The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
Will it go round in circles?

As suggested before on multiple occasions, TiR leaves most obvious, direct, nonsneaky discussion of current & political events to others in blogworld because,

1) they're more interesting and entertaining at it,
2) others "know" more (blogtastic factoids), and
3) perhaps above all else because, in the ruling political climate, i would repeat myself again and again on even more topics, or fear doing so, and thus bore myself even sillier than i already do.

example: Jane Mayer's rilly scary new "Letter from Hollywood: Whatever It Takes, The Politics of the Man Behind '24'," now in the NYer, & discovered via the always essential Digby, who scarcely can be improved upon. (More here from Attytood and from the Libby trial liveblog champs @ FireDogLake here.)

I panic. Have I not read this exact article multiple times over, during the past few years? Have I not blogged about it?

Yes and no. To both questions. It merely feels like I have, three times over, because the new "Letter" contains so much, including on the following three, long-since blogged points:

1. In the discussion of the 1960 French novel "Les Centurions," a look at the liberal mind's capacity for self-dosing of propaganda built out of soothing and supposedly instructional narratives that, as the article states, have "no basis in fact"; and the sad fear again that the USA behaves as if it must be foredoomed to repeat every mistake made by the French in Algeria, As brooded over in May 2004, here.

[a little more on Jean Larteguy's novel here, and the Hollywood film adaptation w/ Anthony Quinn here and here]

2. The dizzy feeling that comes when you watch illusion and reality dissolve into one another with ever more brutal results, when the people running things no longer acknowledge or are able to detect the distinction and when, as the Letter recounts, military interrogators follow suit and move straight from a viewing of a TV torture sequence to an attempt to employ the same counterproductive tactics in the "interrogation" room. As I was baffled by in September 2005, here.

3. The apparent conclusion of Hollywood/comic book science, now reinforced by the new season of "24," that torture does not work (the victim will "never [break] his silence") only if the victim is a white guy from the USA. As I was freaked out by in November 2005, here.

Sisyphus trudges on.

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM