On the passing of William F. Buckley, Jr.

(X-posted to pas au-delà .)

Probably it would be better to say nothing, but as man is currently being lionized beyond belief...my family has a telling story about the real William F. Buckley.  So I'll tell it briefly in a minute.  Given the shameless right-wing bias of the obituaries in our SCUM these days, let's start with a few timely comments from this thread which will always bear re-emphasizing (my father–as it happens–made them more than twenty years ago)...the first from professional blog-commenter John Emerson:

Besides being wrong and right wing, Buckley made a lot of extremely unpleasant statements, especially about race.  His civility was limited to those whom he deigned to recognize as peers and who were willing to play his game, and did not extend, e.g., to queers like Gore Vidal.  Or most other people.

I'€™ve always thought of him as someone who provided a veneer of class for tacky people with unpleasant attitudes.  A bit like Hugh Hefner as a marketer of a cultural trend to people who needed training wheels.  His intellectual accomplishments seem to have been at the level of a generic second rank English or History professor who has a knack for popular writing.  Nothing very interesting, though better than Jonah Goldberg.  His affectation of aristocratic mannerisms was parodic.  Without his inheritance and his claque, he wouldn'€™t have been anything.

That should cover the motherfucker.

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Regarding the Scull Controversy

Rather than going away as an issue, the Scull versus the Foucauldians debate seems to be spreading. It seems odd to me that people are willing to get worked up over this issue. Afterall, standard periodizations of Foucault's work place The History of Madness outside his developed periods; viz., the archaeological, the genealogical, and the problematization. That is, within the Foucauldian corpus itself, The History of Madness is an outlier (not unlike his commentary on Kant's anthropology, his book on Roussel, or the disavowed Maladie mentale et personnalité). The question, then, appears not to be about the place of The History of Madness in Foucault's own oeuvre - a concept that should no doubt be question by anyone who takes Foucault's work seriously - but, rather, about what "Foucault," that is to say "Theory," signifies in the context of (primarily) (North) American disciplinary politics. (Although, it is worth pointing out that comparing passages from the "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" essay with The History of Madness is, at best, strange - it is wrong-headed to criticize a non-genealogical work for not being genealogical!) Scull is engaged in a territorial pissing match with rivals. His concern, it seems to me, is to reject the work of Foucauldians by nit-picking Foucault's major dissertation. (I guess it is easier to take on a dead guy's dissertation than it is to take on work published by Nik Rose twenty years ago.) Predictably, the "Theory" warriors - themselves derivative hacks of the worst sort - are all to happy to jump into Scull's boat in an effort to push their own agenda within the narrow perspective of American English departments.

(Cross-posted from theoria.)

rev tim haggard: music saturday

A song I listened to recently put me in mind of Reverend Tim Haggard's situation.

The song is by the band 'Garbage.'

The title of the song is "Sex is not the enemy"

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Hear the Kossacks Call

What's funniest about all of this "Path to 9/11" humbug:  the 9/11 Commission Report was itself politically white-washed crock of shit.    Sorry to spoil the party (and sign the petition, please*) but still someone had to say it.

*particularly if–like most LS lurkers–you are a centrist with any cred.

Update 9/10:  Oh wouldn't you know it, "The Path to 9/11" is linked directly to David Horowitz (where does that man get all his money?):

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Will the real war reporters please...

Chris Allbritton takes the New York Post's Ralph Peters to task for being sychophantic sack of shit:

Among the claims in his slanderous column: “The Iraqi Army has confounded its Western critics, performing extremely well last week. And the people trust their new army to an encouraging degree.” The Iraqi Army — and police, for that matter — stood by while Shi’ite militias ran rampant through Sunni neighborhoods. They only took up the security positions when the Shi’ite clerics, including Moqtada al-Sadr, had already calmed down the worst of the violence. That’s not “performing extremely well,” unless by “extremely well,” you mean not confronting the enemies and keeping your head down until it’s safe to come out. That’s usually called “hiding.” ...He also makes what may be an unintentionally ironic comment when he criticized Iraqi stringers: “The Iraqi stringers have cracked the code: The Americans don’t pay for good news. So they exaggerate the bad.”

