Given the heterodoxy of my political views, I am typically the last to cry out about creeping fascism. Nonetheless, I find this latest from the White House to be disturbing:

“WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 — President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

“In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.”

More at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/30/washington/30rules.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

My friend Kiran recently won the Booker Prize for her novel The Inheritance of Loss. She is the youngest woman to win the prize, and it was her first time being nominated.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/books/10wire-booker.html

She was in town about six months ago, so you locals missed your chance to meet her, when I mentioned it here.

German word of the week: Zweieinsamkeit, “graced-filled dual solitude.”

I got this from The Orientalist by Tom Reiss (Random House). It’s the biography of Lev Nussimbaum, a refugee, writer, and imposter–a Jew who became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany. He was the scion of an oil-rich family from Azerbaijan who lost their wealth in the Russian Revolution. They fled to Germany where Nussimbaum later took on the garb of a Muslim prince, calling himself “Essad Bey” and “Kurban Said,” and wrote novels and non-fictional adventure books set in the Caucasia, all while he dodged the Nazi pogrom. He later somehow ended up under Mussolini’s wing. The book ties together Jewish, Caucasian, Russian, German, and Italian history in an interesting manner and also explores the theme of Nussibaum’s–and the West’s–fascination with “the Orient.” I’ve just skimmed through a bit of it, and the account of German post-WWI chaos and Weimar art and decadence is very interesting.

 

“There was no rake~hell, no ruffian, no knaue, no villaine, no cogging raskall, but his hand was in with him.” –Angel Day, The English Secretary 44 (1586)

The title is a lyric from Tom Waits’ song “Jockey Full of Bourbon.” My hobbies are lifting weights, sophistry, and happy hour (just for the food).

More here later. Watch this space. Until then, read my livejournal: http://rakehell.livejournal.com/

I am finally getting around to reading Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration, 2001-2005 by Michael O’Hanlon (Brookings). My copy is the first edition which was published pre-9/11, but it is fascinating nonetheless, particularly his information regarding homeland defense, which appears quite prescient. He mentions Bin Ladin and Al-Qaeda for instance. I’ve only read a bit but I am impressed with the incisiveness of his mind. O’Hanlon also wrote an interesting piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago that detailed the four defense technology philosophies that are current in policy circles. The book has since gone through a couple of editions, and he has a newer book titled Defense Strategy for the Post-Saddam Era, which I believe is a continuation of essentially the same material.

Stepping on the Devil’s Tail

I’ve been reading some fascinating stuff about Hegel’s concept of lordship and bondage in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. It’s interesting because, to my mind, it explains a lot about the culture war between red and blue states. The red staters are still in search of replacements for their lost slaves. They cling to aristocratic pretensions of honor, clan pride, and bravery. Their sense of identity is derived from their domination of the other and their willingness to risk death. The blue states are inheritors of the “bourgeois revolution” of capitalism, which Fukuyama describes as a “slave revolt.” The slave gains his identity through his labor, in Hegel’s construction. There’s a lot to it that I’m still sorting out…. (Fukuyama has long been tagged as a neoconservative, but he has gone to the left over Iraq; opposing the war and voting for Kerry. This is an overlong piece about him: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=10304).

What is annoying about him is that, like a lot of conservatives, he tends to wring his hands about vague concepts that are of little consequence, implying somehow that they are pressing social issues. The neocon bioethics honcho Leon Kass was recently derided for complaining about people eating ice cream cones in public, insinuating that this was some sort of symptom of moral decay. Fukuyama makes a lot of similar noises. Good chunks of the The End of History and the Last Man ought to be repackaged and marketed to the self-help section–it is political psychology after all. Regardless, I do like some of the concepts he uses. Besides Hegel, he uses a Greek term and two variants on it: thymos, isothymos, and megalothymos. Thymos means the seeking of respect: blue staters do it via their work, red staters do it via their concept of identity. Isothymos is the seeking of identity via one’s status as an equal among others. Megalothymos is the seeking of identity via placing one’s status above others. He notes that personages such as Lenin or Trotsky sought to create an isothymotic society, yet they could only do so by being megalothymos themselves.

An old livejournal post:  

Jeez, at Noc Noc this weekend I had some guy try to pick a fight with me. I had accidently bumped into him and said I was sorry. Most people are in good humor about that sort of thing in a crowded club, but he wouldn’t let it drop. His schtick was so laughable, like he’d been watching too many Westerns where the bad gunslinger hangs out in saloons deliberately provoking fights. Or some Three Musketeers movie, where a duel is fought because someone brushes by you in the street. Addendum: another incident was reminiscent of Harvey Keitel’s character in The Duellists, some zhlob in the library last week was giving me grief because I was not being “a gentleman” to a lady. I’m going to have to watch that movie again to refresh my memory, because it was so similar to what happened, though somehow the Napoleonic Wars was a less incongruous setting.