[lit-ideas] whose reality?
- From: Rhyme and Reason <rhymereason@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 16:09:15 +1000
The owl of minerva!
>An extract from Rahul Mahajan's blog site for 18 October.
>Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House,
and the Education of Paul O'Neill, had a long piece yesterday in the NY Times
Magazine called Without a Doubt, about the faith-based Bush presidency. Even
at over 8000 words, it's well worth reading, but by far the most remarkable
thing in it is the following quote:
> In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that
the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen
Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White
House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn'
t fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the
Bush presidency.
>
> 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.''
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