January 2003
by Barry Stagg
If there is much to be learned from hanging around bookstores, then one certainty of the old year 2002 is that a lot of American cognoscenti and their provincial cousins in Canada are busy being part of the Hate America First Club. How else to explain the bright-eyed pronouncements of such as Lewis Lapham and John R. Saul,( Vice-Regal Consort Canada). Add in the usual accusations of Henry Kissinger as war criminal and George W. Bush as presidential pretender and you have the intellectual menu for last year.
It seems that most of us are none too smart and easily led at that. In our foggy ignorance,we failed to see the insidious imperialism and demagoguery of the Americans, practiced by these fiends of consumerism ever since Harry Truman said the word and Hiroshima and Nagasaki became nuclear testing grounds. If only the International Criminal Court had existed in 1945, then our world would have been so much different, and all for the better. Truman, an early Democratic version of the present day Republican 'moron', would have been indicted and convicted of crimes against humanity, not to mention ethnic profiling and gross cultural insensitivity. Alas, alas, alas, the world did not unfold as such and we are all the poorer for it.
On to specifics or at least an excerpt from a recent PBS interview,
with Mr. Lapham (post the November Congressional elections) found
at this convenient
link to the PBS Web site :
"MOYERS: Who do you think won
on Tuesday night?"
LAPHAM:" Well, I think the Republicans won and I think the
oligarchy won."
MOYERS: "Oligarchy."
LAPHAM:" Yes. I think that the Congress represents what I would
call the frightened rich, the people who think that the democratic
experiment has served its purpose, run its course, gone far enough.
"
"And here we are, we will now protect ourselves with...behind gated
communities or with such steep differences between incomes that we
will be forever safe. And or with an invincible army that will...or
an invincible homeland security department that will protect us
against death and time."
"And so I think that the election that Bush appealed to the
country's weakness and fear, not to its courage and strength, and
for the moment, I think that the message of weakness and fear found
a sympathetic hearing."
Great gobbly gumptions: Lapham sounds like my old table of drinking buddies from MUN days, back in the seventies. We blamed society as we are told, now and then, in a cliched joke about our student naivete, not to be confused with our stupidity, mind you. But wait a minute, Lewis L. blames society too, so we weren't fools, just prophets drinking Black Horse before its proper time to be trendy and clever. Lewis blames society,Lewis blames......
Enough of this or Mark Steyn will be getting wind of nasty interlopers spreading rumours about fools ,idiots and pundits dressed up in the clothes of prophets and spewing sophomoric platitudes about it all being the fault of insensitive toilet training and the rest of the Freudian book of etiquette for neurotics that distils down to absolution through self-flagellation and/or projected flagellation or some other alleged profundity. This can only lead to a Canadian example from John Ralston Saul, once the word profundity is worked in close to a reference to flagellation of any sort.
This is Mr. Saul in a 1997 interview:
"If you spend a lot of time training kids on machines,
you
know perfectly well that by the time they get out of school, the
machines are going to be obsolete."
"In the meantime, they haven't learned how to dance on one foot and
think of six things at once, which is what they'll need to do in an
unstable, changing world economy, where they're going to have to
move their career five or six times in different directions.
Philosophy is far more useful than turning a machine off and
on."
Thank God that I did that Arts degree and kept my copy of Plato, otherwise there would be no antidote to the antics of these nefarious neoconservatives, Mike Harris and Ralph Klein, the objects of Mr. Saul's dismissive comments on technical training and education. Again, it seems as if the boys quaffing the beer on Tuesday nights just a week before final exams had it right: Ignorant dummies are the cause of it all, just ask Lapham and Saul. Rhyming is serendipitous and accidental.
Lewis Lapham, the long-time editor of Harper's magazine is a genuine public intellectual who has
fallen into a sophisticated trap: He is professionally contrarian toward the very liberal democracy
that maintains him, to the point of being effectively a moral relativist. Saul, one of Canada's
professionally profound also finds a calling in deprecating the border keepers of Western culture.
The words of American historian
Victor Hanson are a counterbalance to these esteemed men and their positions:
"We need to
be reminded of the tragic limitations of the human condition-and how rare Western culture is in its
efforts to ameliorate the savagery innate to all people at all times".
(Quoted from An Autumn of War, Victor Hanson, Anchor Books, NewYork, 2002)
To conclude: These fellows have taken the snobbery of the lower rank academy and projected a world view that amounts to insulated contempt, ridiculing the gaucherie of those who man the barricades. Table manners and a dress code are everything: George W. Bush is right to ignore the lot of them.
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