The Pagan Science Monitor

In The Pagan Science Reading Room (again): Chris Hedges's "American Fascists"

The Christian fascist movement "will succeed because of the moral failure of those, including Christians, who understand the intent of the radicals yet fail to confront them...."

In The Pagan Science Reading Room, Mon. afternoon, 5-7-07

We slammed shut all the books, and if you don't like the noise, you can just leave.
If you think you can still read under this noise, you're welcome to try.
In The Pagan Science Reading Room we're blasting Reptoids, Park A Tiger, 2005 EP.
If we were pretending to be rock journalists, we'd say things like, "K-Oh & Melissa bite off bone-crunching riffs & spit out still-smouldering chunx-o-metal," or, "CRACKLES w/ BLUE SPARKS!" or, "Destined to be classic."
Maybe later in the PSRR: I couldn't raise Bus Driver on the phone Saturday, so we couldn't have his weird smartness (as promised). But he just LVM, & sounds like he has a head full of ideas.

Update: Bus Driver is utterly impossible. He has turned his phone off.

Tags: Pagan Science Reading Room, Chicago, Chicago word, Chicago music, Reptoids, metal, punk, rock, rock journalism, Bob Dylan lyrics, physics, chaos theory.

The fascism argument

Local Chicago radical blogger Steve Lendman has a review of Chris Hedges'
2006 book, American Fascists, on his own blog, and on Chicago Indymedia.
We face a new, historically unique danger in the U.S. today.
The "fascist" epithet has been sorrily misused to describe presidential administrations that were merely nasty (Nixon, Reagan) or movements that had conservative sexual morality and a tendency toward violence (Operation Rescue).
Thinking activists on the left are skeptical: The "F-word" is inflammatory, and can be a total conversation-stopper.
But Hedges and another liberal intellectual, Joe Conason, correctly identify the authentically fascist nature of both those currently in power and the growing mass movements on the right.

In the Pagan Science Reading Room

What Bus Driver is reading, and why
"I like reading about strange people. I'm recently more comfortable with my own strangeness."
--Bus Driver
Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth (New York: Hyperion, 1999; new in paperback).
And:
Flo Conway & Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
(Bus Driver says that Oliver Sachs wrote the back cover blurb for Hoffman's biog of Erdos; Bus Driver's favorite Sachs book is Seeing Voices. Spoken and heard language is just a wave form, pushing against your ear; it can be represented by a long, squiggly line. Deaf language has spacial content. Bus Driver likes thinking about the ways things take up space and time.)

(*) Listening to ... (**) Reading ... (***) Feelin'..., late afternoon Central time, Sunday

Severn:
(*) Whitesnake blasting on the juke box in the bar downstairs.
(**) Dogeared copy of Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat missing last pages, found in room when i moved in.
(***) A little defensive, you guys! I am not contributing to the despoiling of anything. Stop with all that hate email.

In the Pagan Science Reading Room

William Easterly, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
New in paperback.
"...[S]ome readers will take away from [this book] the fundamental conclusion — even though [Easterly] doesn't draw it — that foreign aid just doesn't work; and that would be deeply incorrect. The fact is that many of the people you meet in any African village are alive because of foreign aid."
-- Nicholas D. Kristof, reviewing the book last October in The New York Review of Books
There are links to other reviews, and to debates and discussions, on Easterly's NYU website.
T.P.S.M. will have a longer discussion Monday. Top question on the list: Does anybody talk about capitalism and white supremacy anymore?

Tags: politics, law, policy, development, international aid, Bono, debt relief, capitalism, racism.

In the Pagan Science Reading Room: Joe Conason

Must-read:
Joe Conason. It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. New York: Thomas Dunne / St. Martin's, 2007.
My refusal the other day to treat Jan Crawford Greenburg's Supreme Conflict with a modicum of respect drew one thoughtful response (with a link to a serious review by a brain I respect), and 2 grumpy emails from friends who didn't care for the "purile" humor. That's a lot of traffic for this site these days.
I thought I'd follow up by heaping praise on a naked polemic that doesn't even pretend to be scholarly.