[lbo-talk] Happy Nre Year. And the Carl Remick prize goes to...

[Chuck Grimes]

Happy New Year, everybody. Did you hear the one where George W. Bush
executed Saddam Hussein for killing Iraqis? Can it get better than
that? Well, sure. As a one liner that is almost as good as Henny
Goodman's, Take my wife... please.

These ruminations have inspired me to propose that the LBO list start
submitting entries for the Carl Remick Prize for history's funniest
videos.

Now of course I am speaking metaphorically. Anybody speak
metaphorical, out there?  Okay, video is just a symbol for any
imaginary record of history. The important point is that history has
had a lot of these sorts of great moments where mere absurdity has
turned to the surreal and then beyond to the realm of meta-irony.

I'll give you a couple of my favorite examples of meta-irony (a word I
am borrowing from Octavio Paz) to get the ball rolling here.

Let's go back in time. Imagine 420 AD, and we are in the bedroom room
where Augustine lays dying. Imagine the old bishop of Hippo
languishing on his death bed as the monophysite hordes who have seiged
the city for eighteen months, suddenly they come storming through his door,
blood smeared faces and gleaming swords flashing, ready to kill the
very next trinitarian they find. Boy they hit pay dirt  that
day. The old reprobate heaving his last breath in the twilight moments
of his life on earth saw a terrible miasma between his yellow feet and
the bed posts and suddenly wondered if the holy ghost was welcoming
him to the heavenly hosts, or if the legends of Satan had arrived. In
his dismay, he cried, ``Oh, Lord, what am I?'' The Arian with an axe
in hand answered, ``Your dead, motherfucker.''

I love to imagine moments like that. They might be fictious, but they
have a certain, je ne se qua. 

Even more thrilling and yet absurd is the thought that Hegel stayed up
all night to put the finishing touches on his introduction to the
Philosophy of Mind only to be reminded of the concrete nature of human
history by Napoleon's artillery barrage at dawn that opened the battle
of Jena. About 96,000 rabid French only a mile away were getting ready
to kill Prussians and they were not asking, are you a free thinker
sir?

Hegel scurried off to his publisher in Naumburg with his manuscripts
bundled up on the first conveyance he could hire out of Jena that
morning.  Ah, history whispered to his philosophical mistress: tear
our pleasures with rough strife my dear, times winged chariot hurries
near and quaint honor turns to dust.

I was equally thrilled to learn that Leo Strauss drafted Ernest
Cassirer, Julius Gutmann, and Carl Schmitt to recommend him to the US
Rockefeller Foundation for a grant to study Rousseau in 1928. I mean
think on that. Strauss would go to Paris to ruminate on the great
flaws of political liberalism in the English and French Enlightenment
curtesy of US capital, Weimar's Jewish liberal elite, and the soon to
be appointed legal consultant to the National Socialist Supreme
Court. One and all pulled together to support the short fat boy from
Marburg. And who exactly did Strauss honor as his central influence at
this point? Not one of 20thC philosophy's unsung giants, Ernest
Cassirer. And no, not one of the preeminent Jewish philosophers of the
century, Julius Gutmann. No, Strauss picked Carl Schmitt of
course. What a champion for the advancement of the political
philosophy of liberal democracy. Oh, yes a real prince of high
principles. No wonder Hannah Arendt despised him.

So, how about it folks? Let's celebrate the end of another year, and
raise our glasses:

Into this Universe, and why not knowing, 
Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.

What, without asking, hither hurried whence?
And, without asking, whither hurried hence!
Another and another Cup to drown
The Memory of this Impertinence!

Well, the Persians did have their moments, but alas these were long
ago. 

CG