The Bushies are the new postmodernists.
Julian Borger in The Guardian [no link available]:
When it comes to news and facts… the Bush Republicans are committed relativists. In their eyes, generally speaking, there is no single truth out there waiting to be discovered, but rather competing points of view of the same reality. Your convictions or your faith will determine the view you choose.
During last year’s election campaign a senior aide to President Bush dismissively informed a prominent journalist and author, Ron Suskind, that he and his fellow journalists were “in what we call the reality-based community”.
The aide explained: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left just to study what we do.”
Witness also the the rebranding of America Naomi Klein writes about.
No wonder Jurgen Habermas called postmodernists “the young Conservatives”…
Naomi Klein wrote:
“The only idea that has ever stood up to kings, tyrants and mullahs in the Middle East is the promise of economic justice, brought about through nationalist and socialist policies of agrarian reform and state control over oil. But there is no room for such ideas in the Bush narrative, in which free people are only free to choose so-called free trade.”
I would have thought that nationalism and socialism have been two of the very destructive ideas of modern times. Free trade under the rule of law would appear to offer the best road to peace, freedom and prosperity and one would like to know whether Naomi Klein is in favour of free trade or whether she is critical of the US for being hypocritical about free trade (which is a fair call).
As for Jurgen Habermas, and his colleagues Adorno et al, what a waste of space. One can only hope that the hopeless and confused mess of unhelpful verbiage that they have created will signal the end of that particular road so the next generation can try something different. Did any of them ever say anything intelligible about free trade under the rule of law? Did they ever explain why Germany recovered so quickly after WW2 and why the economy is in such deep trouble at present?
Rafe. Yes, indeed. Habermas wrote a treatise entitled “On Free Trade: A Metaphysics of Export-Import”. It revolutionised international trading relations and according to many allowed the conceptualisation at the end of the 20th century of the possibilities of free-trade agreements and tariff reduction programs.
Without Habermas you’d be still eating hamburgers with pineapple and beetroot in them.
But you do hit on a sore point in that Habermas has refused to be drawn on the question of the Germany’s low rate of GDP increase. Many scholars believe Jurgen is about to publish the culmination of his life’s work in a pamphlet which will argue that the over-reliance on the thought of Adorno and Marcuse within the German central bank has stifled micro-economic reform.
But then, I’d have thought that a scholar such as yourself would have been on top of all this?
Thanks wbb, actually I suffer from the usual problem of the autodidact, the self-taught scholar, namely there are huge gaps in my reading and some obviously important things get left out until someone is kind enough to point me in the right direction. Also I mispronounce a lot of names and technical terms, like the old school of self-educated trade unionists!
But did Habermas acknowledge the work of earlier free traders, not only those of the twentieth century but the Manchester school and before that Adam Smith?
PS What is the problem with beetroot in a hamburger?
There’s nothing wrong with beetroot in a hamburger, in fact its the ‘strine’ thing to put in a hamburger. (The only problem comes up if you’re wearing light-coloured clothes.)
The important question is, why do people feel so strongly about their pineapples and beetroot? They’ve got a national significance in an economy of hamburgers dominated by extremely large chain companies. It’s taken McDonalds nearly thirty years in Australia to even bother responding to the national sentiment for beetroot, come up with a beetroot hamburger. Some victory for competition!
Huge corporations like McD’s also form empires and create their own reality. There are two generations of Australians who associate hamburgers with soft sugary buns, rather than crusty bread, with Coca-cola rather than milkshake or beer, and with franchises run by fifteen-year olds, rather than cafes run by Greek immigrants. It’s actually been more effective for them to change the tastes of two generations of Australians, rather than respond to a ‘national’ taste.
Now that’s creation of reality.
I still don’t understand beetroot in hamburgers. I just don’t get it. How did it become Strine?
Probably because we are good at beetroot. I remember fantastic fresh beetroot from the home garden in Tasmania!
Well said Liam!
I think the beetroot thing might come from the dietary habits of our more isolated forbears — my grandma, who grew up west of Bourke, still serves up a salad consisting of tinned beetroot, pineapple rings, pickled gerkins, and tinned asparagus — with a few slices of fresh tomato thrown in if we’re lucky. It was only a few years ago that she started to use fresh milk, rather than “Carnation” (eugh!) in her tea. Then again, maybe it was the war….
Come to think of it, my country in-laws, who’re still in their 50′s, make similar salads — a country thing, or a poverty thing, maybe….?
Beetroot on hamburgers…. yummmm… used to be a great hamburger shop on Mitre St at St Lucia that did a massive burger with pineapple and beetroot and chilli sauce for 3 bucks – excellent stuff!