I’ve been thinking about how to move YrDoingAGreatJob away from the whole blog as just re-posted smorgasbord of cool stuff you think your (invariably tiny) group of readers will dig; but dadgummit, along comes this monumentally astute knowledge bomb from MattBai over at the New York Times Magazine.
In light of yesterday’s “shocking” defeat of Democrat Martha Coakey by Republican Scott Brown for Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, Bai discusses the increasingly antiquated notion of partisan political alignment. Now, if that term sounds unfamiliar, you’re probably young and it might as well remain unfamiliar. But basically, it’s the idea that because one year ago voters ushered in the Liberal Jesus Barack Obama and technical Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, the nation’s voters would stop watching crappy cable news and listening to even crappier talk radio and go back to work and forget about guns and butter and trust the Democratic Party they just elected and keep voting them back into power each time because, well, Washington and politics and especially, reform, move at about the pace of a garden slug.
Of course, all that is about as relevant now as a rotary phone. Here’s Matt (worth quoting at length):
On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night…
It isn’t only majority parties that will have to recalibrate their ideas of longevity in this new environment. It’s the individual politicians, too. Only in Washington, where changing social attitudes from the rest of the country generally arrive with all the speed of a Pilgrim vessel, is protracted incumbency still considered some kind of ace-in-the-hole selling point. Americans who rotate through a series of jobs or even careers every decade are far less likely to want to pull the lever for the same graying senator — or the same graying party — for the duration of their natural lives, which means the politician-as-local-institution is probably headed for the history books. It doesn’t seem likely that Scott Brown, the newest Massachusetts senator, or any of the energetic and unwrinkled senators who have recently arrived in Washington will ever be memorialized the way Ted Kennedy was, or have the chance to treat the Senate as a kind of surrogate nursing home, in the manner of a Strom Thurmond or a Robert Byrd.
How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany’s greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there’s a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance…
Not only did [Hannah] Arendt have an affair with [Heidegger] when she was an 18-year-old student about half his age, before Hitler took over, but despite his public exaltation of the Fuhrer, despite his firing Jews once he became rector of Freiburg University. We now know that she later resumed some kind of warm relationship with the brownshirt philosopher (yes, it turns out he often wore one to his lectures). Arendt helped usher Heidegger back into the intellectual version of polite society, indeed assisted in preventing his ostracism as a Hitlerite, at least by those who considered his notoriously opaque use of philosophical language to offer something of value beneath it—apart from further opacity….
As the weird and wistful innocence of the Aughts fast approaches the grim futurism of the Twenty-whatevers, recent events in the news provide us with the opportunity to revisit a simpler, some would say quainter time of economic and political tomfoolery.
Amid a global frenzy fed by multibillion-dollar hedge funds, wealthy speculators and governments [are] all rushing to stock up on the precious yellow metal, the price of gold briefly surpassed $1,100 an ounce on Friday, a record high…. In the United States, ads promising high prices for gold are regular fodder for late-night television spots, while buyers are setting up tables at shopping malls or hosting gold-buying gatherings at private homes—like recession-era Tupperware parties…. “Everyone and their grandmother has a sign out saying, ‘We buy gold,’ ” said Ron Lieberman, the owner of Palisade Jewelers in Englewood, N.J. He estimates that 10 times as many people come into his store to sell gold now as when the metal was selling for $300 an ounce at the beginning of the decade…. “In Europe, people want physical gold to store themselves, with no documents,” said Bernhard Schnellmann, director for precious-metal services at Argor-Heraeus. Often, the company doesn’t know the ultimate destination of the bars it makes, only the identity of the bank in Zurich or London that is handling the order.
Which of course brings to mind another much-related century-trotting fad: Pirates!
“In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.” ~ John Dos Passos
I know I can always count on Andrew J. Bacevich, ever the fearless b.s.-detector, to make me question whatever foreign misadventure the US government—no matter who the Comandante en Jefe—is trying to sell the American people:
What is it about Afghanistan, possessing next to nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention? Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan’s importance is simply assumed—much the way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam…. Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how the British, Russians, or others have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.
