[Dialogue] Paradise Regained?

Mon Oct 27 22:53:07 EDT 2008

I found this in the NY trimes today and was stuck by the comarison of the current campaing to Milton's Paradise Regained. Enjoy!
David Walters

The Power of Passive Campaigning by Stanley Fish
In the aftermath of the 2000 and 2004 elections, the post-mortem verdict was that the Republicans had run a better campaign. They knew how to seize or manufacture an issue. They were able to master the dynamics of negative advertising. They kept on message. Now, when many print and TV commentators are predicting if not assuming an Obama victory, the conventional wisdom is that this time the Democrats have run a better campaign. 

When did the Democrats smarten up? When did they learn how to outdo the Republicans at their own game?

The answer is that they didn’t. They decided — or rather Obama decided — to play another game, one we haven’t seen for a while, and it’s a question as to whether we’ve ever seen it. The name of this game is straightforward campaigning, or rather straightforward non-campaigning. 

We saw it in the 10 days when the activity around the mounting economic crisis was at its height. Henry Paulson alternated between scaring members of Congress and scaring the public. Nancy Pelosi alternated between playing the responsible Congressional statesperson and playing the partisan attack dog. Media commentators went from one hysterical prediction to another. John McCain went from saying there’s nothing to worry about to saying there’s everything to worry about to saying that he would fix everything by suspending his campaign to saying that he was not suspending his campaign and that he would debate after all.

And Barack Obama? He didn’t do much and he said less (O.K., he did say some reassuring, optimistic things), and his poll numbers went up. 

Weeks later, the pattern continues, but in an even more intense form. The McCain campaign huffs and puffs and jumps from charge to charge: Obama consorts with terrorists; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; he is un-American; he’s not one of us; he’s a celebrity; he’s going to take your money and give it to people who never did a day’s work; he’s going to sell out Israel; he’ll cozy up to foreign dictators; he’s measuring the drapes. 

In response, Obama explains his tax policy for the umpteenth time, points out that capitalists like Warren Buffet support him, details his relationship with Bill Ayers, lists those he consults with, observes that Senator McCain, by his own boast, voted with President George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, and calls for change. 

What he (or his campaign) doesn’t do is bring up the Keating Five, or make veiled references to McCain’s treatment of his first wife, or make fun of Sarah Palin (she doesn’t need any help), or disparage his opponent’s experience, or hint at the disabilities of age. He just stands there looking languid (George Will called him the Fred Astaire of politics), always smiling and never raising his voice. 

Meanwhile, McCain’s surrogates get red in the face on TV when they try to explain away the latest jaw-dropping thing Sarah Palin has said, or proclaim that anything can happen in seven days, or respond to ever more discouraging poll numbers by saying (how’s this for a weak cliché) that the only poll that counts is the poll on election day. (I know things are bad when my wife, a staunch Democrat, feels sorry for them.)

What’s going on here? I find an answer in a most unlikely place, John Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” a four-book poem in which a very busy and agitated Satan dances around a preternaturally still Jesus until, driven half-crazy by the response he’s not getting, the arch-rebel (i.e., maverick) loses it, crying in exasperation, “What dost thou in this world?”

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that McCain is the devil or that Obama is the Messiah (although some of his supporters think of him that way), just that the rhetorical strategies the two literary figures employ match up with the strategies employed by the two candidates. What Satan wants to do is draw Jesus out, provoke him to an unwisely exasperated response, get him to claim too much for his own powers. What Jesus does is reply with an equanimity conveyed by the adjectives and adverbs that preface his words: “unaltered,” “temperately,” “patiently,” “calmly,” “unmoved,” “sagely,” “in brief.” 

In response, Satan gets ever more desperate; he conjures up rain and wind storms (in the midst of which Jesus sits “unappalled in calm”); he tempts him with the riches of poetry and philosophy (which Jesus is careful neither to reject nor deify); and finally, having run out of schemes and scares and “swollen with rage,” he resorts to physical violence (McCain has not gone so far, although some of his supporters clearly want to), picking Jesus up bodily and depositing him on the spire of the temple in the hope that he will either fall to his death or turn into Superman and undermine the entire point of his 40-day trial in the wilderness. He doesn’t do either. He does nothing, and Satan, “smitten with amazement” — even this hasn’t worked — “fell.”

Toward the end, the poem describes the mighty contest in a metaphor that captures its odd and negative dynamic. Jesus is “a solid rock” continually assaulted by “surging waves”; and even though the repeated assaults result only in the waves being “all to shivers dashed,” they keep on coming until they exhaust themselves “in froth or bubbles.” The power Jesus generates is the power of not moving from the still center of his being and refusing to step into an arena of action defined by his opponent. So it is with Obama, who barely exerts himself and absorbs attack after attack, each of which, rather than wounding him, leaves him stronger. It’s rope-a-dope on a grand scale.

