It’s raining like crazy out here tonight, and it’s a beautiful thing. I’ve been holed up rereading Anderson’s Imagined Communities, and that has sent me (back) to Benjamin. A few lines jumped out at me tonight, and they serve as a good response to Manan’s most recent post about the mess in Iraq. These words are helping me reimagine my own approach to the Worst Administration Ever, and hopefully they’ll help you all a bit, too:
The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are “still” possible in the [current] century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
(W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations)
Sure it’s a little unfair to replace “twentieth” with “current,” and Benjamin is talking about fascism, but there’s something still to this that I’m trying to wrap my head around. But at the very least, it shows that the Bush Administration is full of shit, as are “liberals,” the putative opposite side of the same counter-revolutionary coin. Ahem. I need to get out more…
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