10 Nov 2006

Bush Doctrine, RIP

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A generative anthropologist (Eric Gans?) keyboards a deserved eulogy for what its author describes as “a courageous, novel, and, of course, risky strategy.”

We have just witnessed an epic battle between a courageous, novel, and, of course, risky strategy for transforming the very conditions that have made us powerless against victimary Islamist blackmail, on the one hand, and the forces of continuity with pre-9/11 policies (I would say “illusions,” but part of my argument here will be in favor of stepping back from these more immediate polemical stances), in particular foreign policy realism and transnational progressivism, the political form of White Guilt, on the other. The forces of continuity have won…

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to truepeers.

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Dominique R. Poirier

That’s a good obituary, indeed; and its author is anything but stupid.

Just, the first trouble is that there is no room for obituary, or even eulology, since George Bush is still President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.
Eric Gan gets things done quickly. Too much, and inopportunely, I think.

The second trouble I have found in it is this elusive superior condescension of a sort that pervades the general tune of this article. If it meant to be mere magnanimity, fairness, or polite acknowledgement of the rightfulness of the point of view of one’s opponent (because I express some doubts about the admiration of Eric Gan for George Bush), this brilliant intellectual process is straightforwardly irrelevant.

From these observations, I deduce that Eric Gan’s passion for French culture, literature, and his dedicated works and efforts at the service of francophonism in United States entailed dutiful observance of this arrogance without which he wouldn’t fully understand the French spirit.

Since Eric Gan, for his deepest regret, it is easy to guess it, can hardly claim to be spirited by “bon sens paysan” (French peasant common sense), he couldn’t but conspicuously underline his social origin in making clear on his biography that he is born in the Bronx; a feature, which, doubtless, must please his mentors.

However, and following a careful reading of some of the articles and viewpoints he wrote, I have to acknowledge that he has been successful in fully assimilating, and mastering, and adapting to the English language then, these peculiar syntax and style commonly encountered when reading far leftist intellectual newspapers such as Le Monde Diplomatique, for example.

Having already gotten the Palmes Académiques, a French medal awarding people for their exceptional contribution to the French culture and academic system, Eric Gan can aim now at getting this so coveted Legion d’Honneur, if he succeeds to hand down to the American culture a style and a rhetoric approaching Pierre Bourdieu’s.



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