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Thursday, July 31. 2008

A domestic Cold War?

A quote from Herb Meyer via Am Thinker:

Let me put this as starkly as I can:  What's going on today in our country isn't normal politics.  In normal politics honorable people will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how best to deal with the issues that confront us - national security, border control, healthcare, education, energy, the environment, and all the rest.  What's going on today is a kind of domestic Cold War -- a seemingly endless standoff, with the occasional hard skirmish -- between those of us who see the US for what it really is, and those of us who are seeing the US through a prism.  And remember, unlike real prisms these intellectual prisms -- or, if you prefer, these political prisms -- are invisible.  If you're looking at the US through a political prism, you don't know you're seeing through a prism and you won't believe anyone who tries to tell you that you are.

This is why Americans who see our country and the world through a prism are impervious to facts. 

Read the whole, excellent thing.

Posted by The Barrister in Politics at 21:22 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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Editors' introduction to the ``Sociology of Literature'' issue of Critical Inquiry v.14 n.3 (Spring 1988) p.428-429:

A metaphor that cannot be avoided deserves closer attention. If we examine the mirror more closely, we may find that the metaphor actually serves the sociology of literature in unexpected ways. The marvelously revealing mirror in Hans Christian Andersen's ``The Snow Queen'' offers a case in point. In this tale a demon invents a unique mirror : it does not reflect, it systematically misreflects. Andersen's mirror shrinks and distorts every good and beautiful thing, and it magnifies everything evil or ugly. In this glass pleasant landscapes look like boiled spinach, normal people appear hideous, and kind thoughts become wicked grins.

The demon creator appears mildly amused by his invention, but his students, simple reflectionists, take it very seriously :

[quoting The Snow Queen]

All the pupils in the demon's school - for he kept a school - reported that a miracle had taken place : now for the first time, they said, it was possible to see what the world and mankind were really like. They ran about everywhere with the mirror, till at last there was not a country or a person which had not been seen in this distorting mirror.

[unquote]

Eventually the mirror breaks. Shards of glass fly through the world and lodge in people's eyes and hearts. These shards retain the peculiarities of the mirror, so that everyone sees the world through bent, distorted, and misshapen images.
#1 Ron Hardin (Link) on 2008-07-31 22:43 (Reply)
Thanx. Good images.
#1.1 BD on 2008-07-31 22:47 (Reply)
"If you're looking at the US through a political prism, you don't know you're seeing through a prism and you won't believe anyone who tries to tell you that you are."

Okay, so is Herb Meyer looking through a prism as he writes this?
#2 Thomas on 2008-07-31 23:00 (Reply)
You could judge whether he is or not only by comparing his ideas to history. History too is mostly writ thru a prism, so the only part of it you can be sure of is the data -- what action caused what reaction, what was beneficial to who and and what wasn't.
#2.1 buddy larsen on 2008-07-31 23:44 (Reply)
--not 'history' as in the history course one takes in school, but the stuff that the present continually fills time with as it flows past into future.
#2.2 buddy larsen on 2008-08-01 00:55 (Reply)
Hey, Buddy - where ya been?

I've been in Africa mainly, now East Coast. Little internet connectivity over there, to say the least.
#2.2.1 Skookumchuk (Link) on 2008-08-01 17:53 (Reply)

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