What on earth does this sentence mean:
The walls of ignorance and prejudice and cruelty, which she railed against valiantly all her public life, have not fallen, but their truculence to do so does not speak against her determination to make them collapse.
"Truculence" to do so? Does she mean reluctance? Or is there some other meaning to truculence that I’m unaware of?
Mike Allen reports:
"I introduced myself and said, ‘Good evening, Senator, may I walk with you?’ He replied, ‘You can walk with me. That doesn’t mean you can ask questions.’ I chuckled, thinking he was kidding. ‘But you can certainly walk with me,’ he added. The Senator then underscored, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not answering questions.’ The encounter pointed to some of the unusual dynamics of the ’08 …
More here.
He’s been reading Ben Franklin about the vital importance of doubt:
For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.
Next up: try some Hume, Hugh. Or even Burke. At some point in the future, you might even become a conservative.
The American public is much more mature about this than the Congress or the president.
In honor of Sarah Silverman:
(Hat tip: Michael.)
Some of you have written to let me know the meaning of the word truculence. Thanks, but I am well aware of its meaning. I am also aware of basic grammar. Angelou’s sentence makes no grammatical sense. Walls cannot have a "truculence to do" anything. If someone sent this sentence in unsolicited, the editors at the Washington Post would have sent it back, asking for it to be re-written in English. But it’s Maya Angelou and so they printed it. Leave aside the self-righteous pretentiousness and the exhausted metaphor. The piece is laughably bad.
A reader writes:
Federer is a great player. But to put him up against the greatest of all time, or even our lifetimes (yours being somewhat longer than mine) means we have to put him above Sampras, Agassi, Lendl, Borg, Becker, McEnroe, Connors and Laver. Why does this not sit well with me? All of those men had real rivalries with other players. As Borg brought the game to new heights, McEnroe came along to challenge him. Agassi did the same for Sampras. With no one to challenge Federer it’s irrelevant whether he’s just better than the field or he’s pushed the game too far too fast. In either case, with no one to challenge him, it’s less meaningful when he wins every tournament. We don’t even start on the abundance of hard court tournaments which have made his somewhat-less-impressive work on clay so much less of a liability.
The ones we should all be excited about are Gonzalez (whose played definitively better tennis than Federer before their Final match-up) and that scrawny, odd, brilliant young Scot, Andy Murray.
I’m all for scrawny, brilliant Scots. And I may be suffering from a syndrome known to straight guys as Kournikova-blinders. But Federer is mesmerizing.
Like a lot of serious thinkers – Sigmund Freud and Leo Strauss spring to mind – Michel Foucault has not been well-served by his acolytes in the American academy. I find him an alternately repellent and compelling writer, on those few occasions when I think I have properly understood him. But he is not, pace Stanley Kurtz, a simple pomo lefty. In the last years of his life, he began to appreciate the achievement of classical liberalism. In an email exchange yesterday, I asked a Foucault scholar if my impression was correct. He responded:
Absolutely. He was interested in a Classical Greek aesthetics of the self and a positive view of civil society and the market economy. "History of Sexuality" emphasizes the Hellenistic ethics in an account of sexuality which is both liberatory and questioning of
myths of repression and liberation. "Society Must be Defended" establishes a distinction between an absolutist modern state and a state which is limited by laws and civil society. Foucault was always critical of power, early on there was a Marxist element to that, but in the texts I mention above and others, he came to see Classical Liberal themes as the antidote to power. For example he emphasised the role French Physiocrats had as an antidote to mercantilist absolutism, and similarly the role of Odo group free market economists in Germany as a centre of intellectual resistance to Nazism.
His politics kept evolving even as his theory came closer to Classical Liberalism. A turning point seems to have been the Iranian revolution when he initially supported the revolution because Shia clerics he met convinced him their goals were spiritual rather than concerned with state power. He couldn’t avoid noticing the extreme abuse of human rights though and from that point on did not seek an alternative to what we could call Classical Liberalism, though his understanding was a very specific mix of participation in and observation of resistance to power and discrimination (including gay rights), the study of Hellenistic individualism, and a detailed study of the different ways power has operated in the modern world.
And he spelled his first name Michel.
The blog is in the process of being moved. It happens gradually, although the "hard" switch-over will happen over the weekend. If you want to ensure you can find it, bookmark the URL http://www.andrewsullivan.com. That will automatically redirect you to the new site at the Atlantic. A brief thanks to Adam Embick at Time and all the tech staff at the Atlantic for their help. Monday morning, the new site will be up and running (knock on wood).
I confidently predict that the following phrase will become the new neoconservative mantra on Iraq:
We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.
And the truth is: it isn’t untrue. Blaming the U.S. entirely for the deep ethnic divides and profound sectarian hatreds in Iraq is preposterous. But speaking of the civil war in Iraq as if the Bush administration had nothing to do with it is equally preposterous. Even the most optimistic of pro-war thinkers were aware of the potential for sectarian warfare once Saddam had been deposed. I remember writing for a long time after the invasion that we should be happy that the most likely thing had not yet happened: a civil war. So we knew it was a risk; and we knew we had to act quickly to prevent it. We didn’t. As the insurgency took shape, Dick Cheney was more interested in smearing Joe Wilson than in preventing an incipient civil war. Moreover, the invading army has a moral responsibility to maintain order. What Charles ignores is how complete anarchy is the oxygen necessary for civil war to spark into a conflagration. When there is no central authority, people immediately seek security from their family, tribe or faith-community. By refusing to send enough troops to maintain order, the Bush administration provided the timber, fuel and context for a sectarian fire. No, they didn’t strike the match. But their negligence gave Zarqawi his opening. And he took advantage of it. Zarqawi won this war – because Bush was too clueless and arrogant to win it (and Bush didn’t kill Zarqawi when he had a clear chance).
Recall also how patient the Shia in Iraq were for so long. Constantly goaded by Sunni terrorists and al Qaeda, they tolerated attacks for three years before snapping around a year ago, after the Samarra mosque bombing. So sorry, Charles. If you think you can get the Bush administration off the hook for the past four years and blame everything on Arab pathologies, you’re dreaming.
The Dish 