THIS IS GETTING TO BE A HABIT

Later today I will give my twenty-fifth YouTube lecture:  ten on Ideological Critique, nine on Kant's First Critique, four on the thought of Sigmund Freud, and now my second on Marx.  I am running out of stories!  [not really]

TROUBLING

Josh Marshall on TPM posted this bit two days ago.  It is, in a way, the most disturbing thing I have read.  Note his extreme cation in reporting it:

“I’d say we need to know more about. Quickly.

From a South Korean paper, flagged on Twitter by The Washington Post’s Tokyo Bureau Chief …

Indeed, White House National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs Matthew Pottinger was reported as saying in a recent closed-door meeting with US experts on Korean Peninsula issues that a limited strike on the North “might help in the midterm elections.”

The Post’s Anna Fifield identifies the paper Hankyoreh as “left-wing” and that it is the only paper currently reporting it. I don’t know more about the source. But this sounds like something we need to know more about very quickly. The report suggests Trump may see such a move not simply in the context of the standard efforts to help in a midterm election but to ward offer facing the prospect of impeachment or actual investigations under a Democratic congress.

Late Update: Some follow-on commentary on this report (noted here among other places) suggests that the translation may make it sound more concrete than it does in the original. More like, “we’ve heard” in a generic sense that it “was reported.” So this sounds more like scuttlebutt, what people are hearing that a confirmed report. Still, given the stakes and what else we are hearing, maximum scrutiny is warranted.”

BRIEF REMARK

A brief remark prompted by Ed Barreras’ concerns about frat boy comments.  Verbal aggression, speaking generally, is a good thing, especially as an alternative to physical aggression.  The general rule about verbal aggression – satire, snark, ridicule, obscenity – is:  punch up, not down.  When satirists ridicule politicians, that is punching up.  It may be outrageous, excessive, shocking, utterly unwarranted, but it is fair, because the victim can simply return the favor.  When nerds make fun of frat boys, more power to them [although I will admit that I went beyond the bounds of fair criticism when I filled a desk drawer with water and dumped it out the window on some drunk Final Club members at Harvard in ’52.]  Let us have more Jonathan Swifts and Alexander Popes, if we can find them.  As for Paul Ryan, he richly deserves all the abuse we can heap on him.  And no, I do not think there are any admirable Ayn Rand lovers, at least none that are older than fifteen.

COMING UP

On Monday, I shall lecture about some of the early writings of Marx:  the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts, so-called, and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, with a quotation from The German Ideology to lead off.  Then next week will start the extended formal analysis of the tradition of classical Political Economy, leading up to Capital itself.  Once that material has been covered, I shall plunge into the text of Capital.   This is getting exciting.

MEANSPIRITED THOUGHTS ON SUPER BOWL EVE

Some of you, no doubt, are familiar with the Grey Panthers, a group formed in 1970 to combat forced retirement which has gone on to bring progressive senior citizens together in support of a wide range of domestic and foreign policy issues.  Last Monday, after I returned home from delivering my first Marx lecture, Susie and I went to a meeting of the Carolina Meadows Democratic Club.  Carolina Meadows has 600 residents in Independent Living and roughly 150 in Assisted Living.  The CM Democratic Club claims 423 members [before Susie and I joined], and assuming not every Democrat here has taken the trouble to join, we Democrats would seem to be 2/3 or more of the CM residents.

The meeting very definitely had a Grey Panther feel.  There was a sea of grey hair, and plenty of canes, walkers, and hearing aids.  Thanks to some very imaginative gerrymandering, Carolina Meadows lies in Mark Walker’s bright red Congressional District, so there is not much hope, even in a wave year, of unseating him.  That leaves state house and senate seats and other local contests, which I shall do my best to assist.  But this is only February, so it will be a while before my agita can be translated into useful political action.  Meanwhile, I am left to stew and fret and anguish about the daily assaults on the elements of democratic political institutions.  Which brings me to my mean spiritedness.

I have hated the powerful, reactionary men and women who dominate our politics all of my adult life.  My contempt for them is a settled component of my personality, as familiar and unalterable as my facial tics.  I do not give either of them much thought because I have lived with them for more than seventy years.  But I have developed a new, and therefore especially vivid, detestation for the young princelings and princesses of the Trump entourage. The jeunesses dorées, as they were called in the ancien régime, of Trump world:  Ivanka Trump, Donald Jr., Jared Kushner – and Hope Hicks.  Privileged, smug, greedy, self-satisfied, ignorant, malevolent, possessed of a boundless and utterly unwarranted self-assurance, they preen and parade before us.  It would gravely underestimate their self-delusion to say of them that they had been born on third base and thought they had hit triples.

Donald Jr. and Jared are already in Bob Mueller’s crosshairs, and now Hope Hicks is about to have her turn.  It warms my heart [this is the mean-spirited part] to think that she may find herself indicted for conspiracy or lying to an FBI agent or Grand Jury or even, deo volente, for participation in a money-laundering scheme.  I desperately want them all to be brought low, for the smugness to be wiped from their faces, to see a hunted look in those lifeless eyes.  I would confess to schadenfreude if I felt the slightest schaden about my freude. 

It is cold outside, even here in North Carolina.  The prospect of their downfall enables me to sleep at night.

IDLE OBSERVATION

Lenin is said to have referred to Western sympathizers with communism as useful idiots, and the term has come to mean someone who is not bright enough to understand the significance of what he is doing but who can be put to good use by clever strategists.  Carter Page may not be a useful idiot of Putin, but there seems to be no doubt that he is an idiot.  Is this really the person in whose defense the Republicans want to cut their historic ties with the FBI and the Intelligence community?  It seems a feckless choice.  But then, perhaps any useful idiot in a media storm.

IN CASE YOU WANTED TO KNOW

For reasons that are beyond me, the count of visits to this blog has suddenly jumped from about 1200 a day to 5000.  Brian Leiter does not seem to be the explanation, but in case anyone is looking for the first of my new series of videotaped lectures on Marx, you can find it here.  I am now hard at work on the second lecture, which will feature extended quotations from Marx himself, and therefore will be far superior to the first lecture, which had me talking for an hour.