If you can stomach reading the linked BO discussion with sycophant automaton Tom Friedman, the main thing you will get out of it is "no victor no vanquished". BO apparently read a book or got the phrase got stuck in his head somewhere else and keeps repeating it in the interview like he is high or something. Perhaps he is hoping that the rest of the world buys into the self-esteem movement, no grades, prizes for everyone, and potentially even all the sports teams will go to no keeping score in any of the games and everyone getting a trophy at the end of the year. I guess Vikings fans would be for it -- they would finally get a Lombardi Trophy!
I find the following paragraph to summarize not just BO, but a lot of a generation of Americans to come of age around the millenium :
This was allied with a personal drive for High Moralism, the felt need to build a castle around yourself behind a moat of 12-foot thick walls from behind which you could shoot moral arrows at everyone else to demonstrate your superiority and quickly destroy any emerging criticism of yourself. So from this position of invincible ignorance allied with moral perfection and then allied with power, you could become able to cross a line in history to reach a new world shaped by your conviction of your perfected sensibility.Certainly there have always been smug people, and many Christians were and still are more smug than they ought to be, however this PERSONAL drive for "high moralism" is largely a very recent phenomenon that I find to be very related to the post-Christian world.
I grew up in a very "fundamentalist" Baptist sect where "goodness" was a game of one-upmanship along the lines of "What is it that you DON'T do" ... no smoking or drinking were mandatory, but no dancing, no movies, no TV, no rock music -- etc, etc were all on the list of potential "moral winners".
Today it is environmentalism, recycling, vegetarian, vegan, no plastic bags, etc, etc -- the kind of moralzing that used to be confined to a few fairly obscure sects has broken out into the general public as a plague a zealotry -- in the ignorant hope that people can PERSONALLY effect a "world shaped by your conviction of your perfected sensibility".
Both "the enemy" in the case of foreign policy, and more commonly considering the current level of ignorance involved, simple reality, definitely get a vote ... no matter how smug someone is.
As I've observed since '08, when the smugly ignorant person is president, we are all in grave danger -- a fact which at least more people are now developing increasing awareness of.
'via Blog this'
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