Category America
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What I'm reading: the bazaar is open for business
Jacob Weisberg, The Lucky One (NY Review of Books)
On screen and facing the public, he was a conviction politician. But behind the scenes—as with the arms for hostages trading—the bazaar was open for business.
Ronald Reagan has been a central figure in my reading lately. Rick Perlstein's Reaganland, and the above review of Max Boot's biography, which I think I'll get to soon. Reagan seems to be a central figure also in our current affairs; a world-historical reactionary with a sunny show on his face of American virtue---in which he fully believed---covering over a core of pragmatic transactionism. Reagan's America is the one that endures into the post-Cold War: sunny in speech, dirty in acts, religious and sordid, a dynamic culture in a gerontocratic and ossified political system.
Like everyone else I have been shocked at the United States' rush under its current President to withdraw from its commitments and alliances. Call it a pair to the moral shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a moment of sheer clarity, about what the world is and what Australia's part in it is (very little). I don't think we're ever going to see those submarines, no matter what promises are on paper. But the shock is I think less at the unexpectedness than from, in the philosopher's phrase, being at last compelled to face, in sober senses, the real conditions of American realism and transactionalism in the way it treats other countries and its friends.
Reagan's habit of telling stories about American exceptional virtue was based on genuine belief. His practice of acting according to interests, rather than values, was what made him significant. This present moment was always there and the shock of American cynicism is just our own recognition---we knew all along.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Kings
MONARCHY IS ONE OF the older and more ridiculous of human conceits. The more you think about it the weirder it gets. Elective or hereditary it's permanent; there's no such thing as rotating kingship, and the idea is that you do it unaccountably until you die, restricted only by God or the Mandate of Heaven. They are, like the current world's political situation is, totally ludicrous, but very, very serious.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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What I'm reading: Defector
DEFECTOR IS A MODEL for what journalism should be; sport and politics, and independently and worker-owned.
David Roth, 'Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government'.
They don't know anything about what they're wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don't care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Fighting
THE AMERICAN WAY OF war is well known and extensively written about; it's that of massing tremendous amounts of logistical material and aiming for a crushing, annihilating, victory. In the 20th and 21st centuries that's involved an emphasis, even a dependence, on air power. There's a curious symmetry I think, between that well observed fact, with the obvious emphasis on air power in American disaster response.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Hobbes
WE LIVE IN AN age identified by meritocratic principles. Those aren't ones which describe the world as it is, since clearly the best people are not selected to the highest positions of privilege (I mean, look around), they're principles that describe the world as it ought to be, and which serve to justify what will be. The meritocratic model of the world is one in which it's the inequality of human achievements, intelligence, hard work, talents, that justifies the existence of inequalities of power and privilege, and which aims to exclude accidents of undeserved success. The meritocratic model says, good things should come to the good, and by implication, lays the judgement of failure on the failed. From here, let me introduce a seemingly irrelevant but actually critically relevant event: US President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan
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Role models
IRONY IS A HARD form of humour to appreciate. Senator Ralph Babet (of the Clive Palmer franchise team United Australia Party) went on twitter to post a bunch of slurs. At one level, that's just twitter these days; and his content is no different to the garden variety of hate that everyone still on there stews in, but on the other hand, it is a notable thing for an Australian Senator to do. And what's ironic about it is that it shows a gigantic and secular shift in the way we culture war about values.
Posted · Author Liam Hogan