blake johnson

A friend pointed out an excellent feature article The "Without a Doubt" by Ron Suskind in the Sunday's NYTimes magazine about the way in which President Bush's administration has been shaped by George W.'s faith. There is a section of the article which I find particularly disturbing:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Maybe the postmodernists out there feel right at home in this philosophy, but it makes me rather uncomfortable.

My friend Ben just made a really good comment to me over AIM:

well, Bush's rhetoric is divorced from reality--both the reality of his policies and the reality on the ground. He is trying to be Reagan, but that is not what we need now. The Cold War was a rhetorical war, Reagan was a good president in that context. Now we have a lot of little messes and one big threat: Islamic Militant Fundamentalism. That threat and the little messes need to be dealt with with great care, diplomacy, and thought, which are not what Bush is good at. "Freedom" is not a message that works against an essentially national, post-colonial revolt in the Islamic world. they don't hate our freedom, they don't give a shit about our freedom, they just hate us because they feel we have been keeping them down for the last fifty years.

Some might disagree, but I think the most sensible interpretation of what John Kerry means by a "global test" is a universal standard. In other words, before any political leader commits troops to an action, he has a responsibility to ensure that the action is just, and that he has exhausted non-violent alternatives.

Stephen Green seems to be on to the same idea in his liveblogging coverage of the VP debates, but he tries to turn "global" into "American":

7:19. The "global test" means not lying and being credible. Isn't that an AMERICAN test? So, we still don't know what a global test is.

I think global refers to the moral status of the test, not its geographic boundaries.

My girlfriend Phyllis has started her own blog called sableswan's Journal. She is currently running around Cambridge England, and I think she is happily amused by her Brittish surroundings. Now, if I could just get her to use blogging software which allows for TrackBacks, I might be able to start some dialogue between our blogs.