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calculus: a plea

My formal study of Mathematics, such as it was, ended at the age of thirteen. Even before then, however, it had been rather discontinuous: it was decided in the final year of primary school that Maths wasn't a priority, so for a whole year of school I took no classes in the subject. And then at thirteen, I gave up Maths along with all other Sciences.

Since then, my relationship with Maths has been distant. I hold no disdain for the discipline; it is simply that we have grown apart.

On the whole, I feel I have managed OK without Maths, with the exception of some tricky moments when it comes to calculating tips, taxes, or grades. But we get by, Maths and I, each in our own separate ways.

There are times, however, when I wish I knew more...

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'interpretation'

I would like to bounce off of Matt's heads-up about Bérubé, titled "Serious students need fear not (at least not yet)" below. Bérubé, for those who don't know, has written a critical, though certainly not 'trashing', review of Theory's Empire, the recently published anthology that wears its hostility to Theory, aka postmodernism, etc., on its sleeve. The discussion in the comments section to that post is interesting, and I urge everyone to take a look if inclined.

The question that discussion raises for me reminds me of an intellectual test that can be performed when thinking about the criticisms that 'postmodernism' and 'theory' tends to attract.

To apply this test, I chose a highly favorable review of Theory's Empire by Michael Potemra, National Review, July 4, 2005.

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Ka-Blamo!

Dick "Geriatric" Cheney "mistakes" a 78 year old millionaire lawyer for a "quail" and shoots him in the head with a shot-gun.  Says a spokeswoman, “Fortunately, the vice-president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been.  The vice-president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came.”

Readers will certainly recall the chapter, "Q is for Quail", from George W. Bush's Amazing Alphabet Book of the Contemporary World, or Al-Qaedas All Around (illustrated by Paul Wolfowitz).  The chapter, like the chapter on democracy in Spinoza's Political Treatise, strangely trails off: "See Dick shoot the Quail, all 400 of them! Quail are tiny, chicken-y birds with lots and lots of little bones and no meat, but Dick loves to…"

In any case, firedoglake is all over this one.  And seriously, too.

difference without apologies

It's a well-worn argument to suggest that the Left (whatever exactly that is) should spend more time learning from the Right (ditto), taking a few leaves out of the books of Reagan, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, the Southern Baptist Convention, Bush, the Republican Party, Harper, what or whomever have you...

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Separated at birth?

 To continue with a theme....More ill-thought out and badly timed lookalikes

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A Bit of James Wood

Whatever else he may be, he gets this sort of thing mostly right:

At present, contemporary novelists are increasingly eager to "tell us about the culture," to fill their books with the latest report on "how we live now."  Information is the new character; we are constantly being told that we should be impressed by how much writers know.  What they should know, and how they came to know it, seems less important, alas, than that they simply know it.  The idea that what one knows might – to use Nietzsche's phrase – "come out of one's own burning" rather than free and flameless from Google, seems at present alien.  The danger is that the American fondness for realism combines with this will-to-information to produce a hyperliteralism of the novel:  you can see this in Tom Wolfe....

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Paxless in Americana

It's a match made in heaven.  One wonders if they know each other?  A commenter on the latter, one "Big Billy" asks a good question:

What if a pair of opposing hypocrits (where one says one thing and doesw [sic] the other, and the other says the other and does the one thing) team up? As a human, I find it impossible to constantly avoid hypocrasy [sic], so why not pair up and embrace out hypocritical natures, and then we can really progress, right? My partner will do my work for me while I do his work for him. We will both get our jobs done while approaching more exagerated extremes.
But then again, we're probably better off if you just call me an idiot too.

In this our quest, for the ultimate blog brevity I then leave it to you, dear eater, to draw your own excursions.  For it is a black and white world, with the Author sitting f'evern top (ever'n especially whilst claiming the bottom!) and we was only ever kiddin', once Hugh challenged e to a duel. 

A duel, e says!  At dawn, no less.  E dunno, somehow "be offended, but say so" just don't 'ave the same ring to it.    An' sometimes it be da fools who call idiots, "idiots" best.

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