GGniner
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RE: America's First Post-Modern Presidency
Quote:“Always a danger in relative morality” — Ya Think?
The more clever postmodernists grant that the result of their thinking is relative morality, but always dismiss that danger with the cheap toss off that everyone has “sympathies and prejudices”, but (a) the well-off are less honest in admitting to them, and (b) the sympathies and prejudices of the elite are not as moral or valuable as of those who are of color, female, and poor. Again, Justice Sotomayor:
There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.
The Postmodern Olympus
Sotomayor, however, is simply the most recent concrete manifestation of the reigning postmodern philosophy that is inherent in President Obama’s thinking. For Obama, there is really no bad or good, wrong or right, but simply perspectives — competing narratives, as it were.
In the Middle East we must understand where an Iran or Hamas is coming from, specifically the history of poverty and oppression that fuel their cries from the heart and sometime lead them to counterproductive and self-destructive outbursts. That Israel is a democratic pro-Western nation, subject to the rule of law, means not so much as it once did. Its truth is merely an alternative discourse to that of the Palestinian authority or the Hamas narrative — and one we unduly privilege by its proximity to our own.
Ends and Means
Exalted ends justify most means. That Obama is a radical egalitarian means that he really cannot eat $100 a pound beef, fly-in on a lark his own pizza-maker, or go out on a multi-thousand dollar evening in New York. Unlike Bush, who would do such a thing to rub elbows with New York’s capitalists, Obama would do so reluctantly, for his family, or to find needed relief so he can better help the people the morning after.
In postmodernism, facts as we know them mean little, given either that they are the domain of elites alone with the resources to pursue and master them, or, more fundamentally, are simply representations of knowledge used by the privileged for political purposes. That there are not 57 states, that the world did not save Berlin during the airlift, that Obama’s great-uncle did not help to liberate Auschwitz, that the United States is not one of the largest Muslim countries, again matter little. In each case, particular contexts and intentions — what we troglodytes might call mitigating circumstances — condition the “truth.”
That a Timothy Geithner did not pay taxes that he asks others to pay or that he must himself oversee, or the fact that a Tom Daschle insists on limousine service that he does not report as income, are simply minor distractions. Such public servants pursue a higher truth of helping the helpless, and cannot be sidetracked by constructed transgressions designed to thwart the proper cause of egalitarianism.
So without absolutes, moral equivalence triumphs. In Obama’s world, that most of the Arab world is authoritarian, plagued by gender apartheid, tribalism, religious intolerance and statism matter little. Instead, as the less powerful, their writs against us must be as valid and compelling as are ours against them.
There is no such thing as calibration, a misdemeanor of the overdog must always be equivalent to the felony of the underdog. Guantanamo is about the same as the gulags in Russia, China, or the Arab world and logically deserves as much of the world’s condemnation. In the mind of the postmodernist it matters not at all that a million Arabs live safely under the rule of law inside Israel while Jews in turn live on the West Bank in danger — in the former it is legal and right, in the latter illegal and wrong. Why? The former are without power, while the latter use it to construct a “truth.”
Words Change Their Meanings
After six months of postmodern governance in which words and values lose intrinsic meaning, we don’t know any longer whether tribunals, intercepts, wiretaps, Predator drone attacks, Guantanamo, Iraq, renditions, etc. are good or bad, or Obama’s salvations or Bush’s Hitlerisms. I have no idea now whether five soldiers tragically blown up in war in Iraq (is it a war now?) is news as in the days of Bush, or reduced to “stuff happens” in the age of Obama. Iran having a nuke will soon be merely the same thing as Israel having one first.
I have discovered that “fiscal sobriety” is running up a $2 trillion annual deficit, that Obama’s once taboo middle name Hussein is now a publicized entre to the Islamic world, that his once agnostic father is now constructed back into a devout Muslim, and on and on.
In other words, we now have our first postmodern president. Yes, everything is possible — literally.
VDH is of course an expert in the Classics and thus not a Post-modern Retard
SOAF - there is more mention in there about that narrative thing with israel/arab world.
(This post was last modified: 06-04-2009 04:12 PM by GGniner.)
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