If I were an official, either a minor or a major official… the mere thought of it stirs my blood. I want to say, honestly, I would only want to be a corrupt official. Life as a corrupt official holds many pleasures. Treated as an equal among your fellow officials, welcomed in and sent off amid illustrious gatherings of distingushed guests, your macro-control would display great leaps of progress, even your pets would ascend to glory with you—-just thinking about it brings a surge of thrilling emotions.
From Ai Weiwei’s blog, 7.15.06
`In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in
political terms’ - Thomas Mann
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
W.B. Yeats
Romney’s problem is more acute. Romney has an authentic inauthenticity problem. There are some animals that just seem fake when you see them in real life for the first time; sharks and alligators come to mind. Last year, I took my daughter swimming with a dolphin. Not only did the creature look like it was made of plastic, it actually felt like it was made of rubber.
—
Has to be the funniest thing I’ve read about Romney. [via]
Torture in King Lear is conducted directly by rulers. Before Cornwall even gets his hands on Gloucester, he declares his intention to injure him, quite apart from the outcome of the process of interrogation:
Though well we may not pass upon his life
Without the form of justice, yet our power
Shall do a courtesy to our wrath, which men
May blame, but not control (3.7.24-27)
What is at once horrible and familiar about this declaration is its nauseating blend of legalism, sadism, and public relations, as if Cornwall were already thinking about how he will excuse the fact that there were regrettable excesses in his otherwise legal treatment of the prisoner.
from Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom - incredible reading of Gloucester’s blinding, post-Iraq. “Shakespeare’s audience was far less squeamish about the torture of traitors than we are - or than we Americans were until recently.”
At a dinner in 1998 honoring Robert Pinsky, President Clinton gave a speech in which he recalled his first encounter with poetry came in school when his teacher made him memorize certain passages of Macbeth. This was, he remarked wryly, not the most auspicious beginning for a life in politics.
After the speeches, I joined the line waiting to shake his hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating but before the whole thing had blown up. “Mr President,” I said, sticking out my hand, “don’t you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?”
Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, “I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object.”
from Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom.
There is a simple reason why most contemporary democratic systems focus their energy, and their discourse, on how social services are delivered in exchange for taxes.
Democratic citizens, with their well-stoked individual interests and the priority placed on their own families, need not possess any conception of civic virtue. They need not participate with vigor in public life; they need not even vote. Systems of fining people for not exercising their franchise, as in Australia and eleven other democracies around the world, confess a basic futility. Such fines are just taxation by other means, a price I am willing to pay to be left alone. They are the equivalent of a parking ticket whose cost I will shoulder as a tolerable contract expense, not as punishment for a genuine violation.
The reduction of all fines to prices and all obligations to tax burdens shows just how comprehensive is the transactional contamination of democracy. If citizens are really consumers, forever negotiating the shoals of tax evasion, then it is rational to game the system. Smarter players will take the contest up a level and realize that you can game the system’s dominant myths as well as its material realities. From this vantage, the American Dream is the biggest long con in the history of politics, and the ultimate form of regulatory capture is not buying out a watchdog agency or taming a subcommittee chairman; it lies in keeping the narratives of democratic legitimacy and economic opportunity alive even when all the facts are ranged against them.
Mark Kingwell
We have lost sight of the key lesson of all politics, which is that origins of political order are either insupportable, mysterious, or both. To know everything about the [Chinese] legal system, for example….is to still know nothing about why the state should ever have a monopoloy on the unpunished use of lethal violence.
Sooner or later all politics is realpolitik. And here, as Derrida said, discourse “meets its limit,” because there is “a silence walled up in the violent structure of the founding act.”
Mark Kingwell
Isocrates reminds me of John Dewey. He’s a mediocrity who’s usually right whereas Plato is a man of genius who’s always wrong. I think people are wrong in opposing Plato to Aristotle. Plato’s real rival is Thucydides, who unlike both and following Pericles, did not deify the state but regarded it as a convenience.
- Aduen, from The Table Talk of W.H. Auden
