Paging Dr. Pangloss

PATRICE GREANVILLE | [print_link]

PHOTO: Michelle Obama deplaning in Spain.

• Most Americans want an end to constant war.

They get more war.

There are many other indicators pointing in the same direction.

One can only wonder at what might be accomplished if this significant portion of the American nation were properly led, instead of pseudo-led or plain misled by the Lesser Evil mafia.

So the marvel is not so much that almost half of the American citizenry is comprised of card-carrying idiots and lunatics ready and aggressively willing to shoot themselves in the foot, but that despite a nonstop torrent of misinformation and apologia for the royalist corporate status quo and the questionable values it feeds upon, more than half of all Americans remain stoutly progressive and enlightened in their views.

The Obamas: tone deaf or plain dumb?

The handling of the Gulf crisis (and the Bankster crisis before that) illustrated some of these peculiarities. Like a man painting by numbers, he said and did all the requisite things, including the castigations of evildoers, well enunciated proclamations of being in control, at the helm of the ship of state, yada yada, but there was a robotic, cold quality to the whole exercise, as if his heart was not really in it, which probably wasn’t.

Middlebrow passions—an oxymoron?

That Obama may have erred in choosing to act like a prig on almost every official function is borne out by a long cultural and political record with countless examples in which intellect and passion joined to deliver victory and acclaim.

Engaged, passionate intellectuals are in the forefront of British, French, and German politico-intellectual history, an unbroken heritage dating back millennia, to the Greco-Roman cradle of modern civilization, and beginning with, among others, Julius Caesar himself. Even the most cursory review yields a rich crop, here at random: Erasmus, Voltaire, Thomas More, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Goethe, Stendhal, Jean Jaurés, Victor Hugo, Zola, Nietsche, Camus, Sartre, Disraeli, Marx, Engels—all famous for their passionate beliefs and even legendary rages. Closer to home, we find, with ease, people like Teddy Roosevelt, much underrated as an intellect, along with of course Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Franklin, all of whom could be and were fiery when the occasion called for such displays. Thomas Paine, to whom we owe so much, was also well known for his outspoken ways, and so was Lincoln, who, while not given much to raising his voice, could dominate an audience by the sheer force of his convictions.

Existence determines ideology