Rhetoric unmasked
Dr. Sanity deconstructs (love that word!) the emphasis of the postmodern Left—and its current well-known incarnation, Obama—on rhetoric.
That’s postmodern rhetoric, as in, “[P]ersuasion in the absence of cognition… truth or falsity is not the issue: what matters primarily is the language’s effectiveness.”
Language thus used may sometimes sound casual, but it is hardly that. Dr. Sanity quotes a wonderful piece by Victor Davis Hanson detailing the cleverly Orwellian rhetorical turns of Obama’s latest efforts to detangle his own words by twisting them still further.
Great point!
I’m having a huge debate with a post-modern lefty – he’s a Texas Democratic delegate, naturally – on Obama’s Wright controversy, or athe lleged “non-controversy,” I should say, since the guy will twist any word or statement completely out of the origininal context.
Example: Michelle Obama didn’t say she that “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country…” The guy says she says “really” proud of to be American, and blames it all on Bush.
These folks are the worst:
http://biobrain.blogspot.com/2008/03/obamas-pastor.html
Debra Saunders on probably the last word on why Obama’s gaffe was and is arogant and insulting.
Unless and untill I find another. But in this one, Saunders throws Obama’s provincial rhetoric right back at the elitist in a point Im sure they’ve never thought about:
Xenophobia: San Francisco Style
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/04/xenophobia_san_francisco_style.html
And to think they’re so much smarter than the rest of us.
you like “deconstucts” or deconstructs? liberal fascism points out its roots.
After Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 Heidegger the world-renowned philosopher became Heidegger the Nazi, holding membership card number 312589.
so much effort to protect his philosophical work by denying his politics. given the political nature of his philosophy work, its inserpable.
Finally, both types of Marxism employ a method of analysis guaranteed to show the correctness of their ideology in every situation. For classical Marxists, the method is Marxist economics. For Cultural Marxists, the method is linguistic: deconstruction. Deconstruction first removes all meaning from “texts,” then inserts new meaning: one way or another, the text illustrates the oppression of women, blacks, homosexuals, etc., by white men and Western culture. The intended meaning of the author is irrelevant.
and
Following World War I, European Marxists faced a difficult question: why did the proletariat throughout Europe not rise in revolution and establish a new, Marxist order, as their ideology said it would? Two prominent Marxist thinkers, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came up with an answer: Western culture. Western culture so blinded the workers to their true “class” interests that they could not act on them. So before socialism could come to power, Western culture had to be destroyed. Lukacs in 1919 posed the question, “Who will save us from Western civilization?” As Deputy Commissar for Culture in the Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary that same year, the first thing he did was introduce sex education into Hungarian schools.
In 1923, Lukacs and a group of German Marxist intellectuals founded a “think tank” intended to translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University. The Institute quickly became known as the Frankfurt School. In 1933, when the National Socialists came to power in Germany, the Frankfurt School moved to New York City (Columbia University).
There, its key figures–Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich–developed critical theory,” a crossing of Marx with Freud that labeled the key components of Western culture “prejudice,” i.e., a psychological disease. The “critical theorists” argues that to eliminate “prejudice,” Christianity, capitalism and the traditional “patriarchal” family all had to be destroyed.
The connection between the Frankfurt School and the student rebellion of the 1960s was made primarily by a key Frankfurt School member, Herbert Marcuse–the man who in the ‘60s coined the phrase, “Make love, not war.” Marcuse’s books Eros and Civilization argued that the tools with which to destroy Western culture were, in effect, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. He popularized the Frankfurt School’s ideas in ways the ‘60s student radicals could understand and absorb, and we now know his work as Political Correctness.
So that is Political Correctness’ dirty little secret: it is Marxism, Marxism translated from economics into culture. We know what economic Marxism did to the old Soviet Union.
deconstruction is key to warping old classics and old culture and twisting it around till we hate it.
while that might not be the intent of the originators usage for deconstruction, its sure the usage of it now.
its up there with reimagineering…