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Showing posts from March 14, 2021

For Peace ... and the Draft

  In 2006, Harper’s Magazine sponsored a forum on the possibility of an American coup d’etat. Among the participants in that discussion was one Major General Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.  Dunlap was part of an interesting exchange about the composition of the military. “WASIK: I want to address the question of partisanship in the military. Insofar as there is a "culture war" in America, everyone seems to agree that the armed forces fight on the Republican side. And this is borne out in polls: self-described Republicans outnumber Democrats in the military by more than four to one, and only 7 percent of soldiers describe themselves as "liberal." KOHN: It has become part of the informal culture of the military to be Republican. You see this at the military academies. They pick it up in the culture, in the training establishments. DUNLAP: The military is an inherently conservative organization, and this is true of all militaries around the world. Also the demographics hav

Biography of a price - the argument from adventure

    We live in an epoch in which objects have taken one of the attributes of kings - that is, they get biographies. The biography of the fork, the pencil, Wall Street – the transfer of the life story from the human to the inhuman has become quite fashionable, as though, since we all know about the pathetic fallacy, we are allowed to systematically commit it. I jest, ho ho – and in fact, I have to admit that there is something life-like about these things and their passage through our lives. If they aren’t alive, they still have mana – a lifelike power. They become totems. However, noone, so far as I know, has done a biography of a price. Ah, there’s a subject! One would first have to wrest it from the enormous mystifications of the economists, who know what a price must be without often looking at what a price is, and one would have to restore it to its true nature, its genesis, its type. Scratch a price and you find an adventure. We’ve become accustomed to thinking that the advent

The ides of March, a poem

  The Ides of March   Fate’s patent on circumstance makes a monopoly of accidents. Me, for instance – isn’t my every hair counted by God on his golden throne?   Down here below, those that I lose collect in the filtre de cheveux de drain In the shower. Out of omen Out of luck.   “Caesar self also doing sacrifice unto the gods, Found that one of the beasts which was sacrificed had no heart.” Myself, untouchable, hairpicker grub In the soapscum for what I’ve shed. - Karen Chamisso     .