(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Thursday, June 06, 2002
Warblogger Watch has come under fire from a woman reporting "Live from the World Trade Center." An unemployed MBA alumna of the University of Chicago - that place where interned academics examine equations instead of actually existing economies, and enjoy their Austrian fantasies in cognitive dissonance-free comfort - takes us to task endlessly. Allow me to register a few words in our defense from my station beneath the "slush pile at a third-rate college newspaper."
"Jane Galt's" principal complaint against us is our juvenile refusal to give proper hearing to the arguments of our opponents. Given that nearly every posting is deals with a specific instance of warmongering on someone else's behalf, I find this assertion curious. If we don't engage the quote thoroughly - and for my part, I emphatically do not - it is likely because the words before us are from a yabbering ass, offered at maximum volume and with minimum acquaintance with both fact and logic. How, I wonder, did those encountering Lee Perry respond when they found him walking backward and striking the ground with a hammer?
She is spot on re: some of her other charges. My shop teacher told me back in 1976 that I was perhaps the most competent builder of strawmen he had ever seen in practice, and I feel I owe very little the way of courtesy to someone who delights in other peoples' sufferings and indulges in the truly scatological. If admirable conduct these days demands quiet deference before the perpetrators of one of the grossest crimes against public discourse since the enactment of the Sedition Act, I proudly inscribe myself among the uncivilized.
Though insufficient to land her a paying job, Galt seems to have read all the required management texts and Paul Samuelson books. She's got the telltale arrogance. Noam Chomsky and Edward Said et al., she says, have been saying the same thing for thirty years, and have been overtaken by history in the interim. If she had actually familiarized herself with either the works of Chomsky and Said or with history itself, she would probably not have ventured this statement. But then again, the disdain required by the boardroom impressed upon her sputtering brain by Chicago, she probably would have. Chomsky is profoundly anti-theoretical, and what he has been doing for the past thirty years (in addition to that little side job he's got redefining linguistics and dethroning the behaviorism that so enamored conservatives) is cataloging the misdeeds of the American government. If your appreciation of history is so minimal as to not apprehend the fact that we have put down almost every secular, progressive indigenous movement to rise, then it seems pointless to continue. Likewise, if Said has been saying the same thing for thirty years, perhaps he was writing in response to an unchanged constant, viz. the unremedied wronging of the Palestinians.
Galt, while projecting a reasonable enough persona at times (though wrong nearly always), is just as flawed as her warblogging brethren. Convinced of her own heroism in defending the status quo, she is best left alone to contemplate the perfection of markets and the moral beauty of Richard Perle.