Possibly the most all-embracing WHODUNNIT ever written - and
it wasn’t the Butler either. Definitely needs reading from start to finish –
one long crescendo outperforming Ravel’s – with a virtuoso cadenza bound to
generate a long reverberation-time embracing not only individual brains but diverse
whole cultural fiefdoms.
Tom Wolfe: Jonathan Cape, London, 2016
ooooooooooooooooooooooo0000000000000000000000000000000000oooooooooooooooooooooooo
COMMENT added 06 SEP 2016:
It occurred to
me that a TYGER like Tom Wolfe might have a comment on Donald Trump – and found
an interview in The American Spectator at http://spectator.org/65918_tom-wolfes-view-trump/ from which I would like to quote this part:
“If
you go through our history, the strictly intellectual component of the
presidency is not all that important. Just look at Reagan. He was a huge
success. He was considered an idiot by half of the people in the political
field.
2008
I remember Henry Kissinger was at a university once, holding a seminar
for ten students and he didn’t know that his remarks were being recorded. And
he said something like, “You know, when you first meet Reagan and you spend a
half hour with him, you leave saying, ‘Oh my God, how could the future of the
free world be dependent on such a stupid guy?’” But then Kissinger said, “And
yet every move he makes is right.” Kissinger was horribly embarrassed when that
came out. The point is that decision making is not necessarily an intellectual
talent.
One of the stories about Reagan that I remember is the time he went to
Germany to speak before the Berlin Wall. It was at the time when the Berlin
Wall was still a big factor. And so Reagan had a discussion with his advisers
about whether or not he should say that the “wall should come down.” And they
said, “Oh, don’t say that,” and then told him what he should say instead. But
when Reagan gave the speech, he said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” and
it was a real turning point in the Cold War. It was just Reagan’s gut reaction
to the facts.”
This brought to mind something in relation to the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989 which I recently mentioned in one of my blogs -- http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/brexit-musings.html
-- where I quote Vaclav Smil:
“Russia, too, is part of my
Europe. Arguments about Russia’s place in (or outside of) Europe have been
going on for centuries… I have never understood the Western reluctance of the
Russian hesitancy to place the country unequivocally in Europe… its history,
music, literature, engineering, and science make it quintessentially European.” p.93
Global
Catastrophes and Trends [MIT Press,
2008]
in relation to which I found this comment by Noam Chomsky:
“The near-universal Western
condemnation of Putin includes citing the "emotional address" in
which he complained bitterly
that the U.S. and its allies had "cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back,
presenting us with completed facts. With the expansion of NATO in the
East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They
always told us the same thing: 'Well, this doesn't involve you.'
Putin's complaints are factually
accurate. When President Gorbachev accepted the unification of Germany
as part of NATO -- an astonishing concession in the light of history -- there
was a quid pro quo. Washington agreed that NATO would not move "one inch eastward," referring to East
Germany.
The promise was immediately broken, and when Gorbachev complained, he was instructed that it was only a verbal promise,
so without force.
President Clinton proceeded to expand NATO
much farther to the east, to Russia's
borders. Today there are calls to extend NATO even to Ukraine, deep into the
historic Russian "neighbourhood." But it "doesn't involve"
the Russians, because its responsibility to "uphold peace and
stability" requires that American red lines are at Russia's borders”.
[Because We Say So, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2015]
While it is apparent from Tom Wolfe’s book that Noam Chomsky
and epigones dismally failed Sir Karl Popper’s litmus test of
“Whenever
a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you
have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to
solve”
being one of my ‘wooden-nickel-detectors’,
[cf. my comment in
http://cleanenergypundit.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/why-some-haveasked-what-it-actually-is.html ]
it is in relation to many other
topics -- as in the Gorbachev reference – that Chomsky can be welcomed as a quite perspicacious detector of wooden
nickels.
oooooooooooooooooooooo0000000000000000000000000000000000oooooooooooooooooooooooo
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete