Timothy Garton Ash, writing in The Guardian, has picked it:
Crucially, it was House Republicans who defied their president’s appeal. For some, the choice was ideological. They would rather die than vote for an expansion of government’s economic role which they regard as tantamount to socialism. No, Bolshevism. Listen to Representative Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan, chair of the House Republican policy committee and co-sponsor earlier this year of a resolution urging the president to make 2008 “The National Year of the Bible”, as documented in the Congressional record of Monday’s debate: “The choice is stark, and it was put forward in the book by Dostoevsky. In The Brothers Karamazov, the grand inquisitor came to Jesus and he said: ‘If you wish to subject the people, give them miracle, mystery and authority; but above all, give them bread.’“It has always been the temptation in a crisis especially to sacrifice liberty for short-term promises of prosperity, and it was no mistake that during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution the slogan was Peace, Land and Bread. Today you are being asked to choose between bread and freedom. I suggest that the people on Main Street have said that they prefer their freedom, and I am with them.”
Main Street Jesus against the Dostoevskyan Bolshevik bail-out. Who was it said American reality trumps its own fiction?
I’ve always thought the Grand Inquisitor, that simulacra of religious devotion was the perfect metaphor for the pious hypocrisy of those parts in the Republican Party who love the bread and circuses act of pious religosity.
2008 version of “Peace, Bread, Land.”
“SUV, Flat Screen, McMansion.”
Americans may have talked the talk on “freedom”, but they haven’t walked the walk. When the House of Reps caves and passes the Senate Bill, a slight flicker of a sardonic smile will flit across Lenin’s embalmed visage.
I don’t think so, Katz. Lenin wouldn’t have bothered collectivising failed banks. The socialist’s motto when it comes to nationalisations is “buy low, steal high”.
Well, yes Liam. Lenin was a naughty old expropriator.
I was referring to his acceptance of the political requirement to promise anything.
And that is exactly what Chimpo did. He said that unless the Congress did their duty, there’d be no SUVs, Flat Screens, and McMansions for anyone.
(This was after asking plaintively whether the best thing for him to do was to go out and tell the folks “that everything is ok”.)
The irony is that many Americans will lose their SUVs, Flat Screens, and McMansions no matter what Congress agrees to.
God knows where McCotter gained all his GOP righteousness - Michigan’s Democrat Governor, Jennifer Granholm has put enormous resources & effort into attracting new economy business into the mitt & can’t say I’ve heard McCotter hollering about that type of governmental interference in capital’s need to go with the flow.
Kinda funny too that McCain has just announced Michigan out of his race…
But McCotter is a good soldier for the rigtheous right, introducing this little doozie into the house last week (crisis, what crisis?)
Try again:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.Res.1510:
Marvelous writer that Dostoevsky is I don’t believe in a fallen humanity. A humanity made up of murderer’s and prostitutes. We are far from perfect but we’re also far from all being sinners of some sort or another. The theory of evolution ( properly supplemented with Kropotkin, Mendel and microscopes) explains this better than I can.
And in the final analysis Dostoevsky, himself rejects any ‘god’ that takes the live of anyone…especially any young girl-child. If there was such a god it would be necessary to destroy it. This is the greatness of Dostoevsky…and fiction.
As for ‘bread uber alles’
This has long been a Marxist standard even as they starved millions of poor peasants to death. The truth is that freedom of movement trumps even the most primitive need-to-feed. This is why Dostoevsky still talks to us… even as Marx and Engels ( and Liam ) just parrot dogmatic, inhuman nonsense.
Umm…., Gov Grandholm is a contender for history’s title of “worst governer ever of a US state”.
Gov Grandholm “attracting” new ANYTHING back into the state is a goddamned laugh! She has caused no end of people to hightail it out of there. Eventually only the bone idle & the hopeless will remain.
Gosh, steve, I didn’t know you were an expert on Michigan state politics.
Kim, Michigan (under Gov Grandholm) is the most interesting of all 50, you never know what is going to happen next!
Oh dear - that’s a cracker of a find Kim!
Thaddei are prone to wild statements, Possum!
SatP - point re Grandholm was that it being McCotter’s home state, his silence on government initatives there and his Henry V performance over the Paulson bill is an interesting study in contrasts.
And given that Michigan is “blessed” with over 30% of its economic output deriving from manufacturing, their economic woes are neither Grandholm’s fault nor for the fixin’, though she seems to be doing something right:
“Michigan scores particularly well in the trend regarding high-tech jobs as a
percentage of all jobs, where the state has moved up from a rank of 35th in 2002 to
20th in 2007, the second highest rate of positive change in the nation.”
From Centre for Local, State & Urban Policy, Univ of Michigan.
Sorry if everyone already thought this, but: These guys have the gall to call liberals elitist. I doubt Joe Sixpack has heard of Dostoevsky, let alone read him enough to understand the context.