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November 03, 2010 at 08:00 PM
Has the bear gone into hibernation? If so, for how long? Is it the typical November-May sleep, or will it be a few years of rest for the furry and dangerous beast?
What happened yesterday? (This blog appears on Wednesday but is written Sunday and/or Monday.) Yesterday for blog purposes was the election. One party will be happy and the other sad. For the market’s sake, we hope for a Democrat-Republican-Republican configuration, which seems to work well, but Democrat-Democrate-Republican or Democrat-Republican-Democrat (president/ senate/house) would be OK.
I’m rereading “The True Believer–Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,“ by Eric Hoffer. Hoffer was a deep-thinking philosopher and longshoreman, recommended originally as an important read by a seemingly unlikely person, Dwight D. Eisenhower*, and popularized (insofar as a philosopher can be made trendy; at least he had 15 minutes of fame) in a series of televised conversations with one of the era’s more intellectual newsmen, Eric Sevareid.
Why read this book again? “The True Believer” is very relevant today — it’s helpful in deciphering radical Islam; the Tea Party movement; Glenn Beck, whose followers apparently consider him to be an educator; and radical liberal chic, the latter being shallow-thinking liberals — for example, the one-step liberal desire to bring extremists from Guantanamo Bay to the U.S. for trial.
That first step was a part of the election rhetoric in 2008; what about the second step? A second step would have answered the question: Where to put them? It turns out no one much wanted them in their state. What I’m saying is that the pot — here in the U.S. — is being stirred and, therefore, stability is more of an illusion than ever, which adds to the plague of uncertainty.
