with us?
And what the hell do Adam Goldenberg and movement conservatism have to do with anything? (Though it must be said that he got pretty close to Charlize Theron.) ¶ 7:46 AM
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Don't you see? Standing Eagle IS Adam Goldenberg. Like Higgins was actually Robin Masters in Magnum P.I.
# posted by 
: February 12, 2008 12:54 PM
: February 12, 2008 12:54 PM
I never toy.
The reason movement conservatism's shark-jumping matters is that it will finally deflate the turgid improvised shrine that was built in the nineteen-eighties and has been worshipped with burnt offerings ever since. The knowledge consumed in these sacrifices heats the air but sheds no light on the truths that universities are about.
What is this inflatable shrine, now mobbed from the right-hand side of the aisle by heavily oiled, corpulent, and tightly swaddled torsoes, each wielding at the end of T-Rex-style vestigial arms an Old Testament (with the words "Hebrew Bible" crossed out), a copy of The Fountainhead, and a placard of a guy in a flight suit, and waddling always forward into the billows of the canvas that composes the shrine -- while its few pathetic leftist adherents, in colorful diapers, with sagging thigh flesh and defiant chins, continue to make their puny ritual offerings of watery milk and packets of Equal?
It's the shrine of Identity Politics. In the very Temple of Learning tribalism has had built its sovereign shrine, and the main altar has been stripped to deck its rococo form.
Lent is well underway, but there is a resurrection coming.
To all thinking people, of course, identity politics never made much sense in a US context: the whole POINT of politics in the US has always been that your pre-given identity doesn't matter. Each person defines herself; we have an individualist creed at the very heart of our founding ideology. It's one of the only good things about our capitalist ideology (the other being that it works) -- and note by the way that the legal fiction that corporations are 'persons' does a lot to mitigate the moral value of capitalism's focus on the individual.
On campuses since the early and mid nineties the shrieking mobs of contrarianism-addled right-wing acolytes at the Hollow Shrine of Identity Politics have drowned out substantive civic conversation. How? Easy: they took the already-perverse idea of identity politics (which was a painful torque on the US idea of the *political*) and perverted it AGAIN. They twisted the idea of *identity*: and claimed that conservatism (read: Republicanism) was a protected identity, too, an oppressed minority, blah blah blah. And the conversation (what can be heard of it over the keening of the flat-taxers and the activist-judge-baiters) has centered since then on whether Republicanism is indeed an oppressed identity.
But the real question is whether it is an IDENTITY at all.
It is not.
Ideas can never be an identity. Ideas must always be fluid, fungible, tentative, or ironic. They must always always, no matter what, be TESTED. If they fail the test -- not necessarily by being shown false, but by being shown uninteresting or distracting -- they get set aside for a different day.
Identities -- real ones, like creed, race, sexuality, gender, national origin, etc. -- in this country are never tested: hence, the Bill of Rights.
But if universities stand for anything it is the claim that all ideas are always to be tested, and that in that crucible they are transformed, giving birth to useful inventions, terrible beauties, and the occasional Frankenstein abomination.
The shrine of Identity Politics is such an abomination. It has drawn under its heaving, billowing aegis vast crowds of selfish, mentally unwell, or authoritarian maniacs. The time is right for pitchforks and torches, to bring it down -- with whatever intellectual carnage to the throngs is thereby necessitated. Their mob mentality is the opposite of America, and their fierce devotion to a ritual without mystery, without numen, without anything but the Self, disqualifies them from the protections of the First Amendment.
Tillich defined religion as 'ultimate concern about an ultimate concern.' Devotion to self-vindication cannot (my behavior on this blog notwithstanding) be an ultimate concern. Movement conservatism deserves no protection, and the flaming monstrosity about to topple, Hindenberg-style, onto its adherents in university settings is a comeuppance of its own devising. Bystanders -- or perhaps call them fellow-travelers -- people who believe, casually, in the notion of 'intellectual diversity,' involving 'conservatism' or 'liberalism' as an IDENTITY -- will not be harmed. McCarthyism is not a (healthy) jeremiad but a vindictive crusade. Nonetheless those fellow-travelers too will certainly learn some things in this purge. And on the wreckage the intellectual infrastructure of the welfare state we deserve (a la Krugman) will begin to be built.
Further broadsides on the way.
I believe my proximate goal in posting this month is to recruit Goldenberg to carry this extra pitchfork I'm holding. Let's make hay while the sun shines.
If this be toying, let it be a woolgathering as lawful as agriculture.
