We are hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords

john atcheson in common dreams...

Dark Ages Redux: American Politics and the End of the Enlightenment

We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world.  We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts.

[...]

Now, we seek to operate by revealed truths, not reality.  Decrees from on high – often issued by an unholy alliance of religious fundamentalists, self-interested corporations, and greedy fat cats – are offered up as reality by rightwing politicians.

For example, North Carolina law-makers recently passed legislation against sea level rise.  A day later, the Virginia legislature required that references to global warming, climate change and sea level rise be excised from a proposed study on sea level rise.  Last year, the Texas Department of Environmental Quality, which had commissioned a study on Galveston Bay, cut all references to sea level rise – the main point of the study.

We are, indeed, at an epochal threshold.

As Stephen Colbert so aptly put it: if your science gives you results you don't like, pass a law saying that the result is illegal. Problem solved.

Except it isn’t.  Wishing reality away, doesn’t make it go away.  Pretending that the unreal is real doesn’t make it real.

UN-fuckingly believable...

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"Either extraordinary self-confidence or out of touch with reality. I can't tell you which."

as his long-time friends and allies jump ship, and as everything he has worked for appears doomed, george w. bush, certainly not out of intellectual curiosity and almost certainly out of inner desperation, is calling in historians and scholars hoping to find justification if not vindication...

Burdened by an unrelenting war, challenged by an opposition Congress, defeated just last week on immigration, his last major domestic priority, Bush remains largely locked inside the fortress of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in the seventh year of a presidency turned sour. He still travels, making speeches to friendly audiences and attending summit meetings, such as this weekend's Kennebunkport talks with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. But he rarely goes out to dinner, and he no longer plays golf, except occasionally chipping at Camp David, where, as at his Texas ranch, he can find refuge.

"I don't know how he copes with it," said Donald Burnham Ensenat, a friend for 43 years who just stepped down as State Department protocol officer. Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), another longtime friend who once worked for Bush, said he looks worn down. "It's a marked difference in his physical appearance," Conaway said. "It's an incredibly heavy load. When you ask men and women to take risks, to send them into war knowing they might not come home, that's got to be an incredible burden to have on your shoulders."

[...]

And yet Bush does not come across like a man lamenting his plight. In public and in private, according to intimates, he exhibits an inexorable upbeat energy that defies the political storms. ... He still acts as if he were master of the universe, even if the rest of Washington no longer sees him that way.

"You don't get any feeling of somebody crouching down in the bunker," said Irwin M. Stelzer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who was part of one group of scholars who met with Bush. "This is either extraordinary self-confidence or out of touch with reality. I can't tell you which."

can i venture a guess...? it may not be until he either leaves office or is thrown out, but, eventually, inevitably, reality will come crashing down on george w. bush, and, as a human being with compassion for my fellow human beings, i can't imagine the pain of the mental and emotional turmoil that he will experience... certainly one of the most painful realizations will be how his personal weaknesses have been used and manipulated, and how he has been only a totemic prop, the sock puppet carefully groomed and placed to carry out the agenda of those who really call the shots... it will be a terrible denouement, but, nevertheless, a completely appropriate one for a man, endowed like all his fellow men, with the gift of free will and the power to choose...

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"Power has made reality its bitch."

what a quote... some way or another, those six words need to go down in history as perhaps the best one-line summation of the bush administration ever written...

from the la times...

Here is my favorite quotation about the Bush administration, a description of a conversation with the proverbial "unnamed administration official" by the fine journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004:

"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.' "

I must admit to you that I love that quotation. The unnamed official, widely believed to be Karl Rove, sketches out with breathtaking frankness a radical view in which power frankly determines reality, and in which rhetoric — the science of flounces and folderols — follows meekly and subserviently in its train. Those in the "reality-based community" are figures a mite pathetic, for we have failed to realize the singular new principle of the new age: Power has made reality its bitch.

Given such sweeping claims for power, it is hard to expect much respect for truth; or perhaps it should be "truth" — in quotation marks — for, when you can alter reality at will, why pay much attention to the idea of fidelity in describing it?

i have no doubt those words were uttered by karl rove... everything i know and have read about karl rove positively oozes that kind of staggering arrogance... my fondest wish is that, some day, karl's headstone will read, "i TRIED to make reality my bitch, but reality had her way with me in the end..."

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