No Excuse

Tonight marks a number of milestones. Among them, it's the end of 2006 and the beginning of Eclectica's second decade online. What I'd like to do with this essay, at the risk of self-aggrandizing, is look back on the last ten years through the lens of some of the essays I've written for the magazine. I want to do this not just because I think the exercise might provide an interesting framework, but because I find there have been a curious number of things happening lately that remind me of topics I've explored in the past. Some connections are tenuous, some nonexistent, but there are at least a few that should resonate. My first of what I used to loosely call editorials touched upon the first Gulf War and Fukuyama's essay, "The End of History?" Looking back, my interpretation of this now famous touchstone for neo-conservative thinking was in some ways naive, in others off the mark. Agreeing with what I took to be his general premise, that the dye of human history had largely been cast, I asked, "What's the point of having another Superbowl when we've already had nearly thirty of them? How pointless is it going to be when we reach Superbowl five-hundred?" Reading Fukuyama now, I see that he wasn't arguing in 1989 that there would be no more drama, change, or conflict in store for the human race. His arguments were more confined to an esoteric extension of Hegelian and Marxist philosophy, and he meant that all subsequent drama, change, and conflict would be in service of the inevitable triumph of Western liberal democracy. But he did say something at the end of his essay about how mankind might just start history up again out of sheer boredom, which I suppose validates my Superbowl comment. Fukuyama is now on the Board of Directors of the New America Foundation, and he has distanced himself from his neo-conservative brethren who advocated the invasion of Iraq as part of a larger plan to speed up the democratization (i.e., end of history) process using bunker busters and Hum-vees. An Elegiac Look at Education Interplanetary Commute -- Gates, Brangelina, and Virgin Galactic Dead Man Talking -- Hanging Hussein Hoop Musing -- Guys I play with now? Wild at Heart Revisited -- Strangely Enough, Part of Me Still Wants to be Famous!? -- The Queen Greetings -- email (gift for my mom) and phone customer service ("unusually high call volumes") I followed that with an essay entitled "Sometimes I Wish I Lived on a Houseboat." Direct marketing Coffee... The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm * Francis Fukuyama is deputy director of the State Department's policy planning staff and former analyst at the RAND Corporation. This article is based on a lecture presented at the University of Chicago's John M. Olin Center and to Nathan Tarcov and Allan Bloom for their support in this and many earlier endeavors. The opinions expresses in this article do not reflect those of the RAND Corporation or of any agency of the U.S. government. This fifty years of opposition to fascism and communism provided us with clear moral and political goals, but they were negative. We took our orientation from the evil we faced, and it brought out the best in us. The threat from outside disciplined us inside while protecting us from too much depressing reflection on ourselves. The global nature of the conflicts we were engaged in imposed an unprecedented uniformity on the world. It has been liberalism - or else. The practical disaster of the anti-liberal Right and Left has in general been taken to be a refutation of the theories which supported or justified them. Now, however, all bets are off. The glance back towards ourselves, as Fukuyama indicates, is likely to be not entirely satisfying. It appears that the world has been made safe for reason as understood by the market, and we are moving toward a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men's bodily needs and whims. The world has been demystified, and at the end of history all the struggles and all the higher dedications and myths turn out to have served only to satisfy the demands of man's original animality. Moreover, with the loss of our negative pole of orientation, one can expect a profuse flowering of positive demands, liberated from Cold War sobriety and reflecting the non-rationalized residue of human longing. There will be movements agitating for the completion of the project of equality in all possible, and impossible, ways. Religion and nationalism will also be heard from in the name of higher callings. http://www.wesjones.com/eoh_response.htm * Allan Bloom was a professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The problem with people like Fukuyama and Bloom is that they are too far up in their ivory towers of intellectual isolation to fully appreciate micro-realities about which they are macro-theorizing. A rhetorical sleight of hand may cover oneself on paper, but glibly talking about how facing the evils of fascism and communism "brought out the best in us" fatally overlooks the ugly details of what that "best" included, such as the CIA-backed toppling of Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953, the "blowback" of which eventually led to 9/11 destruction. The problem with the nuanced, admittedly brilliant theorizing of people like Fukuyama is that people like Bush can't begin to understand them beyond the Cliff's Notes level, and people like Wolfowitz, Kristol, and Perle--people who are enough smarter than Bush to be really dangerous, are sadly too lacking in intelligence to implement these ideas without creating history-altering messes like Iraq. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blowback_CJohnson/Blowback_BCJ.html Justice. If someone in a position of power is involved in the deliberate misleading of millions of people, resulting in premeditated, deliberate loss of life, then that person should face criminal charges of mass murder. A man who yells "Fire!" in a crowded theater where there is no fire is liable for the resulting mayhem. A doctor who fails to assist someone in a medical emergency can be prosecuted. Why, then, should a tobacco company executive who testifies before Congress that nicotine is not addictive, when evidence proves the same executive not only knew that nicotine WAS addictive, but that he deliberately marketed his products to young people in the hopes they WOULD become addicted, and that same executive knew that his product was likely to cause disease and death on a global scale... why should that individual not be held personally and criminally accountable for HIS transgressions? If it is against the law in many countries for people to deny the holocaust occurred, as it probably should be, then why is it okay for people to deny that global warming is happening? Particularly when we're talking about certain public servants cum business executives cum elected officials who knowingly mislead the public and manipulate scientific reports specifically to protect certain industry concerns at the expense of millions of natural disaster victims who would not otherwise have died had global climate change due to CO2 emissions not created a flood or a hurricane or a drought or even, God forbid, an ice age. I'm just saying that there ought to be accountability for lying when that lying is deliberate, done from a position of authority and/or public trust, and results in needless death and destruction. The latest brushfire in education centers around child obesity. A school district in Maryland sent letters to parents informing them that their children were overweight. Apparently, a bunch of those parents were "outraged" that school officials would be so mean, and that they would think it was their place to educate parents on an issue like this, in spite of the fact that obesity, and particularly child obesity, is out of control and the number one health threat we face as a nation. A few years ago there was a drive by similarly-minded parents to ban the game of dodgeball from gym classes. The thinking in these and other cases seems to be that if our children are lazy, close-minded, selfish, cowardly, rude, ignorant, or anything else we might reasonably consider negative, the last thing we'd want to do as parents, school officials, or society would be to try to do something to correct them. Apparently, it's much better to prop up a kid's precious self-esteem, not by giving him any reason to actually be proud of himself, but by making sure he never has to face his own shortcomings. Dog psychologists recognize that puppies learn valuable lessons at a very early age when they must compete with litter mates for food. The struggle for access to their mother's milk actually teaches puppies resilliency, patience, anger-control... One expert, xxxx, suggests xxxx as a technique to help mold good temperament. We know that a child who is overly protected from germs will in the long run have a weaker constitution than the child who is exposed to illnesses and able to build a stronger immune system. Why don't we look at these very basic examples of biological reality and realize that the more we coddle and indulge our children, the more our society is going to rot from the inside out? Dog behavioralist Cesar Milan, AKA "The Dog Whisperer," advocates exercise, discipline, and affection, in that order, to achieve healthy, balanced dogs. Parents would do well to apply this approach to rearing their children, as opposed to television, denial, and placation. Aside from terrorists, there are two very scary groups of people in the world. They are anti-semites and anti-Islamists. If for some reason you're skeptical of their existence or prevalence, take a few minutes to peruse a half-dozen message boards of your choosing. For a guaranteed hate-fest, pick thread topics like Saddam's hanging, Iran's nuclear program, or the Palestinian Israeli conflict. At first glance, it's hard to imagine these people aren't actually on the same side. In fact, they probably would be except for the fact that aligning with either the Jews or the Arabs enables them to hate the other faction that much more. My theory is that with the recent decline of the Republican right wing, there are a lot of racist hicks in this country who suddenly feel less certain of their superiority and sense of entitlement. The boundaries of the Wal-Mart parking lot are closing in on them, and it's time to get real earnest about finding people to subjugate in order to make themselves feel better. The anti-Islamists are especially into never showing weakness. It's all about making the "dune coons," as they call them, cower in fear of the might USA. Only when we let the xxxx think that we're weak will they dare to hijack planes and fly them into our buildings. They apparently dismiss the possibility--and I say apparently because I've never seen one of them even acknowledge the possibility in order to dismiss it--that what really drives people to blow themselves up in an effort to get at us is precisely that we are so "strong," and that we've been demonstrating our "strength" for generations by killing people and manipulating governments with impunity. For every action, there is a reaction. What, I wonder, will be the reaction a decade from now to our show of "strength" in Iraq. We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here. And yet, in the process, we're increasing exponentially the number of people who will hold as their life's purpose the hope of someday bringing the battle back to the good ol' USA. Is it just me, or does the term "troop surge" sound a lot like the Battle of the Bulge? Yet another example of Bush administration neo-fascist wordsmithing, like Fatherland, I mean Homeland Security? Well, the Battle of the Bulge turned out well for the U.S. in the end, didn't it? Of course, we were on the receiving end of that one. In 198x, Stephen Seagal penned a warning into the script of his film "Above the Law." He said, xxxx. Bill Gates, along with his wife and Bono, were Time Magazine's People of the Year in 2005. Brad and Angelina, Clooney... Elan Musk (?) and Virgin Galactic... Most impressive of all, famed wealth accumulator (not the Cheeseburger in Paradise guy). This year, catering to our narcissistic impulses, Time gave the nod to all of us who use the Internet, which is pretty much all of us on the planet.