>I think I know why André Malraux
>and Ivan Illich fare so poorly. In the book, their names are spelled
>Malreaux and Ilych.
Ooops. Doug
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You realize that Ivan Ilych is a character in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych. So that Ivan was imaginary but that Andre was real. The other Ivan Illich is (was?) a sociologist(?) I think. Never read him and had to look him up---but scanning some of his titles, he might be worth a look. See:
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/bibliography.html
I used to argue with the Right at home (stepfather) and in high school (Granada Hills). It was pointless.
But, to be civilized about it, consider arguing about Malraux's idea of western culture's metamorphosis of the divine into the secular through the arts. How far do you suppose I would get with Jessie Helms in a discussion like that? Or Posner for that matter?
See the trouble with the Right is their ideas are bunk. In other words garbage in, garbage out. And Hakki makes pretty much the same point:
``...First of all, Verhoeven appears to have predicted that the US - bec it's obvious that's what the movie is about - will not produce a more sophisticated ideology in the future, but a dumber one. The elements of this ideology: The war, the enemy, the public figures, the rhetoric, the institutions, are straight out of comics, where indeed they increasingly appear to come from today...''
Turning back to reality(?), part of the Righwing agenda, is a kind of anti-intellectualism, that is carried out by dragging discussion down into a morass of trivial moral certitudes. They think of this technique as debate, but it is the cartoon of debate. Under this system the realm of ideas is partitioned into the Good and the Bad. The Right picks what it considers a popularly conceived Good, and then leaves its adversary to defend the Bad.
For example, abortion is murder, evolution is against God, socialism is prison, America is Good, queers are against Nature, etc, etc, etc, not to mention their racism and sexist crapolla. So you argue, discuss, theorize, and blather on ad nausium on any of this shit. After awhile you realize the entire frame is twisted and has been intentionally constructed to end like tic-tac-toe. The first move determines the outcome of the game. So the answer is don't play.
``Don't try and understand them. Just ride and rope and brand them. Rawhide...''
In a more serious tone Justin writes:
``..I myself have never shied away from enaggement with right wing ideas. The danger is that you might start to see the point, thus my admiration for Hayek and Mises. When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.'' jks
That has a nice sound. But when I have looked into the soul of various righwingers I known intimately, I found a frighten child crouching in a freezing cesspool---something like the famous (stolen?) image in Schindler's List.
It should have evoked pity in me, but the Right's hatred and mean spirited nastiness---their complete lack of self-recognition and self-knowledge, turned whatever hopeful feelings of humanity I might have had toward them into absolute contempt.
I could never answer this question. How can you be like that, and not see it in others? How can you ignore that, lie about it, turn it into something mean and nasty, and thereby insure its perpetuation. In other words, how can you look at the human condition and have no heart?
So the abyss is their heartless gaze upon the world. I have no intention of understanding that. And yet, of course I do. It is a denial of that condition in themselves that drives its antithesis, which is essentially the foundation of evil. For all their moral argument, at the end of the day, in a kind of dramatic twist that is completely self-revealing, they have none. That is why the american rightwing is always teetering into fascism.
A few more excuses like the WTC/Pentagon attacks should push them and therefore the US government into out right nazism. I don't know if anyone has noticed it, but we are sitting on the fence as it is.
Chuck Grimes