FreeLists / lit-ideas / [lit-ideas] Re: It Doesn't Stay in Vegas

["Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Irene,

 

It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about, inasmuch as I
read the entire article and not merely the little example I posted.  But
having figured out what you are probably talking about I am nevertheless
nonplussed.  Did you read the whole article?  I posted an example of
Fukuyama's clever thinking, and in this context, clever repartee.  I suppose
however that you on the left can't do that, that is can't appreciate clever
thinking or speaking unless it is consistent with your partisan point of
view.  And then, I suppose, if you don't recognize it you assume it to be
coming from the opposite partisan point of view.  Like I said to someone
else recently, if I thought like that I wouldn't read anything, or if I did,
I wouldn't read "promiscuously," as a lurker recently described my reading
habits.

 

Lawrence

 

  _____  

From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Andy Amago
Sent: Monday, May 01, 2006 6:59 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: It Doesn't Stay in Vegas

 

Lawrence, are you lamenting that Americans are not warlike enough? We're too
soft, can't stomach war? Or are we not warlike enough but not as bad as the
Europeans? 

 

 

----- Original Message ----- 

From: Lawrence <mailto:lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>  Helm 

To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: 5/1/2006 8:39:40 PM 

Subject: [lit-ideas] It Doesn't Stay in Vegas

 

I subscribed to Francis Fukuyamas new journal, The American Interest, and
just received my first copy.  Ive read some of the articles and they are
very good.  Unfortunately there were only teasers on the AI web site
<http://www.the-american-interest.com/> www.the-american-interest.com until
I got to It Doesnt Stay in Vegas, in which the peripatetic Frenchman,
Bernard-Henri Levi is described as duking it out with Frances Fukuyama
over American virtues and vices, neoconservatives, religion, the future of
American muscular internationalism, and the role of intellectuals in a free
society.  The AI website provides this as a free article  a very good
choice:  <http://www.the-american-interest.com/cms/bhl.cfm>
http://www.the-american-interest.com/cms/bhl.cfm .

 

Here is an excerpt and Fukuyama at his best: The End of History and the
Last Man ended with ruminations about the possibility that modern democracy
would yield "men without chests", wedded to ever-increasing peace and
prosperity. During the Clinton years, in our preoccupation with the NASDAQ
and Monica Lewinsky, that seemed a fair conclusion. But on further
reflection, it has seemed to me that America was not remotely in danger of
becoming the home of the Hegelian last man. Now that the United States has
launched two wars in the new millennium, it seems like an even less apt
concern. The last man actually lives in Europe. 

This, it seems to me, is the essential paradox you deal with in American
Vertigo: Americans have this incredible energy, they've created a faux
paradise in the desert at home and now they want to make deserts bloom in
the Middle East. But they go about it in a clumsy and self-defeating way,
and they have neither the imperial bloody-mindedness nor the steady judgment
to see the project through. Maybe so. But if global leadership were left up
to Europeans, they would either acquiesce in whatever exists, or they would
make cynical deals to preserve their own narrow interests while talking
about universal rights and justice. 

Lawrence