Re: Waiting for Godot bis

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: [PEN-L] Waiting for Godot bis

one comment: for all else you can say about Dubya, he's not charismatic. He's learned to speak clearly and forceably (when there's a script), but charisma involves much more.

------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Aldo Matteucci [mailto:aldo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 4:13 PM
> To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [PEN-L] Waiting for Godot bis
>
>
> Dear Ken,
>
> Thanks for the encouragement.
>
> Style is all I got, the rest is social-democratic vCJ - I guess, you
> know, "old" Europe. Still better than stone-age Rumsfeld, if
> you ask me.
>
> On the specifics of the current political situation I feel a bit like
> Cicero at the end of the Roman Republic. I see Caesarism
> coming, and I'd
> like to stop it. Well, poor guy, he failed miserably. He was
> - like me -
> a fast talker and bit of a coward. He lost his head anyway, and a lady
> amused herself by piercing his tongue with pins.
>
> Why Bush in particular? Bush has a system at his command: an
> ideology, a
> devoted party (cum posse), massive economic interests, and is a
> charismatic leader (Nixon, on the other hand was too much of
> a loner to
> have more than rudiments of any of these elements). It
> matters to me that
> this system not be fitted in place permanently. Though I
> might wish to be
> in an egalitarian Paradise, I would still prefer to have reason not to
> fear deportation to Guantanamo, should I enter the US (it is
> difficult to
> avoid US territory when you fly, as I do, the Pacific). All right, I
> presume Gore too would have ordered my shoes sniffed, but if
> the machine
> can take, I can.
>
> True this tsunami looks unstoppable. And I'm not asking anyone to go
> about creating a mass movement. But we can prepare ourselves
> to ride the
> mass movement, should it emerge, and to ride it successfully, i.e. to
> give it meaningful direction, while acknowledging that we
> can't turn it
> into our preferred tool of social transformation. We have little time.
> Six months from now the opportunity might be gone, or never
> materialise.
>
> Where I part company with you - and others of the group - is where you
> state somewhat succintly: Movements are not directed by people. Let me
> explain.
>
> 'Movement' is a construct, a convenient shorthand for compressing the
> multifarious interactions into a term. Such shorthands were first
> developed in mechanics, and they worked in predicting how
> fast an apple
> would fall from the tree, and why. They worked because the determining
> factors involved were few, and their interactions were ruled by simple
> relations - mass, distance, and acceleration.
>
> At the latest since Plato the West tried 'the conquest of abundance
> inherent in human life and society' - in the words of Paul
> Feyerbabend -
> i.e. to distil essence behind contingence, to look beyond the shadows
> moving inside the cave and discern the unmoving truth. It is
> a Faustian
> bargain - the attempt to squeeze life's complexity into an
> eternal law.
> Forget it, and take squarely Margarethe by the hips - you'll enjoy it
> more.
>
> We are in the world of pure non-linear interaction systems. To draw
> predictive conclusions is pure sin of reification. By the
> same token that
> you'd refuse the use of 'intelligence' as an operable
> concept, you should
> refuse the use of 'movement' as an operable tool. The
> Chinese, ever the
> wise, knew that we could not draw conclusions from history. That's why
> they gathered anecdotes, leaving to the individual the
> responsibility of
> applying the analogy to the concrete situation.
>
> The factual experience is that people do make a difference - hence by
> Popper's law your assertion is falsified. By their stupidity - as when
> Marshall Ney rushed up the hill of Waterloo leaving the spikes for the
> British guns behind. He took the guns, but could not spike
> them, he was
> repulsed, the British started during the guns again, and the
> battle was
> lost. By chance - Krakatoa's explosion in ca. 550 AD brought
> the plague
> to Europe and weakened Byzantium to a point that it never
> recovered. The
> kingdom of Saba was destroyed and Islam could emerge along
> the new trade
> routes of the Arabian interior. Or by creating new
> technologies - as when
> my dear Swiss rolled down from the forest above logs and stones on the
> advancing Austrian armour at Morgarten and gained their freedom. And I
> could go on forever.
>
> History is a fascinating mix of structures, multiple layers, fractal
> recurrences and contingencies, and you can never sit back and
> assume that
> it will play itself out before our eyes in stately and scientifically
> predictable fashion. In Medieval times philosophers kept a
> skull on their
> desk to remind them of their vanity and inanity. I'd keep a
> model of the
> earth on my desk - without its oceans. It would then look like a
> misshapen pear, battered by meteorites, drawn apart by internal forces
> and imperfections. That's what life is all about. Life is no more than
> fluff in a corner of a poorly cleaned room.
>
> Conclusion? Sometimes people trigger movements like
> avalanches, sometimes
> they can ride them for a while, and sometimes 'movements' emerge
> spontaneously looking for a leader. You never know, and
> you'll never know
> unless you are prepared to look with much curiosity - and the
> wisdom to
> know when you better leave the hornet's nest alone.
>
> This being said, I agree that movements can have very old, or even
> unfathomable origins, and that you have to study history in depth to
> uncover these subterranean currents. E.g. it is my view that
> one of the
> sources of the resonance GWB enjoys today with the common people
> (particularly in the South) is the slavery experience. GWB
> did not know
> that when he set out about preaching the lynching of the
> terrorists. He
> stumbled upon this after 9/11. He saw that it worked. Like
> Hitler, he is
> a sublime opportunist.
>
> Since my youth my preferred toy was a kaleidoscope. No matter
> how much I
> turned it, I could never get the same pattern back. I was
> enchanted and
> frustrated at the same time.
>
> See you in a world of kaleidoscopes.
>
> Aldo
>
> PS - While waiting for Godot, what about a good shave with
> Occam's razor?
>