God knows your calling patterns. God knows your friends on Facebook, your pages liked, your rants and your dissenting comments. More – and better than the NSA or FBI – God knows what you think. Or, if there is no personal God, if that term is just a word made of letters – G-O-D – […]
New Communism, Old Totalitarianism
. Alan Johnson has a bracing roundup in the May-June issue of World Affairs of the latest in communist theorizing. Entitled The New Communism: Resurrecting the Utopian Delusion, it begins so: A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of “new communism.” A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than […]
Living in History
. I am reading Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. I would be interested in the history anyway, but I have a personal interest too. Snyder identifies the “bloodlands” thus: The bloodlands were where most of Europe’s Jews lived, where Hitler and Stalin’s imperial plans overlapped, where the Wehrmacht and the Red Army fought, and where the Soviet […]
9/11/11: a “Good Terror”
. (Ninth in a series) When it came to 9/11 sympathies too absent to squander, Slavo Zizek actually beat Baudrillard to the text. On September 14, 2001, only three days after 9/11, he first posted to the internet “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” which he revised and extended several times. Later, like Baudrillard’s […]
The Personal Is Not Political
I have been traveling on the East Coast all week, and will be for a while longer, which is why blogging has been light, except for my definitive statement on postcolonialism, the literary canon, and Newt Gingrich, rendering the first two no longer necessary subjects of discussion and, with any justice, ending the puny political […]