Comments on: Carl’s Rock Songbook #8: Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”

By: Carl’s Rock Songbook #9, Marilynne Robinson, “I Miss Civilization” » Postmodern Conservative | A First Things Blog

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 15:32:07 +0000

[...] busy, to submit it. Didn’t seem in the Christmas spirit. But with “Masters of War” now on my mind again, and with summer crying out for some excuse to rumble with the Porchers, it’s time has come. So [...]

By: Carl Eric Scott

Carl Eric Scott — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 16:52:53 +0000

John, you and I are on the same wavelength–I thought of that line in “Ask” as well!

(But I don’t see how Dr. Strangeglove can work as evidence of using-the-bomb for the purposes of helping along sexual liberation or justifying extreme politics or expression.)

By: Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:38:11 +0000

Peter, I’m really not inclined to describe Pres. Eisenhower as a person given to exaggeration. I probably ought to look up the speech and re-read it but if I remember correctly, he was rather serious about this particular warning. I think I remember watching it on our old black and white Crosley. The speech must have stirred a hornet’s nest among the m-i-complex?

Mr. Seaton, I wholeheartedly agree with your No. 1 and mostly No. 2 too, after all the idea of a highly centalized general gov’t is anathema for all good and true republicans, and given the current crisis, for good reasons. Re: No.3 I’m not sure that, in a moral sense, our ‘foreign adventures’ have accomplished much more than needlessly mucking up some primitive cultures who were pretty much minding their own business. But hey, maybe we need those six hundred or so bases throughout the world?

Carl yes, for me ‘empire’ does, indeed, have a negative connotation and while I don’t subscribe to the notion that the contemporary American ‘empire’ follows the typical ecumenic empires so ably described by EV, it does signify an abandonment of the effort on the part of the founders, or some of them, to seek/acknowledge a ‘divine order’ in the American polis. The movement away from these republican principles has resulted in a long series of disordered regimes proudly grounded on a secularist immanentism. We are, currently, experiencing the results of such folly.
Re: your upset stomach allow me to recomend two fingers of Maker’s Mark.

By: Carl Eric Scott

Carl Eric Scott — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 23:41:10 +0000

Paul, agreed, and the next songbook entry will contain a brief recommendation to the Porchers of Manent’s conceptualization of “empire.”

If everyone used the term “empire” in the way Manent and Aron do, or in the way that BOTH Jefferson and Hamilton used the term to refer to the U.S’s continental extent, I would have no problems.

But, almost no one uses the term that way. It almost always loaded negatively. As it is for Bob.

And Bob, while I respect much of what you say and thus suspect your conception of empire has more subtlety than meets the eye, the possibility of you and a Porcher and a Paleo and a Chomskyite and a German America-hater and an Egyptian Islamist all agreeing that “America is an empire” makes me queasy.

By: John Presnall

John Presnall — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 23:38:46 +0000

In defense of Carl’s statement–“The Counter-Culture needed the Bomb more than it can admit”–let me suggest that many counter-cultural heroes have endorsed this view abut themselves or their own times. Terry Southern/Stanley Kubrick stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb in an allegedly ironic crescendo of nuclear devastation at the end of Dr. Strangelove. 20 or 30 years later, Morrissey (egads!) sings in a Smiths song called “Ask”, “If it’s not love then its the bomb that will keep us together”–to which Carl could add keep us together in ritualistic and apocalyptic expressions of rage.

By: paul seaton

paul seaton — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:58:37 +0000

I tend to agree with Peter, that certain sects (not all) reason as follows: 1) domestic policy is more important than foreign because of the primacy of the moral health of the polity (Straussians connect this with the classics v. moderns divide; cf., e.g., Tom West on Leo Strauss’s Platonic foreign policy views); 2) we don’t like the results of much of 20th century American foreign policy (mainly because it centralized the State, militarized society, etc.); so 3) let’s reread that history and show the wickedness and folly of our “foreign adventures”. At first glance, I find this to be a combination of principle, understandable (over)reaction, and ostrich-thinking. (I’m not willing at this point to go further back in American history, to Lincoln, with Mr. Cheeks, Don Livingston, et al.) Jim Ceaser has a relevant discussion about America assuming global responsibilities in the 20th century in (the underappreciated by Peter) LD & PS.

By: Peter Lawler

Peter Lawler — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:22:21 +0000

Bob, we would up for Paul being an actual byline. For now, I agree that WW1 is a tougher call, but we did break the all-consuming tie, after all. The way we screwed up the peace with a kind of imperial idealism is a different story. Eisenhower, who used to be an underrated prez until everyone started to call him that (he might be overrated now), exaggerated the danger–as do phrases like “garrison state,” which were big in those days. You and I are on the side of those who believe the Cold War wasn’t invented by a CIA serving our corporate interests, and as Carl has suggested, virtually all of our wars–even if wrongly or in a screwed up way–were political choices by our elected leader(s). Even if we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, it wasn’t big oil that sent us there.

By: Robert Cheeks

Robert Cheeks — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:48:45 +0000

BTW, Paul Seaton should be writing here…regularly. I’ve always enjoyed his insightful ‘comments’, even those I didn’t necessarily agree with.
Peter, I don’t think the opposite of ‘republic’ is ‘empire.’ I see ‘republic’ as that form of gummint best able/suited to nourish the desire of men/women to love and be free in the sense of God’s will.
Your comments re: the m-i-complex are in disagreement with Pres. Eisenhower, which begs the question, do you think he was wrong/confused in warning the American people of the danger?
And finally, what’s wrong with ‘choosing’ not to participate in WWI, what reason did we have to involve ourselves in Europe’s madness? The confrontation with modernity’s perverse ideologies is another matter that deserves a deeper analysis.

By: Peter Lawler

Peter Lawler — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 18:07:10 +0000

Of course America is an empire, but the opposite of republic is not empire, we’ve taught the world. Imperial republic, as Mr. Aron wrote, is not an oxymoron. The phrase that doesn’t ring true to me is military-industrial complex. Studies show that one of the two major reasons Britain might have entered Bob’s favorite war on the side of the Confederacy was that a united America was bound to displace her–less by intention than as the inevitable consequence of a huge amount of territory and unprecedented techno-prosperity. So says THE FEDERALIST, Justice Marshall, yada yada. So what’s wrong with paleo etc. view is that we could simply choose not to be an empire (either now or by staying out of WW1 or WW2 or by backing off after WW2 etc. etc.).

By: paul seaton

paul seaton — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:48:06 +0000

JD & Carl, your little exchange reminded me of the Ion. (That’s a good thing.)

Carl (and Peter), I think we need to be a bit more open to Robert Cheeks’ employment of “empire” in connection with America. After all, Raymond Aron entitled his book on American foreign policy The Imperial Republic. And Pierre Manent labeled America an empire in A World beyond Politics?. I do not necessarily agree with the “Republic” v. “Empire” dichotomy as used by people like Christopher Lasch and Andy Bacevich, but our post-1898 (or 1918) regime and our global economic, military, and diplomatic status are rather complex; we probably need some such word, perhaps “hegemon”?