(no subject)

[phamos]

i've been up all night reading this seymour hersh book and making progressively punchier comments in the margins. i had one really great insight. hersh starts talking about strauss. first he insinuates that wolfowitz got his doctorate studying under strauss, which he did NOT. he took, like, 2 classes from him. but whatever, it makes the narrative more compelling. anyway, he paints the picture, as most people do, that strauss was an elitist who believed that "the works of ancient philosophers contain deliberately concealed esoteric meanings whose truths can be comprehended only by a very few, and would be misunderstood by the masses." but strauss wasn't saying that only a certain people were WORTHY of understanding these "esoteric" meanings, though that's what some of his students tried to convey. he was saying that you had to attack a text in a certain way, read it carefully, from all sides, to really get to the heart of what the writer is trying to say. and being "misunderstood by the masses" simply means that the majority of people aren't willing to put the work in to read the text themselves, and would rather have others tell them what was being said. strauss hated the idea of secondary sources and wouldn't let his students read them. the course was to be a close reading of the text only. (this is the model for the u of c's current fundamentals concentration, which i took two classes in -- one with mark lilla, the strauss admirer who hates straussians -- love it!) so when one of hersh's sources says that "the defense department and the office of the vice-president write their own pieces, based on their own ideology...we collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want," i wrote the following in the margins:

i.e. intelligence turned into a replica of any given humanities department of a major university. you can find anything you want in a text if you go in looking for it. this is the exact opposite of strauss's original intent. must ignore secondary sources (i.e. pre-existing biases) and look for hidden "esoteric" truth

strauss wanted people to find the truth at the bottom of a text, not proof of some theory they heard about in some other guy's paper. these straussians aren't very good straussians.

so, ok, i did a little bit of actual useful thinking. but then it got away from me when i started thinking more about the different definitions of "esoteric truth" norton wrote about among strauss's first gen followers -- leon kass tells her he has this secret commentary that only 6 people have and she has to come read in his office; joseph cropsey hears her mention it, pulls it out of his desk nonchalantly, and lets her borrow it. the two sides of strauss's students -- the secretive elitist and the man who revels in the life of the mind. (i don't know enough about cropsey to actually give him that much credit, but i just wanted to say "life of the mind") and so then i'm thinking about leon kass, and earlier i had been thinking of stinky allen bloom and his stupid "closing of the american mind" book that i should also really read but know it will make me mad. and then i wrote this:

if allen bloom and leon kass are supposedly the interpreters of straussian anti-modernism onto the fields of morality and ethics...given that allen bloom was ass-fucking his dormitory charges at cornell...should we then assume that leon kass is equally hypocritical and secretly eats fetuses to gain superhuman strength, like christopher reeve on south park? something to think about.

ok, at this point i know i'm losing it. but i've got south park on the brain, and when hersh quotes bush and condi rice saying the same damn talking point over and over about smoking gun=mushroom cloud, i finally give up and just write "we are trapper keeper. we are one."

and now i kinda want to watch akira. see why it's hard for me to write this paper? my brain is just so stream-of-consciousness and all over the place!

Comments

[this-monograph.livejournal.com]

maggie, would you mind if i fwd'ed this to brian? he might enjoy it. while i'm at it, i think you and brian might have some stuff in common. (he's writing a paper right now on the lineage of populism --> new left --> neocons. that is the most simplistic synopsis of his paper evar and i'm not sure i completely get it, but hey.) he's incidentalnoise if you want to add him. he needs more lj friends and i think you would be a good one!!

also, where did you get the sandman mood icons?? that one is awesome.

[phamos818.livejournal.com]

sure, go ahead! forward away, though i don't think anything i've said here is particularly coherent. i think the straussian thing is a whole other layer beyond the new left/neocon schism. it seems to come at a different time and place, and the people who are regarded as neocons today (the straussians) aren't quite the same as the neocons of the 70s and 80s (irving kristol, norman podhoretz, dan pat moynihan, jeane kirkpatrick).

i got the mood icons last night by going through the memories listing over at...uh...this list right here. i don't think i know how to import them right, though, because the way i did it took me a fucking hour and a half and there HAS to be a simpler way.

[this-monograph.livejournal.com]

well, i don't know much about strauss, but it might interest brian. and you're right - neocons are not the same now. it's honestly something i'd like to read about this summer, since i know so little. i did fwd some of your comments about fukayama to brian, though, 'cos he just read (one of?) his books and i thought he might be interested.

here's the summary of his paper, although i think he's changed it a bit. (dirty harry is still in there, tho.) http://incidentalnoise.livejournal.com/4886.html

and thank you for the list! i've been wanting new icons for awhile, but couldn't seem to figure it out. will give that a shot.

i STILL have a gift for you from xmas. i will mail it FINALLY once i get back from california. don't feel bad - i still haven't sent my grandmother and uncle thank you cards for xmas OR birthday money. i suck so much. school makes me the worst friend ever.