It's of a piece with admiring leaders for their sincerity ("Once you can fake that....") and passion, irrespective of what they're sincere and passionate _about_.
As to Franks' competence over his career: maybe he has got results, or just kept his nose clean and been a good soldier. In either event, the reason he's being paid to give motivational speeches is that he got famous during the recent adventure in Iraq, during which a good number of people (and a number of good people) believe that he displayed a notable lack of competence.
I'm beginning to think that maybe there _should_ be a draft, if only to get more Americans to stop idolising the military and to teach them how to hate generals.
If it takes a village, how do we avoid the giant floating white blobs? What if they're not quite as vulnerable to plastic forks as they might look?
Makes me proud to be an heartless democratic socialist: if you can't work, I don't want to run your life, I just don't want to have to step past you as you beg, or over your body when you can't any more. It's both awkward and encourages a diminution of empathy in sheer self-defence that I find unpleasant and might end up hurting me. If you can work, I don't want you so scared of being reduced to penury that you'll vote for loony political or (wish it were "xor") religious leaders. Other social technology may also make life better (without being too intrusive on client or payer) for you, who might end up being "me" for some values of "you". Games go better when you don't kill the losers, as the Aztecs didn't say.
Why "heartless"?: because I think aiming for the stars can end up hitting London instead. People are going to find endless ways to screw up their lives even if they're warm and dry and decently fed; I don't want the government to try to stop them because it creates an obnoxious government, and besides, tomorrows useful innovation might be today's cock-up.
When kids are involved, I admit it gets dicey.
(And there go the Black Lodge Singers on WFMU wailing away on the "Flintstones" theme---I hope they 're the kind of village it takes.)
Oops, that should have been "...hard to identify the Left with {Peter Parker}/Spiderman".
Given Steve Ditko's later Randroid turn, it's hard for me to identify Peter Parker with Spiderman; on the other hand, J. Jonah Jameson has a lot more to do with Col. McCormick than a chinless looter.
On the third hand, headless ranting is hardly confined to the Right.
"It's from you I would expect to hear the f-word, not from them...."
It's not just since the '90's; think of the success of the Dirty Harry and Deathwish films series.
To be Johnny-one-note about it, I trace this to an antinomian streak in our culture---if you're a Good Guy, you're allowed anything, and your isolated judgement can be trusted.
Much of the anger around I see as traceable to persons who believe themselves to be members of some Elect but find some things still forbidden them---the Simpsons' Mr Burns' agitation at discovering that he's not allowed to run down a small child no matter how much money he has comes to mind...or at least some small number of hierarchophiliac white men who no longer have someone automatically below them in the perceived hierarchy.
No wonder I liked Bad Magic so much; it turns out that I've had occult sinusitis for the past few weeks.
Now, to get my Third Nostril opened....
Anthony Bourdain's "Brasserie Les Halles Cookbook"---still out of work, but can still afford the ingredients for seven-hour leg-of-lamb, and have the time for it....
J. Rifkin's The European Dream: alternately interesting and tedious; I promise not to snicker too loudly if he should end up talking about European advantages in biotechnology.
S. Zielinski's Bad Magic: recommended on this site, lives up to it...going over the beginning again to catch things I didn't, laugh at at least one bad joke involving a skirt.
A J2EE architect's exam study-guide, P. Allen & J.Bambara, in the probably-vain hope that this will help me get work. (I have experience with Dynamo Application Server, and these days it's like knowing Dutch in a world that demands German---close, but not really there.)
I strongly doubt that Rudy Giuliani could really stand up to public criticism...it would be very hard to tell every individual heckly M.P. that they need to seek psychiatric help, and telling them en masse to go into "group" might be too collectivist for the Right of the Republican Party.
Remember though, that there's little incentive to be tough when bullying swagger will do as well.
Poor, alcoholic, eclipsed, Phil Ochs sang in "Another Age":
And they'll coach you in the classroom that it cannot happen here
But it has happened here
(He also went on to sing:---and now it's gone that way again, though perhaps we can't have really died twice if there hasn't been an interposed resurrection.