And McCain knows it. Last Wednesday, campaigning in New Hampshire, he spoke sneeringly about Obama’s campaign being “disciplined and careful.” That’s exactly right, and so far the combination of discipline and care — care not to get out too far in front of anything — along with a boatload of money is working just fine. Jesus is usually the political model for Republicans, but this time his brand of passive, patient leadership is being channeled by a Democrat.

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Carolyn Antenen 
  To: Colleague Dialogue 
  Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 2:29 PM
  Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Need a quote

  This is an amazing discussion that I'm going to draw on for the Antenen clan conversation during Thanksgiving.
  Ann just gave us her complete files from Academy.  

  Although Jay Sr. has struggles with memory, this type of topic usually elicits gems of insight or poetry from him.

  My oldest son, Jay III, was a Philosophy Politics and Economics major, and studied Heidegger for a semester at Oxford University.
  Can't wait to share this connection to EI curriculum and hear his and our other 2 sons perspectives (Donald was at Global Conference 
  in Guatemala and Henry's Freshman Seminar at Bard College looks like the Academy's reading list ). 

  Carolyn

  On Oct 27, 2008, at 2:35 PM, Richard Alton wrote:

    Great!, Wayne. I took a graduate course on Heidegger's "Being and Time". It was pure fog, but great that we may of had some foundation in his work. I am amazed that you had enough stuff upstairs to see through the fog..good work!
    Dick

    Richard H.T. Alton International Consultants and Associates 'building global bridges' 166 N. Humphrey Ave, Apt, 1N Oak Park, IL 60302 T:1.773.344.7172 richard.alton at gmail.com Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back Babe Ruth

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    Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:27:44 -0400
    From: wnelson at ica-associates.ca
    To: dialogue at wedgeblade.net
    Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Need a quote

    Here’s another angle on this question.  

    On one of David McClesky’s visits to visit Kendra in Toronto, we asked him about the foundations and origins of the “Focused Conversation – Art-form” method. We were  working on “The Art of Focused Conversation” at the time and trying to get a hook on Joe’s approach to phenomonology. David sent us to several sources. One of them was Heidegger’s  “Being and Time”,  an extremely dense, dizzyingly complex and intimidating work. 

    In the final section of the book, he uses 3 key terms. 

    “Now-no-longer”
    “Just-now”
    “Now-not-yet”

    He also uses a pile of others to talk about our individual and collective self-conscious relationship to time and history.   

    I couldn’t find a nice clear paragraph. As near as I can tell, Heidegger has no crisp, quotable, short paragraphs. :) He also uses a lot of linguistic constructions that are attempts to break out of traditional thinking – difficult reading. Perhaps if I had more “Just-now” time. 

    It is clear, however, that he is talking about the relationship to time we take as self-reflective entities - “Dasein.”  He is speaking primarily to our individual relationship to past-present-future. It seems to me that what Joe did was to stretch those notions to the sociological and say that is the view of history for self-conscious people committed to making something happen in the world. The “infinity” sign that always places us in the “Just-now” is related to this.

    I remember going to Joe’s apartment in 341 Homan to repair a broken window. Probably about this time in 1970. There was Joe, sitting ins his lungi with piles of books and papers spread over a desk and a table. (The TV was also on.) As I worked on the window, I saw him looking from one to another and making notes. I don’t know what he was working on, but he was really hard at it. 

    Joe was always interested in making things accessible to everyone. He was also very graphic. I can imagine him flipping back and forth between Bultman and Heidegger and others – probably Bering and Nothingness by Sartre which address this as well -  and doodling on paper in an attempt to make grounded sense of these ideas. Making pictures is one of the only ways to penetrate some of this stuff. Otherwise it all looks like weird abstractions. He did it for almost everything and, as a result, gave us ways to navigate the rough waters of life’s key existential questions. Not answers, paddles.

    These are all what I call “back bearings”  and speculative explorations, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

    \\/

    "David Walters"  wrote:

      Maybe this will help. It is from John Cocks blog. Especially the last sentence.

      The meaning of the theme “Man [sic] between the Times” is at first simple to determine.... [T]he notion of an “interim” – a time that is neither past nor future, and yet both – [is an] understanding of the paradoxical existence of man ... [the] certainty of the unconditionedness of the divine demand and the divine grace.... [F]or him who lets God be his God, the past is extinguished and the future is open. ~Rudolf Bultmann, “Man Between the Times...,” Existence and Faith, pp. 248, 252, 253
      CArlos wrote:

    < >  < >  < >  < >  < > 
    Wayne Nelson - ICA Associates Inc
    416-691-2316 - http://ica-associates.ca

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