Standing Eagle
The reason movement conservatism's shark-jumping matters is that it will finally deflate the turgid improvised shrine that was built in the nineteen-eighties and has been worshipped with burnt offerings ever since. The knowledge consumed in these sacrifices heats the air but sheds no light on the truths that universities are about.
What is this inflatable shrine, now mobbed from the right-hand side of the aisle by heavily oiled, corpulent, and tightly swaddled torsoes, each wielding at the end of T-Rex-style vestigial arms an Old Testament (with the words "Hebrew Bible" crossed out), a copy of The Fountainhead, and a placard of a guy in a flight suit, and waddling always forward into the billows of the canvas that composes the shrine -- while its few pathetic leftist adherents, in colorful diapers, with sagging thigh flesh and defiant chins, continue to make their puny ritual offerings of watery milk and packets of Equal?
It's the shrine of Identity Politics. In the very Temple of Learning tribalism has had built its sovereign shrine, and the main altar has been stripped to deck its rococo form.
Lent is well underway, but there is a resurrection coming.
To all thinking people, of course, identity politics never made much sense in a US context: the whole POINT of politics in the US has always been that your pre-given identity doesn't matter. Each person defines herself; we have an individualist creed at the very heart of our founding ideology. It's one of the only good things about our capitalist ideology (the other being that it works) -- and note by the way that the legal fiction that corporations are 'persons' does a lot to mitigate the moral value of capitalism's focus on the individual.
On campuses since the early and mid nineties the shrieking mobs of contrarianism-addled right-wing acolytes at the Hollow Shrine of Identity Politics have drowned out substantive civic conversation. How? Easy: they took the already-perverse idea of identity politics (which was a painful torque on the US idea of the *political*) and perverted it AGAIN. They twisted the idea of *identity*: and claimed that conservatism (read: Republicanism) was a protected identity, too, an oppressed minority, blah blah blah. And the conversation (what can be heard of it over the keening of the flat-taxers and the activist-judge-baiters) has centered since then on whether Republicanism is indeed an oppressed identity.
But the real question is whether it is an IDENTITY at all.
It is not.
Ideas can never be an identity. Ideas must always be fluid, fungible, tentative, or ironic. They must always always, no matter what, be TESTED. If they fail the test -- not necessarily by being shown false, but by being shown uninteresting or distracting -- they get set aside for a different day.
Identities -- real ones, like creed, race, sexuality, gender, national origin, etc. -- in this country are never tested: hence, the Bill of Rights.
But if universities stand for anything it is the claim that all ideas are always to be tested, and that in that crucible they are transformed, giving birth to useful inventions, terrible beauties, and the occasional Frankenstein abomination.
The shrine of Identity Politics is such an abomination. It has drawn under its heaving, billowing aegis vast crowds of selfish, mentally unwell, or authoritarian maniacs. The time is right for pitchforks and torches, to bring it down -- with whatever intellectual carnage to the throngs is thereby necessitated. Their mob mentality is the opposite of America, and their fierce devotion to a ritual without mystery, without numen, without anything but the Self, disqualifies them from the protections of the First Amendment.
Tillich defined religion as 'ultimate concern about an ultimate concern.' Devotion to self-vindication cannot (my behavior on this blog notwithstanding) be an ultimate concern. Movement conservatism deserves no protection, and the flaming monstrosity about to topple, Hindenberg-style, onto its adherents in university settings is a comeuppance of its own devising. Bystanders -- or perhaps call them fellow-travelers -- people who believe, casually, in the notion of 'intellectual diversity,' involving 'conservatism' or 'liberalism' as an IDENTITY -- will not be harmed. McCarthyism is not a (healthy) jeremiad but a vindictive crusade. Nonetheless those fellow-travelers too will certainly learn some things in this purge. And on the wreckage the intellectual infrastructure of the welfare state we deserve (a la Krugman) will begin to be built.
Further broadsides on the way.
I believe my proximate goal in posting this month is to recruit Goldenberg to carry this extra pitchfork I'm holding. Let's make hay while the sun shines.
If this be toying, let it be a woolgathering as lawful as agriculture.
Standing Eagle
Are you suggesting that movement conservatism is a new version of McCarthyism?
# posted by : February 12, 2008 1:53 PM
: February 12, 2008 1:53 PM
No, I was suggesting that there are McCarthyist temptations in the purge of movement conservatism that I am describing.
Those temptations are to be avoided.
SE
Those temptations are to be avoided.
SE
If Standing Eagle is Robin Masters, than who are Zeus and Apollo?
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# posted by : February 12, 2008 5:39 PM
: February 12, 2008 5:39 PM<< Home
