The New Republic Daily
Report
03/02/11
Post-Post-Imperialism Has Conquered the Middle East, and Obama Doesn’t Get It Leon Wieseltier
As the dictators fall, the clichés fall, too. Cairo
and Tunis and Tripoli are littered with the shards of platitudes about what is
possible and what is impossible in Arab societies, in closed societies.
Civilizational analysis lies in ruins. Idealism, always cheaply mocked, turns
out to be a powerful form of historical causation, as disruptive of the
established order as any economic or technological change, and even more
beneficent. Stability, the false god of hard hearts, has been revealed to be
temporary, chimerical, provisional, hollow, where the social arrangements are
not decent or fair: the stability of injustice, though it may last a long time,
is essentially unstable. It is delicious to see realists convicted of illusions,
to hear them utter the words on which they used to choke. (If there is one thing
that realists know how to do, it is pivot.) The Arab uprisings have been
heuristically useful: they have exposed a lack of intellectual preparation, a
lack of historical imagination, a lack of moral aspiration, here at home. I
count the president among the Americans who are sunk in stereotypes and dogmas,
even if the good people at the White House want you to know that he is somehow a
hero of this springtime. By now—after Tehran, Tunis, Cairo, and Tripoli—a
presidential pattern has been established. Obama’s reluctance to lead, and to
establish the United States ringingly and incontrovertibly as the ally of the
freedom movements, is owed to many things, but most of all, I think, it is the
result of certain conventional assumptions about the historical agency of the
United States in the developing world. In almost his every pronouncement about
the valiant accomplishments of the liberalizing crowds in “the Arab street” (now
an honorific!), Obama keeps insisting that we had nothing to do with this, that
they did all this on their own, that Arab democracy must not be the work of the
United States or any foreign power. He dreads the imputation of our influence.
All his assurances of a new world notwithstanding, he is haunted by the ghost of
imperialism.
Continue reading "Post-Post-Imperialism Has Conquered the Middle East, and Obama Doesn’t Get It"
If Only There Hadn’t Been So Much Flying: Why ‘Spider-Man’ Fails on Stage Laura Bennett
TV Networks’ Disgusting, Embarrassing, Harmful Coverage of Charlie Sheen Seyward Darby
03/02/11
Post-Post-Imperialism Has Conquered the Middle East, and Obama Doesn’t Get It Leon Wieseltier
As the dictators fall, the clichés fall, too. Cairo
and Tunis and Tripoli are littered with the shards of platitudes about what is
possible and what is impossible in Arab societies, in closed societies.
Civilizational analysis lies in ruins. Idealism, always cheaply mocked, turns
out to be a powerful form of historical causation, as disruptive of the
established order as any economic or technological change, and even more
beneficent. Stability, the false god of hard hearts, has been revealed to be
temporary, chimerical, provisional, hollow, where the social arrangements are
not decent or fair: the stability of injustice, though it may last a long time,
is essentially unstable. It is delicious to see realists convicted of illusions,
to hear them utter the words on which they used to choke. (If there is one thing
that realists know how to do, it is pivot.) The Arab uprisings have been
heuristically useful: they have exposed a lack of intellectual preparation, a
lack of historical imagination, a lack of moral aspiration, here at home. I
count the president among the Americans who are sunk in stereotypes and dogmas,
even if the good people at the White House want you to know that he is somehow a
hero of this springtime. By now—after Tehran, Tunis, Cairo, and Tripoli—a
presidential pattern has been established. Obama’s reluctance to lead, and to
establish the United States ringingly and incontrovertibly as the ally of the
freedom movements, is owed to many things, but most of all, I think, it is the
result of certain conventional assumptions about the historical agency of the
United States in the developing world. In almost his every pronouncement about
the valiant accomplishments of the liberalizing crowds in “the Arab street” (now
an honorific!), Obama keeps insisting that we had nothing to do with this, that
they did all this on their own, that Arab democracy must not be the work of the
United States or any foreign power. He dreads the imputation of our influence.
All his assurances of a new world notwithstanding, he is haunted by the ghost of
imperialism.
Continue reading "Post-Post-Imperialism Has Conquered the Middle East, and Obama Doesn’t Get It"
If Only There Hadn’t Been So Much Flying: Why ‘Spider-Man’ Fails on Stage Laura Bennett
TV Networks’ Disgusting, Embarrassing, Harmful Coverage of Charlie Sheen Seyward Darby
