[lit-ideas] Was Dept. of Defense, now Dept. of Postmodern Theory

From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 19:00:34 -0700

(This is pretty funny -- andreas)

The New Know-Nothings
Arianna Huffington

There's an old saying that when the facts are against you, argue the law. But the Bushies have gone one better: when the facts are against them, they argue the very existence of facts.

As pretty much every fact has turned against the administration in Iraq, the fallback position has increasingly become: well, who can really know anything? Everything is so complex. You've got Sunnis, you've got Shiites, you've got Kurds...the truth is...well, the truth is that we can't know the truth...so how can we be held accountable when nothing is really knowable?

Of course Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their cohorts didn't invent this way of thinking. The funny thing is that the very people who claim to be moral absolutists from the heartland turn out to be arguing a variation of postmodernism -- an Eastern elitist linguistic theory laden with moral relativism.

Here's the short version of postmodernism, via Wikipedia (I know I'm distilling a bit, but this is not, after all, a peer-reviewed academic blog):

"In the broadest sense, denial of objectivity is held to be the postmodern position, and a hostility towards claims advanced on the basis of objectivity its defining feature... all standards are arbitrary and meaningless."

Sound like any defense secretaries you know?

If you want to know how postmodern poster boy Jacques Derrida would have sounded in a political context, check out Rumsfeld's answer at a recent DoD press briefing when asked about the number of Iraqi security forces that are ready to conduct operations on their own:

RUMSFELD: "Trying to get a single, simple answer for a complex situation where you have, I'm going to guess, 15 or 20 different categories of Iraqi security forces that have different purposes, different training, different equipment -- so the number is 171,500 currently, last time I looked -- last week. But it's made up of apples and oranges. So it isn't useful to try to oversimplify."

Of course not. It's way too complex, and way too impossible to know how many Iraqi security forces there really are.

Then we have another classic Rummy response Derrida would have been proud of, this one after Tim Russert asked him: "Did you make a misjudgment about the cost of the war?"

RUMSFELD: "I never estimated the cost of the war. And how can one estimate the cost in lives or the cost in money? I've avoided it consistently. And how can that be a misestimate? We've said that there are always going to be unknowns, that the battle was going to change, depending on what the enemy does and how they adjust and how we adjust..."

And of course there is this all-time great postmodernist Rummy riff:

"As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."

But while Rumsfeld and his chums claim that nothing concrete is really knowable, they are -- somehow -- sure that we are winning. It's just that any fact or statistic that might disprove this assertion is dismissed as invalid in a complex, postmodern world. But if you set all facts aside, you will be totally certain that we're making progress.

Looking back, it's fascinating how sure they were back when they were lying about WMD. Then it was all about solid facts, and aluminum tubes, and Tenet saying "slam dunk" and Cheney saying "no doubt ."

But now that all that has vanished, so too, it seems, has our ability to know anything about anything.

Bush claims he's going back to his ranch after his presidency, but perhaps a Distinguished Chair in Postmodernist Theory at an Ivy League university might be more appropriate.

Maybe it'll happen. Who can really know?

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[lit-ideas] Was Dept. of Defense, now Dept. of Postmodern Theory

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