Posts Tagged ‘liberty’
washing the dishes and taking out the trash November 29th, 2008
So usually we have a bai who comes home, twice a day. She comes every morning around 7:45 a.m.
She starts by bringing in the clothes from the clothesline. Then she turns off my fan (very annoying, if I’m still in bed — she loves traumatizing me, I sometimes refer to her as the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal) and then heads on to the kitchen, where she does the dishes. Then she starts dusting around the house, sweeps and swobs, and takes out the trash. She finishes her work in about an hour and a half.
She comes again in the evening, to do the dishes once again; and then the routine begins again.
The point is, we aren’t really cleanliness freaks. We like a clean house, and so it’s a routine that we follow, (claims of labor rights and payment aside. I dunno what we pay her, but I assume we don’t scrimp on it.) and the house is pretty well maintained.
So when I hear the Pakistan foreign minister saying that he would like to see proof of the involvement of Lashkar or any other terrorist organization within their boundaries, before taking action against them, it ticks me off.
You don’t need your neighbor coming on over, knocking on your door, and telling you that there’s a right nasty stench emanating from your home, (coming in under his door and through his window, and he knows this for sure because the forensic guy he called to investigate said so) before you take out the trash, do you?
It can’t be all that hard to turn off Animal Planet, or whatever TV you’re watching, put the kebabs and faux Coke or whatever down on the table for a minute, get your ass up, and take out the trash, can it?
Same goes for the Indian Government, and the issues we’ve got in-house. I mean, stop finding reasons things CAN’T BE DONE. Impossible is only the lack of imagination, incentive, and most importantly, intent.
The Challenge of Terrorism?
Organized Crime?
Education?
Vaccination of kids?
Basic Provision of Food, Clothes and Shelter to each Citizen?
Protection of the Human Rights of Citizens?
Prevention of Violence and Crime?
Development of Infrastructure?
Promotion of a Diverse, Progressive Society?
Does any government actually have to be TOLD to do this? Doesn’t it come as a part of the job description? Does the Indian Government have to have it’s ATS chief assassinated before it figures it should invest in giving the police proper bulletproof vests? Does the Pakistani Government need proof of the actions of what it acknowledges is a terrorist organization, before it takes action against it? Shouldn’t acknowledgment of the nature of the organization be enough?
Tags: as the world changed, cleaning, house keeping, ideas, liberty, life, logic, political science, terrorism
Posted in Opinion, Politics/Ideas, reflections | Comments (3)
on the american dream
May 20th, 2008
A period in Paris, just after the war brought Bellow in touch with existentialism and post-war American writing is the subject of some ironic reflections in a famous essay Bellow published in 1963, “Some Thoughts on Recent American Fiction”. (The piece was written just as he was about to publish Herzog.) Here he reflects on the current appeal of new American fiction for European intellectuals; recalling the title of Wylie Sypher’s brilliant and then influential study of modernism, ‘Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art’, he observes that a literature of the lost and inauthentic self has become a staple of contemporary writing. In Europe, in the work of writers like Gide, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus, this arises from the crises of contemporary history, and the breakdown of Enlightenment thought, and has clear origins in philosophical theories of the human condition. ‘American writers, when they are moved by a similar spirit to reject and despise the Self,’ Bellow then adds ironically, ‘are seldom encumbered by such intellectual baggage, and this fact pleases their European contemporaries, who find in them a natural, that is, a brutal and violent acceptance of the new universal truth by minds free from intellectual preconceptions.’ In European writers he sees a nerveless collapse of humanism, a sacrifice to history or necessity or logic. In post-war American writing the violence of being, the absurdity of existence, the state of alienation are presented as plain and brute empiricism, a view of the way things just are.
- Malcolm Bradbury
A period in Paris, just after the war brought Bellow in touch with existentialism and post-war American writing is the subject of some ironic reflections in a famous essay Bellow published in 1963, “Some Thoughts on Recent American Fiction”. (The piece was written just as he was about to publish Herzog.) Here he reflects on the current appeal of new American fiction for European intellectuals; recalling the title of Wylie Sypher’s brilliant and then influential study of modernism, ‘Loss of the Self in Modern Literature and Art’, he observes that a literature of the lost and inauthentic self has become a staple of contemporary writing. In Europe, in the work of writers like Gide, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus, this arises from the crises of contemporary history, and the breakdown of Enlightenment thought, and has clear origins in philosophical theories of the human condition. ‘American writers, when they are moved by a similar spirit to reject and despise the Self,’ Bellow then adds ironically, ‘are seldom encumbered by such intellectual baggage, and this fact pleases their European contemporaries, who find in them a natural, that is, a brutal and violent acceptance of the new universal truth by minds free from intellectual preconceptions.’ In European writers he sees a nerveless collapse of humanism, a sacrifice to history or necessity or logic. In post-war American writing the violence of being, the absurdity of existence, the state of alienation are presented as plain and brute empiricism, a view of the way things just are.
- Malcolm Bradbury
I don’t know if it is post-war or if it actually started before the war.
Of the European philosophers, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Derrida and Baudrillard would be my greatest influences. Thoreau and Paine are the Americans I am reasonably familiar with.
Thoreau and Paine and Baudrillard have always seemed the “Free-est” of the lot — Thoreau and Paine by virtue of, as Bellow points out, having a natural (if brutal — not comfortable with the flavor of this word, unless understood in an exact intent) outlook, Baudrillard by virtue of having ripped apart (or rather, progressed to the next logical stage) of contemporary thought, with his precession of simulacra and the hyperreal.
Nietzsche tried to break free of the shackles, and succeeds somewhat, but he, like Sartre, I think, is encumbered by the baggage of prevailing politics — which for Sartre was his movement towards communism.
Camus is the odd one out here, somewhere between Thoreau and Derrida, I think sometimes, scraping against the outer arc of the idea, the event horizon of contemporary thought (I’d like to call this event horizon The Theater of the Absurd) without really breaking free of it.
Still, the tools these thinkers set into place have great value. One I haven’t mentioned, since I am still getting acquainted with his work, is of course Wittgenstein.
Anyways. I found this piece rather interesting, and, having now been immersed in these ideas for a while, I can’t help but thinking of Friedrich Holderlin’s words…
“We are in the period of darkness
between the Gods that have vanished
and the God that has not yet come,
between Matthew Arnold’s two worlds,
‘one dead, the other powerless to be born’”
Those thinkers are all gone, Baudrillard was the last. But their work remains incomplete.
Tags: america, Baudrillard, Camus, Derrida, existentialism, freedom, Holderlin, ideas, inhibitions, intellect, liberty, Nietzsche, Paine, philosophy, Sarte, slavery, Thoreau
Posted in Books, Opinion, Politics/Ideas | Comments (0)
