Kultur

[jporter]

<"I am reminded here of one our recent posts of Pynchon's proverbs
for paranoids : "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they
don't have to worry about answers." The political shell game that is
being perpetrated on the American public is symptomatic of a process
that has successfully substituted "culture" for politics.">


"Dangerous Boobyism," I agree. That is, the politics that then proceeds
from their "elaborate Folly" which "absorbs them into itself," making 
them
unable to distinguish "Fancy" from the "substantial World."

If The Constitution has any merit, being, as it is, a compromise 'tween
nouveau slave-keepers and puritan crackpots, "only He that sows the
Seeds of Folly in His World may say. That is, it's purely accidental.

In this long American rallentando, methinks, we're in for more 
surprises.
Hurricane season begins in nine days.

jody


On May 22, 2006, at 10:12 AM, Mark Smith wrote:

> In a review of a new book, "The Seduction of Culture in German 
> History", by Wolf Lepenies, Andreas Huyssen outlines how German 
> notions of "Kultur" became the de facto unifying principle for a 
> nation otherwise lacking in a central state organization ( The Nation, 
> May 29).  Although the influence of American rock and roll, pop, jazz, 
> and Hollywood movies have made huge inroads into the German concept of 
> Kultur as a unifying force, it is still possible at least to have a 
> working understanding of the difference between nonsense and serious 
> cultural issues in Germany, and entirely possible to conduct science 
> without catering to fringe religious beliefs.  If "Kultur" is what 
> unifies a country in the absence of real political organization, at 
> least let it be the real thing, and not some low-brow melodrama which 
> purports to be culture.
>
> "The intense focus on cultural issues like sex in the movies, 
> evolution and creationism, even academic curriculums, distracts from 
> the hollowing out of constitutional checks and balances, the 
> dismantling of international law and domestic threats to civil rights. 
> Even more ominous, the "war on terror" and the "march of democracy" 
> have increasingly taken on shadings of a war of cultures. As German 
> historian Heinrich von Treitschke argued more than a century ago, once 
> war becomes war of cultures, there is no end to it."
>
> I am reminded here of one our recent posts of Pynchon's proverbs for 
> paranoids : "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they 
> don't have to worry about answers." The political shell game that is 
> being perpetrated on the American public is symptomatic of a process 
> that has successfully substituted "culture" for politics.
>
> More at downstreamer
>
>