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he rich man and all the compromises one must make to become wealthy considered even honored by others things we would never normally excuse others will wantonly excuse in the pursuit of power people we would willingly embrace we would tear apart once objectified as an diabolical other we manufacture hatred because we have no charity ourselves politics in america just seems to bring this fatal personal flaw in people to the fore in ways i d never imagined even five years ago much less 10 or 20 years ago when i got started again they don t want to be helped only fed i have thought a great deal about keeping a diary the same way victor klemperer did during the rise of fascism in germany and the concurrent arrival of the communists in east germany both claimed to be utopias neither had conscience and we seem absolutely bound and determined to create american versions of each who wins this fight certainly not the people yet there is a presentation of inevitability in the contest participate in politics they say lest you be governed by evil men the counterpoint better to be insane with the mob than sane alone for myself i see this wave of creative destruction in our institutions and society proglumated by people with rotten souls and malformed minds both sides chasing appetites knowing what the rich man knows that it is far easier to steal than it is to build can there be a politics when rational discourse is reduced to pathos on the left and ethos on the right that narrow field for logic and discourse logos seems to be growing more and more narrow by the day one gets the sense that people don t even really believe what they say they believe anymore provided it either carries their tribe to victory or denies it to those whom they profess to dislike to keep such factions in line roman emperors used to resort to colors such as blues and greens and then force them towards civic projects the key point here that an emperor was required to keep faction down i am reminded of a recent biography on secretary of defense james mattis that one can still find in bookstores the title of this book was rather quaint no greater friend no worse enemy i m sure a good number of folks in both parties got a chest thumping hurrah out of such a title without even considering where it was from or whom it references the line is sulla s epitaph the man who overthrew rome s corrupt leadership and restored some sense of constitutional law before pompey and caesar engaged in their death struggle to rule a dangerous sentiment indeed one imagines who wins and loses fostering such thoughts but i assure you it will not be the common man rather it will be some apparatchik or group thereof who see this as a game they can win ignorant of how to govern and willfully blind to the consequences of stupid schopenhauer used to argue that intellect is invisible to the man who has none the same could be true for individuals in power the same is definitely true for a mob yet when even the best and brightest set down their pens for fear of retribution when some of the best journalism in recent memory is drowned out by a series of fake news either state sponsored or privately fostered when honest opinions and legitimate thought are muzzled and pay to play hackers and the rage of feelings is the norm euripides wrote in his tragedy the bacchae how the young women of thebes whipped into an ecstatic frenzy by dionysus ends up killing pentheus with his own mother helping to rip him apart using their bare hands the ecstasy wears off and the maenads see what they have done pentheus own mother agave still in an ecstatic state presents her son s head to the king believing it to be the head of a mountain lion as the ecstatic frenzy wears off agave sees what she has done and is exiled for it dionysus himself leads a barbarian horde to wipe out the city of thebes in vengeance now we might lie to ourselves and suggest that our petty principles really are about the future deep down we know they aren t euripides is a warning about what happens when we whip ourselves into a frenzy and put principles over values one might say pathos over ethos will we learn five years ago i was more hopeful today it is harder to cut through the noise to even have the discussion one sees more bacchanalia than discourse i m afraid posted in essays comments off on on the bacchae and discourse in america in the end the world will break your heart posted on october 14 2018 by shaun kenney i don t think there s any point in being irish if you don t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually i guess that we thought he had a little more time daniel patrick moynihan 1963 mise éire i am lonelier than the hag of beara great is my glory i who bore the brave cúchulainn great is my shame my own children who sold their mother great is my pain my bitter foes who terrorize me without end great is my sorrow the hope i placed in my people died mise éire i am lonelier than the hag of beara padraic pearse mise eire 1912 the hidden conceit of every writer is that we always hope that there will be one essay just one completely coherent thought that will actually crystallize opinion and change the way people view the world ideally for the better needless to say the world seems to have become much more coarse since the early naughties when the internet was brave and new i have been writing in virginia for about 15 years now the world was a better place for ideas back then as social media such as it was consisted of books ideas art culture and so forth then came twitter the mythological school of athens we thought digital media would provide us after the straightjacket our legacy media outlets continued to cram us into simply dissolved into the coliseum in some sense social media has been a net positive though one does lament the demise of newsprint to some degree the legacy media did bring it upon themselves too sclerotic to improvise too angry at digital media for stealing advertising revenue they believed was sacrosanct too livid at digital media for stealing their work only to turn it into commentary yet in many ways the newcomers simply imitated the sins of the past with our attempts to institutionalize and our narrow editorialization of the news bloggers that eponymous term for all things print media despises simply imitated the standard they recognized as print media declined and digital media interposed journalists of the old school yielded to rank reporters of the new imitators of a legacy but pale ones at that meanwhile the opinion class merrily chirped away for myself i find it much more difficult to justify writing on current affairs it s boring for a start moreover the only way we seem to have any impact is if we are absolutely savaging our opposition be it internal or external moreover it s what our reporters expect from us if it bleeds it leads isn t a term that we invented after all the sad truth is that opinion leaders really aren t leading a damn thing anymore to quote one such leader of the french revolution there are my people i must find out where they are going so i can lead them such is our pathetic excuse for political leadership today that we find that our elected officials are more courtesans than statesmen conservatives love to pound the table that we are more republic than democracy yet one wonders whether this is true in practice anymore of course l affaire kavanaugh brought us a determinate contact point regarding mob justice neither side was really invested in the idea of getting to the bottom of things both sides merely crammed facts into their hypothesis and let the chips fall where they may yet much more serious to me was the fact that in real time we watched as senate democrats finally cashed out the very last penny from the public trust i don t believe that the progressive left truly understands the damage they have done before september 2018 republicans at least made a pretense that the democrats really would observe due process instead we were treated to a spectacle of shame followed by the outrageous behavior of a mob pounding on the doors of the u s supreme court some have said that if the democrats truly believed that the u s constitution represented the values of white supremacy and rape culture they would be arming themselves and actually holding a revolution not merely intimating violence yet that intimation of violence is precisely the problem in the week after the kavanaugh confirmation the political talking point was to act like trump the chattering classes on the left at first tried to fob this off as metaphor then pounced upon a pennsylvania governor s remarks that of course could not possibly be metaphor what bothers me intensely is that we are getting to point in this country where we are treating our neighbors as a metaphor this metaphorical they is looking to steal your income deny you basic human rights even enslave you to their will in many ways the father of identity politics wasn t barack obama though his campaign certainly weaponized it in a way we have never quite seen before in modern american politics rather the idea that one is either with us or with the terrorists was a talking point of president george w bush many will argue that we have seen such times before japanese internment camps during the second world war anti german laws during the first world war the suspension of habeus corpus by president lincoln the confiscation of loyalist property during and after the revolutionary war yet if the end state is really a condition between us and them who are us senator ben sasse pens this article for the wall street journal wondering whether loneliness is the condition that is afflicting american society lone li ness is every where in the u s across every sec tor of so ci ety a sur vey of more than 20 000 amer i can adults con ducted ear lier this year by the health in surer cigna and the mar ket re search firm ip sos found that a ma jor ity of us are lonely based on re sponses to the ucla lone li ness scale the high est scores were re ported by the youngest adults ages 18 to 22 the re searchers de scribe it as a lone li ness epi demic none of this should sur prise us amer i cans to day have fewer shared projects than our par ents and grand par ents did and we be long to fewer civic groups be cause we change jobs more of ten we have fewer last ing work friend ships we de lay mar riage have fewer chil dren and live in larger homes more sep a rate from those of our neigh bors we move from place to place for re la tion ships eco nomic op por tu nity and bet ter weather and we end up with eco nomic op por tu nity and bet ter weather some good things to say here but i think ben sasse misses the point it s not loneliness that is plaguing the american public but mediocrity in short we have become a vulgar boring people and you can see it every day on social media legacy media commercials entertainment sports etc our loneliness isn t the problem we re just not interesting anymore neither to ourselves or to one another so we have to manufacture virtue rather than work on becoming better more interesting people turns out virtue can t be purchased so we opt for wit humor condescension and the like rather than insight relevance and dialogue is it a problem of education perhaps so what i do know is this the solution here is very simple but it s not easy empathy and character only get folks to a certain point but they are useless without dialogue and while we have taught ourselves that emotive is rewarding and disengagement is the best defensive measure rarely do people discuss ideas trying to understand the perspective of they but rather with the objective of asserting the power of us perhaps this is the logic of power and perhaps power is always a zero sum game where anyone outside of us is a pathogen to the body politic that must at all cost be destroyed yet as i grow older and re read the things i have written in the past one concept occurs as inescapable that i am a christian personalist in a world that is neither christian nor personal for instance most people will readily identify themselves as republican or democrat whereas i would places such terms in the very last of the ordinal hierarchy of labels a conservative before i am a republican a virginian before i am a conservative a christian before i am a virginian and my catholicism as the fullest expression of who i am and what i believe that s me my family my core i have been a tremendous fan of montaigne s essais ever since picking them up many years ago in fact the proto blogger himself and the father of the essay sadly more recently i have found myself picking up and reading through victor klemperer s essays and diaries he collected as he survived nazi germany before enduring the german democratic republic my thoughts have been drifting towards the spanish civil war and its root causes the grasp for power the decline of institutions the blind fanaticism of the spanish nationalists fascists and the spanish republicans communists one can only imagine how fr jose maria escriva must have thought during that time as he was founding opus dei enduring both the persecution of the communists and the recriminations of the fascists one of my favorite films of all time is fritz lang s 1927 metropolis which begins with the epigram the mediator between the head and the hands is the heart thea von barbou lang s wife who penned the script for metropolis had the catholic church in mind as that institution which welds the aristocracy to the demos yet even a cursory look at the catholic church both in america and in europe finds a catholicism convulsed by the power struggles of secular religions interposing upon the sacred one is either a conservative catholic or a liberal catholic i am neither i just want to be a catholic it is difficult to see things one believe as settled be overturned in a matter of years once upon a time i did not believe that racists could occupy positions of power in the republican party much less in virginia and i was wrong once upon a time i believed that violence in the public square was something to be abhorred by both sides of the political spectrum and i am being proven wrong again i believed and was taught that what was unique about america was that we would allow 100 guilty men to go free if it prevented the conviction of one innocent man whereas the soviets would plow through 100 innocent men to get to a guilty one and i see that spirit dead in america today i believed that to be a good catholic one had to feed the poor visit the sick clothe the naked rebuke the oppressor and hunger for righteousness and i see that our own bishops do not believe much less practice this most of all i believed in a certain jeffersonian optimism that if people were given the tools to be self sufficient and create better lives for themselves and their families they would one feels as if this presupposition ...
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