When these guys get bored by politics it’s very bad news
by digby
Corey Robin has a good piece in Salon this morning warning about this latest expression of political ennui coming from certain writers. He warns that when people of this ilk get bored with politics it’s usually time to start a war.
Packer belongs to a special tribe of ideologically ambidextrous scribblers — call them political romantics — who are always on the lookout for a certain kind of experience in politics. They don’t want power, they don’t seek justice, they’re not interested in interests. They want a feeling. A feeling of exaltation and elation, unmoored from any specific idea or principle save that of sacrifice, of giving oneself over to the nation and its cause.
It’s not that political romantics seek the extinction of the self in the purgative fire of the nation-state. It’s that they see in that hallucination an elevation of the self, a heightening of individual feeling, an intensification of personal experience. That’s what makes them so dangerous. They think they’re shopping for the public good, but they’re really in the market for is an individual experience. An experience that often comes with a hefty price tag.
It’s the media, too, although they are moved by a simpler desire for sheer stimulation which can be delivered through tabloid stories, disasters and other major events. But little gets their juices flowing like a war. (Why else do we see all these reporters embellishing their stories of being in the battle?)
And needless to say, nothing makes right wing hawks happier than when they can march around wrapped in the flag calling everyone else a traitor.
Read the whole thing, it’s very good. And then check out this older piece by Chris Hayes talking about how so many of the Iraq war cheerleaders openly expressed a desire to be another “Greatest Generation.” This is a rather human impulse, I think. But one that should be resisted, particularly by the leaders of the most powerful nation on earth.
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