We were born in a revolution and we died in a wasted war
It's gone that way before
)
It's always a bad sign when someone emits a sentence ending with the phrase, "..., it's the only language Those People understand." It bespeaks intellectual laziness and an over-willing quickness to deny Those People the imputation of enough humanity to allow them to understand more subtle methods of communication, e.g. common speech, hand gestures, formal appeals to reason, a crow-bar, &c..
Be that as it may, I feel the need to say, "Vote with your money, it's the only sort of vote which They feel a moral obligation to count, and (modulo becoming a violent jerk) it's really The Only Language They Understand."
Now: euros, pounds, swiss francs...?
If I go to Washington to Turn My Back on Bush, will I be the only one to add that great Klingon arm-jive to it? (A simultaneous breast-beat with both arms, timed so that the thump pretty much coïncides with being turned all the way around.)
T.U.L.I.P.
Sure, I don't expect the Southern Baptists to be dead-on Calvinists, and I've never heard someone who really seemed to believe in their own Total Depravity, which goes somewhat against American Optimism, but I think they're willing to believe it of the out-groups (but every culture finds a way to do this). More generally, I think that a few petals have fallen off to flavour the national tea.
In particular, I think the antinomianism potentially implicit in the Persistence of the Elect allows many of us to feel that we're the Good Guys regardless of what we do; I can never forget the shocked faces of the officers convicted of raping Abner Louima, expressions that seemed to scream, "But we're the good guys!"
And I think that Unconditional Election and Limited Atonement translate into the capability of some to accept the system as good even should it seem to work well only for a few. Some are saved, some are damned, and that's how the Source of Love willed it.
Irresistible Grace? It fits in really well with the narrative of the spoiled wastrel who squanders every opportunity given him for thirty-five years, and then is pulled up to be God's Chosen Maximum Leader. More generally, though, it flies in the face of the myth of how anyone, even Richard Mellon Scaife, can pull himself up by his own damn bootstraps.
An endocrinologist once told my doctor that his secretary could diagnose most of the low-testosterone men on sight: they tended to be really rude and swaggery.
I've had the privilege of being a terrible student of two amazing martial arts masters, and both gentlemen were exactly as soft-spoken as (one) stereotype would demand; the ex-S.A.S. man who was the chauffeur to the main investor in a start-up of which I was a part was supposedly pretty soft-spoken himself.
My father spent three years at war, and three years a P.o.W., and never wanted to talk much about it at all...he insisted my brothers stay the hell out of Vietnam, figuring that if his old outfit (the Legion) couldn't hold it, it wasn't possible over the long term.
He hated generals. He was in no way a "warrior"; he was something much more important, a soldier, the type of person who takes orders and wins and loses battles. In his eyes, Bush's 'tude didn't equal "tough", it screamed "clown"...so the dude has a ranch, so what?
But I digress; I originally just wanted to affirm that tough guys don't need to swagger---the closest I can think to it were the few enormously successful physicists I've known who acted Ellisonically obnoxious, and they were a distinct minority.
Maybe I have my facts wrong, but I recall hearing that the reaction of a fair number of middle-to-upper-class whites after school integration seemed to be inevitable was to send their children to "Christian academies".
So, my flip answer is, "What do you expect from a trend strongly influenced by people educated in schools where the word 'Christian' was used as a synonym for 'Whites(-who-can-afford-it)-only'?"
My less-flip answer is that the movement has merged Social Darwinism with the Elect/Preterite divide of T.U.L.I.P. Calvinism to end up with, "All I have achieved I is immutably mine even if I nominally don't deserve it, and so none can be taken from me legitimately. All who are poor or despised deserve to be, and it's evil for us to try to do anything about it beyond the individual charity we're supposed to do as an outward and visible sign of our Election."
There're also a fair number of Preterite over-seas who are in our way...they are as chaff anyway, so don't pay them too much mind as we go through them to get those wolves.
Elected by the indwelling of the Holy Market, justified and covered by the blood of the unlucky.
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