{"id":518,"date":"2004-09-06T17:31:05","date_gmt":"2004-09-06T17:31:05","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:46","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:46","slug":"bad_philosophy_day_too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=518","title":{"rendered":"Bad Philosophy Day, Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

He must have thought it was white boy day. It ain’t white boy day, is it? <\/p>\n

– Gary Oldman, as Drexl Spivey, in True Romance<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Every so often I just feel like it’s ‘Bad Philosophy Day’; either I see an egregious example of it, or else someone raises the issue and joins the team fighting the War On Bad Philosophy.<\/p>\n

Today we get both.<\/p>\n

Via Harry’s Place<\/a> and Jonathan Derbyshire<\/a>, a couple of interesting quotes from people who are enlisting on our side:<\/p>\n

T]here is not just an equivalence, but a blend, between the Islamism that condemns the Western liberal democracies and the international pseudo-Left intelligentsia that condemns them as well.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

… We can be certain … that the performance of the Western intelligentsia has never been worse. Before the collapse of the Warsaw Pact regimes, the intelligentsia was merely deluded. After the collapse of the World Trade Center, it has gone haywire. Essentially a branch of the home entertainment industry, the Left intelligentsia circulates, almost entirely for its own consumption, opinions even more contemptuous of ordinary people than used to prevail on the Right.<\/p>\n

– Clive James in the Times Literary Supplement<\/a> (subscription). <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The James article is about Isaiah Berlin, and in the summary posted on the public TLS site, James goes on to say:<\/p>\n

Though Berlin wrote comparatively little about the twentieth century\u2019s worst horrors, there wasn’t much he didn’t know about them. The question is how much he usefully wrote about them: a question worth trying to answer, because on the answer will eventually depend how much we continue to value him.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s interesting to me, since I have become fairly convinced<\/a> that Berlin’s book ‘The Roots of Romanticism’ writes usefully about the philosophical ground that grew these 20th Century horrors. If there are any TLS subscribers out there who can send me the whole article, I’d be grateful.<\/p>\n

And then there are those signing up for the other side. <\/p>\n

I once went through an S.J. Perelman\/Dorothy Parker phase in my reading when the Algonquin Round Table was the center of the universe. Alexander Wolcott, the Times theater critic sat near the center of that universe. He was apparently insufferable – The Man Who Came To Dinner was written about him – the owner of an immense ego, and devoid of empathy (Harpo Marx was one of his best friends and describes him well in ‘Harpo Speaks,’ his autobiography).<\/p>\n

I’m assuming that James Wolcott is his son, because the ego and lack of empathy track well, and James seems to think that he’s been promoted from the center of the Algonquin’s literary lunch club to the center of the universe. Here’s his latest<\/a>, in its entirety:<\/p>\n

I root for hurricanes. When, courtesy of the Weather Channel, I see one forming in the ocean off the coast of Africa, I find myself longing for it to become big and strong–Mother Nature’s fist of fury, Gaia’s stern rebuke. Considering the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature with deforesting, stripmining, and the destruction of animal habitat, it only seems fair that nature get some of its own back and teach us that there are forces greater than our own. Sure, a hearty volcano can be enjoyable. Burning rivers of lava: so picturesque. But a volcano is stationary, like Dennis Hastert after a big lunch. It doesn’t offer the same dramatic suspense. Hurricanes are in unpredictable flux. They move, change direction, strengthen, weaken, lose an eyewall, repair an eyewall; they seem to have volition and opera-diva personalities.<\/p>\n

So there’s something disappointing when a hurricane doesn’t make landfall, or peters out into a puny Category One. Reporters and weather announcers may profess relief and gratitude that residents were spared the full unleashing of the vortex, but their coverage belies this. They love having reporters shouting into microphones on rain-lashed beaches as the stray yacht gets flung around like a bath toy. The helicopter shots of rows of mobile rooms smashed as if stomped on by a giant boot are money shots to the news networks.<\/p>\n

Hurricane Frances also has a heraldic quality. Camille Paglia observed on Salon in February, 2003 that the explosion of the Columbia shuttle on the eve of the war on Iraq was a “stunning omen,” one that would make a Roman general think twice. A catastrophe strewing death, fire, and human remains across Bush’s home state of Texas was inauspicious to our undertaking; and so it has proven to be. Frances is the second hurricane to afflict Florida, home of brother Jeb, in rapid succession.<\/p>\n

The gods are not pleased. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He’s got the decency to title it ‘An Ignoble Confession,’ so I’ll grant him something for that.<\/p>\n

But what he’s really doing is expressing the same sentiment as the people who were secretly thrilled<\/a> to watch the jumpers from the WTC on 9\/11, because:<\/p>\n

When the towers started collapsing and all chaos broke loose, I felt actual excitement. Here was an event that broke banality. Finally, here was something meaningful.<\/b> I had grown so tired of the meaningless fluff our continent had become so enamored with. Here was an issue of raw emotions. I was glad that this was happening to snap people back into reality, to snap them back to mortality. My last sinful thought was that of genocide — lets just send nuclear missiles to all of the Middle East and let it be done once and for all. <\/p>\n

(emphasis added)<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that – that fatigue with daily life (or, better, the daily lives of others) and the search of the overarching, true, genuine, transformative moment – is what it must feel like when you pull the lanyard on your explosive vest.<\/p>\n

Some people just buy them from better tailors than others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He must have thought it was white boy day. It ain’t white boy day, is it? – Gary Oldman, as Drexl Spivey, in True Romance Every so often I just feel like it’s ‘Bad Philosophy Day’; either I see an egregious example of it, or else someone raises the issue and joins the team fighting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}