This new essay in the Library of Law and Liberty on the work of Professor Jürgen Habermas serves as criticism of all academics who use intentionally impenetrable prose to imply deep meaning when the truth is they are fakes and frauds:

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was the poet of romantic, democratic individualism, or possibly even of egotism. His most famous poem, after all, is Song of Myself, which opens: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself …”

Another line, of the kind of which there are many, is: “I exist as I am, that is enough…”

Whenever, therefore, a patient complained to me of lack of self esteem, thoughts of Walt Whitman rose inexorably in my mind. In fact, the deepest experience of his adult life was serving for three years as a volunteer nurse to the wounded of the American civil war. At the outbreak of that bloody conflict, he wrote an exultantly pro-war poem that starts: “Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugle! Blow!” and ends: “Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties, / Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses, / So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.”

Though Whitman never lost his faith in the justice of the Union cause, his experience, attending the wounded, changed his tune somewhat….Here is his description of his first sight of a war hospital, dated 21 December 1862:

Begin my visits among the camp hospital in the army of the Potomac. Spend a good part of the day in a large brick mansion on the banks of the Rappahannock, used as a hospital since the battle [of Fredericksburg]—seems to have receiv’d only the worst cases. Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc …

For twenty years before the world started to wait for Godot, it had waited for Lefty. The US playwright Clifford Odets (1906-63) wrote his play Waiting for Lefty in 1935, at the height of the great depression. Then, as now, there appeared to be no light at the end of the economic tunnel. Lefty is a union organiser who, like Godot, never arrives.

The short play, which was initially a huge success, is composed of six scenes depicting the travails of people in times of hardship. One scene is set in a hospital, and features the characters of Dr Barnes, the medical director, and Dr Benjamin, a young surgeon.

….

Dr Benjamin then confides that he had a dream: “To really begin believing something? Not to say, ‘What a world!’ but to say, ‘Change the world!’ I wanted to go to Russia. Last week I was thinking about it—the wonderful opportunity to do good in their socialized medicine . . . ”

He decides, however, to stay in the United States, although it means driving a taxi to stay alive. The scene ends with Dr Benjamin exclaiming: “Fight! Maybe get killed, but goddam! We’ll go ahead!” Then he stands and gives the clenched fist communist salute.

Some Americans followed Dr Benjamin’s impulse to emigrate to the Soviet Union, and were rewarded there by the most terrible misery. Odets, like many an intellectual of his time, managed entirely to miss the famine, the terror, and the everyday tyranny of Soviet life, even though information about it was freely available. He himself took a different path—to Hollywood. There his plays and films became less overtly political, prompting one critic to ask, “Odets, where is thy sting?”

Dalrymple at his Hilarious Pessimist blog (h/t Teddy Msigwa):

Dalrymple is generally opposed to new laws as solutions to social problems, but this piece in the Telegraph (h/t Teddy Msigwa and David) proves he is no purist. The careless and uncivil disposal of chewing gum is so disgusting, and the chewing itself so ugly, he calls for a national ban. It’s not just the aesthetics of the matter. Getting it stuck on one’s shoe is a serious imposition, and what’s more….

As the quotes around the title of this piece indicate, the phrase is not Dalrymple’s own. In fact, it belongs to French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry, who recently used it to condemn those who advocate balanced budgets as a solution to the crisis of the Eurozone. At the Library of Law and Liberty (h/t Mary Catelli), Dalrymple says this remark reveals “a revolution in our sensibilities”:

I’m surprised to find that Dalrymple apparently watched at least one of the American presidential debates. In a piece for the Library of Law and Liberty, he takes both candidates to task for a few things they said. But the one remark that really caught his eye is the one aspect of Obama’s rhetoric, not just during the debate, but during the whole of his presidency, that has most rankled me: his appeal to envy.

Thanks to the EU, Europe faces a stark choice between the Scylla of debauching its currency, with all the dislocations that rapid and perhaps uncontrollable inflation brings in its wake, or the Charybdis of fiscal rectitude that will strangle the economies of those countries whose government plays a predominant role in the economy…

Whatever solution, or rather policy, is chosen, it cannot be democratically acceptable to every country in Europe: the will of some country or countries must prevail over others. This is not a recipe for peace. Transfer payments between regions of countries are already tearing them apart. Catalonia wants to secede from Spain and Flanders from Belgium, but the recipients of Catalonia’s and Flanders’ largesse do not want them to secede. Yet what has been created in Europe is a Greater Belgium, to which indeed it would be a good idea to change the name of the European Union: the GB instead of the EU.

The Greater Belgium is the best we can hope for, with its interminable but peaceful quarrels over language and subsidies from productive to unproductive parts. More likely we will get Yugoslavia, with nasty little wars to re-establish national sovereignty. If there were a Nobel prize for the creation of conditions for conflict and war, then it could be awarded to the EU without irony or satire.

Savile’s knighthood, granted by a Conservative government in 1996, was another manifestation of an elite’s moral cowardice and lack of belief in cultural standards. If knighthoods are to be given to such as Savile, it is time to end the honours system: and this would be so irrespective of his sexual abuse of adolescent girls.