Prompt: scraping up the Clinton scandals one mo’ time.
Response regarding cultures of power and the powerful politician:
There also are and have been multiple political cultures feeding up to but also drawing on the manners of the powerful of state.
Should we dredge all the way back to Henry VIII? Or Louis XIV? Or Thomas Jefferson?
Regarding the Clintons and perhaps others, I would rank accomplishment in authentic community care and concern far above personal peccadilloes and incautious personal stupidity for the purpose of voting. I’d rather have a good civic spirit in office than a seedy authoritarian of the kind too common in the world.
For referencing other web content so often and so much, BackChannels has practically stopped expressing its own logic and sensibility. Therefore and herewith a few observations related to the now infamous and nationally degrading accusations aimed at the world’s — not only America’s — major high-integrity media (even the famed “Gray Lady” has been the target of somebody’s half-packed mud balls).
First, choose your own preferred mode in contemporary governance:
Feudal Political Absolutism
Modern Checked and Democratic Distribution of Power
That should be easy, but if you’re up to your chinny chin chin in loot, corporate or illicit (or both), and have been the object of generous favor by some singular power, then weighing the options (starting with making a little to a lot less money) may be more difficult.
Let’s move on.
Dictatorship should be oh so 20th Century by now. If a citizen of the old EU / NATO experience, you have seen it, defeated it — Franco, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin et al. — lived through it, or at least heard about it and thought as much gone with the Cold War and done, finished, and dead in the west. If respectful of the American flag and those of others aligned with it in spirit, then perhaps you have been also respectful of the war dead whose sacrifice has enabled this very freedom to read and write with earnest and responsible intent.
In short, you may know and love freedom of speech — “Press Freedom” — as intended and practiced and appreciated.
And yet here I / you / we are confronted by an “information space” packed with the must vulgar of accusations: those institutions wholly devoted to reason and truth, so much has been inferred, have reverted to malicious invention.
It ain’t so, Joe.
Something has been sabotaged, gone wrong, thrown off course in relation to common confidence in America’s political discourse and news, but is that to be blamed on the many communities of best educated editors and writers and remarkably informed, sharp, and thoughtful readers?
An American homily may apply: “He who points the finger should point it back at himself.”
For how long should the sins of the fathers be visited on their sons?
It’s a timeless question.
To forestall the reemergence of similar evil, the answer is “forever”; to facilitate the doing of good, perhaps the answer should be “Not one more day.”
When I was a little boy recently moved into a new suburb, the still plain dirt yard of a neighbor’s new house and the clean siding of the same proved a too tempting target for the neighborhood’s eight-year-old mudslingers.
Kids.
It’s different with kids, of course.
How different adults are from children in their expanded powers, and yet how similar (in history and today) when it comes to a malicious thoughtlessness and “everyone else was doing it.”
Knowing how the Nazis worked as an infernal mafia, one may sympathize with the family business that intended to stay in business through the Nazi Era and now lives with the long hangover from a bad case of “civilizational narcissism” (reference Mobarak Haider’s work on the Taliban for more about that).
To the end of his life, my father who may have possessed a personality formed in the Depression Era and WWII, would not buy major manufactured German anything.
If today is different, it needs to be kept different and the past firmly consigned to the political period between The Great War and the end of the even greater insanity that came to its end for Germany 72 years ago.
Related Online
Accusation and guilt prove perennial if — or if not — haunting.
Since there is good and evil in all of us, may God grant us the compassion and wisdom to see the good and not the evil.
Correction:
“Since there is good and evil in all of us, may God grant us the compassion and wisdom to know the good and do it and not the evil.”
Language: such statements may be about our capacity for the doing of good and evil, and what may be most important, day by day, decision by decision, is that we do good and care to lean toward what is good.
The Persian Faravahar has come to my mind as symbolic of both the tension between good and evil and the taking of the direction of the good.
The awesome conversation has been working around the issue of virtue in other threads. BackChannels’ own political virtues have long been posted near the top of the left sidebar: Compassion, Empathy, Justice, Humility, Inclusion, Integrity.
In Wikipedia, one may find listed the “Cardinal Virtues“: “Prudence, Temperance, Courage, Justice”.
Of course, there are other characterizations of what is good, but all may be reduced to {normative values x context / intentions} and good intentions further reduce to loving consideration and thoughtfulness. Hillel the Elder distilled all of that into one golden expression:
“That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another.”
Barbaric cultures of cruelty complicate our lives as do the insatiable needs of the malign narcissists who set their lowest standards and tones, but even within those one hopes the good will continue striving to be so.
Authors should have responsibilities in relation to God, nature, and mankind — and those who have survived the ages have and do, although one has to be flexible as regards the great breadth of great libraries.
In 1933 Engelbert Dolfuss seized power in the name of Austrofascism, which gave way to Nazi fascism in 1938 with the Anschluss. Hitler, who moved to Vienna from Linz in upper Austria, had been transfixed by Schoenerer and, particularly, Lueger. He hungrily absorbed all his hero’s complaints about the Jews and the mixing of “races”; he called the Viennese a “repulsive bunch”. Thus liberal Vienna had produced its exact opposite: militant nationalism and anti-Semitism. During the interwar years these forces gradually took hold of the new Austria and from the 1920s onwards many began to flee abroad. One of the last out, in 1938, was Freud.
Magnificent article on Vienna’s most glorious days and its lasting contributions to western art and culture. As this is BackChannels, the note, however, picks up on the irony of developing a liberal state only to find it encouraging a transformation in the direction of fascist enterprise.
The Constitution emphasizes equality for all beneath the law and forbids the establishment of a relationship between the state and any church, mosque, synagogue, or other symbol of faith. ALL are free here to practice their faith — in private and at private expense — in a civil and lawful manner.
The United States is a Christian-majority state, but it is not a Christian state by law or even exclusively so within the spirit of its laws. It’s true inheritance may be characterized as “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian”. To the extent that Islam has borrowed from Judaism and recognized Christianity and in the better aspects of the Qur’an, say those emphasizing freedom of religion (“There is no compulsion”) and integrity (Muhammad’s emphasis speaking the truth), we’re good as a secular humanist society.
If one were to take the coldest view of the political science attending “Allahu Akbar Terrorism”, it would be to note that each attack has naturally promoted traditional patriotic nationalist and religious responses. “Damned Arabs, damned Muzzies” shouts a part of the public and off it goes to Brexit in one state and resurgent white bread Christianity in another.
The truth about that comfortable extremism — often our own! — may be anchored elsewhere.
Hamas spokesman Ismail Radwan told Al-Monitor, “The Meshaal-Lavrov meeting shows Russia’s interest in the Palestinian cause and comes as a continuation of the periodic meetings held by Hamas with regional and international parties. However, there were no discussions in the meeting regarding the possibility of Russia playing the role of a mediator to reactivate the reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas, although Lavrov and Meshaal have stressed its importance in general.”
This blog also may be searched for “Russia, anti-Semitism” for further enrichment — but as much may return this note to the wisdom of secular governance and its producing for all of its constituents equality under the law and zero, zilch, nada, never ever compulsion to either choose an “official religion” nor feel intimidated in the classroom or anywhere else as regards having by way of choice or legacy a different minority path.
