The shape of November is numerically flexible: second Tuesday, last Thursday, dark and cold and those bright yellow leaves against bare black branches. Not like July 4, 14 July, those dates, bright and sunny any day of the week.
Ron Susskind in the Oct 17 NYTimes (with initially unacknowledged reporting from Susan Mazur):
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Jonathan Freeland in the UK Guardian comments about the Susskind piece:
Look hard enough and you can see this mindset in the current Bush campaign. The Bush-Cheney billboards with the single slogan: One Nation Under God. The unwavering certainty of the supporters in Marlton. Bush's inability to name a single mistake of his presidency. There can be no doubt; they are doing the Lord's work.
One of my students (the lone Bush voter in a class of 16, as it happens) wanted to argue in an essay that all notions of justice come from religion. So much for the Enlightenment. (I pointed out to her there were secular theorists of justice, and anyway, she should concentrate her argument on something about the class texts and do-able in 5 pages).
Anyway, various bloggers are now declaring themselves proud members of the reality-based community. Me, too, but maybe in a poststructuralist kind of way. Talk about strange bedfellows. I mean, I saw a PBS documentary about Rumsfeld’s “war with the Pentagon” a few weeks ago and it made me all sympathetic to the military. Jeez.
