[Peace-discuss] Being and nothingness among American murderers

[C. G. Estabrook]

Actually, there is at least one Sartrean notion that's appropriate to the 
Obamans.  Jean-Paul spoke of what he called "bourgeois bad faith": "a 
paradoxical internal duality of consciousness in which consciousness thinks of 
itself as a thing at the same time that it gives covert recognition to its 
freedom." Le fond de l'affaire is that claims that one is not free to act are 
usually bogus.  "We were never freer than under the Occupation," he wrote, 
scandalously.

Try that on those defenders of Obama who keep saying their man would like to do 
the right thing, but just can't.

Sartre, in an interview with the NYRB when he was 70, said, "Naturally, in the 
course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason 
or another, but at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was 
because I was not radical enough."  Seems right.  --CGE


E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> under-score.
> 
> The cognitive dissonance does certainly threaten to wash the victims over the
> cliff of existential despair... a likely fitting end point to relativism...
> 
> I think they Were All Bozos on that Bus.  How many empty seats?
> 
> "The Naked Lunch" might be out of print or out of vogue or something. Or
> maybe they are fighting back by dropping pirated and bootleg copies of
> "Nausea:"
> 
> C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> As the administration rapidly expands its illegal war in Pakistan, its 
>> propaganda cover slips like a bad toupee.
>> 
>> The US has to pretend we're killing "terrorists" in AfPak (there's no 
>> Congressional authorization for anything else) when in fact we're fighting
>> the resistance to US control of the entire Middle East.
>> 
>> The word this week was "existential." Tangling her syntax in a way that
>> might interest a psychoanalyst, SecState Clinton told a House committee, "I
>> think that we can not underscore [underestimate?] the seriousness of the
>> existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan." (Maybe she meant
>> "underscore enough.")
>> 
>> "Existential threat" is a term of art from Israeli propaganda: the 
>> nuclear-armed Israeli government insists that its existence is constantly
>> threatened by non-nuclear states and of course Gazan schoolchildren (and in
>> a sense it is).
>> 
>> But the memo on "existential" has clearly gone around in the Obama 
>> administration: "US Defence Secretary Robert Gates has warned Pakistan that
>> the Taleban poses an 'existential threat to the democratic government of
>> the country'" [BBC]; "Gen. David Petraeus warned Congress Friday that the
>> United States faces a 'tough road" ahead ... what has been missing still is
>> “the kind of whole-of-government approach that would result from a complete
>> commitment by the Pakistani senior leaders ... that will be necessary to
>> face up what is again an existential threat to Pakistan” [Politico].
>> 
>> But perhaps the American officials simply mean that the sneaky Taliban are
>> about to distribute the works of J.-P. Sartre to unsuspecting Pakistanis.
>> That would make more sense than what they're actually saying.  --CGE 
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>> 
> 
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