As he shuffled through life, Charleston artist William Aiken Walker must have been inspired by card games, for he is known for his Poker Game Aboard a Mississippi Riverboat as well as making a Confederate deck of cards during the Civil War as a contribution to the war effort. Of course with war, why let the truth get in the way of a good lie, and America is still engaged in war….
The final revelation is that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art. Oscar Wilde – The Decay of Lying
The aesthetic, the rhetorical flourish, artistic liberty,poetic license, has historically endured an uneasy relationship with institutions of power and authority. For Plato , the dangerous possibilities he perceived in the practice of art, and the subsequent aesthetic it would propagate and spread, was enough for him to assert that poets and performers be excluded from his ideal Republic, given their natural inclination to corrupt the guardians and potential philosopher kings. There would be no Diana and the Golden Bough in the grove of Alba. KISS- keep it simple and stupid. And make sure the exercise of reason and judgement are not clouded by the wily arts which tend to defy roles of subservience. In the modern era, post-modern, aesthetic practice has become a central tenet of political and cultural radicalism establishing its domain among the highly privileged and powerful as something to be collected and enjoyed. Certainly, President Obama is a product of the aesthetic explosion whose sense of enlightenment is constantly contradicted by the aesthetic rhetoric of style…
Mark Blyth, professor of politics at Brown University, who specialises in economics, was pessimistic about its chances of working, especially at a time when the global economy is weakening. “Both parties know they are in the hole over this but want the dirt to stick to the other guy. What he proposes is sound but will not significantly dent unemployment,” Blyth said.”To keep it at its current level, it needs to keep up with the trend rate of population growth, minus those folks leaving the labour market due to giving up on searches. It’s doubtful that these measures will significantly affect this push/pull phenomenon more than one percentage point.” Read More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/09/barack-obama-jobs-plan-congress
As in Ricky Gervais’s movie, The Invention of Lying, the unadultered truth, is kind of R.D. Laing meets Dr. Janov after a calming massage. The undiluted truth being cumbersome and perhaps even violent in its aggressiveness. At the extreme, nihilistic in which goodness is a fraud. In a world in which there is no lying, imagination is nothing more than a status word for prevarication. Ultimately, Gervais without realizing it, stumbles onto “the in-between” where neither the truth or lie is visible, but it affects our behavior. He affirms by denial, by not lying he is lying, yet escapes by absence of dialogue. One wonders if Obama is not plying the same waters, kind of making it up as he goes along….
a hidden god remains eternally hidden in the infinity of his alterity. and yet we believe we can still pray to it. but the god of the between requires a human deed for its very existence. dialogue, the act of god-creation, is a fundamentally arduous task of the whole-being. it requires the mind, the body and the social engagement with all three realms of existence. it is perhaps for that reason that maimonides begins his mishne torah (his definitive work of torah exegesis) with the remark that one needs to overcome with the determination of a lion to wake up every morning to begin the service of the creator. Read More:http://dialogicalecology.blogspot.com/2011/06/on-god-briefly.html
ADDENDUM:
…Jeff Madrick:
The other thing that was disappointing to me that was he mentioned that if we didn’t reform social security, it wouldn’t be here—that is totally not true. I don’t know a Democratic president that would say that, I don’t know if many Republican presidents would say that.
So that danger is what is behind Curtain Number 3, which he hasn’t pulled back yet. That is, he says he will offset all this $450 billion somehow….
…Number three, he didn’t talk about two other big areas. One was mortgage relief, and the other was trade policies.
Finally there was one last issue he didn’t mention. There was something behind curtain three so to speak. He said he has a plan to pay for all these tax cuts and spending increases, and he didn’t talk about this plan or the timing of the plan. And that’s where the Republicans are going to make him make pay. Will that now involve cuts in Social Security and Medicare? You can be the Republicans will demand something like that to sign on. Read More:http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/09/obama-s-jobs-speech-jeff-madrick-s-reaction.htmla