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Orwellingly Yurz
SFN Regular
USA
529 Posts |
 Posted - 08/12/2006 : 09:41:06
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YO: Just THIS In...
BUSH READS CAMUS' 'THE STRANGER' ON RANCH VACATION
US President George W. Bush quoted French existential writer Albert Camus to European leaders a year and a half ago, and now he's read one of his most famous works: "The Stranger."
White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer's 1946 novel -- in English.
The US president, often spoofed as an intellectual lightweight, quoted Camus in a February 21, 2005 speech in Brussels praising the US-Europe alliance and urging other nations to help Washington spread democracy in the world.
"We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that 'freedom is a long-distance race.' We're in that race for the duration," Bush said in those remarks.
(Now G. War, here's a Camus quote for you.....)
"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness."
OY sez:
I think this quote from "The Plague" is much more germane to our times that probably any of Camus' aphorisms. Oh, just two more things Mr. President: "The Plague" is actually a better and easier read than "The Stranger." And we know the reason you "made quick work" of "The Stranger" is because, in it's softback version, it's only 154 pages.
OY!
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"The modern conservative...is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
If dogs run free
Then what must be,
Must be...
And that is all
--Bob Dylan
The neo-cons have gotten welfare for themselves down to a fine art.
--me
"The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights."
--J. Paul Getty
"The great thing about Art isn't what it give us, but what we become through it."
--Oscar Wilde
"We have Art in order not to die of life."
--Albert Camus
"I cling like a miser to the freedom I lose when surrounded by an abundance of things."
--Albert Camus
"Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes."
--Oscar Wilde |
Edited by - Orwellingly Yurz on 08/12/2006 09:41:57
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
Posted - 08/12/2006 : 10:24:41 [Permalink]
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| If Bush were able to understand metaphor, which I strongly doubt, I don't think he would be very comfortable with the message of “The Plague”. All things are seen in black and white terms by Bush. He is the village idiot. Unfortunately for us his village is very big and he's been allowed to run the place... |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Orwellingly Yurz
SFN Regular
USA
529 Posts |
Posted - 08/12/2006 : 11:07:49 [Permalink]
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YO: YOu said....
quote:
Originally posted by Kil
If Bush were able to understand metaphor, which I strongly doubt, I don't think he would be very comfortable with the message of “The Plague”.
M. Kil: To make him and any of his disciples uncomfortable is why I posted my earlier message. It's possible, but not probable, that such discomfort might help him and his followers to appeciate metaphor, and even irony, more clearly.
OY: |
"The modern conservative...is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
If dogs run free
Then what must be,
Must be...
And that is all
--Bob Dylan
The neo-cons have gotten welfare for themselves down to a fine art.
--me
"The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights."
--J. Paul Getty
"The great thing about Art isn't what it give us, but what we become through it."
--Oscar Wilde
"We have Art in order not to die of life."
--Albert Camus
"I cling like a miser to the freedom I lose when surrounded by an abundance of things."
--Albert Camus
"Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes."
--Oscar Wilde |
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Orwellingly Yurz
SFN Regular
USA
529 Posts |
Posted - 08/16/2006 : 13:12:02 [Permalink]
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YO: More on Bush Cherry Picking Camus. Here's today NYTs op-ed column from Maureen 'my queen' Dowd....or as I also like to call her articles: DOWD OUTLOUD.
August 16, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Camus Comes to Crawford
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Strangely enough, we find two famous men reading Albert Camus's “The Stranger” this summer.
One is Jean Girard, the villainous gay French race car driver hilariously played by Sacha Baron Cohen (a k a Ali G and Borat) the sinuous rival to Will Ferrell's stocky Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights.”
Girard, a jazz-loving, white-silk-scarf-wearing, America-disdaining Formula Un driver sponsored by Perrier, is so smooth he can sip macchiato from a china cup, smoke Gitanes and read “L'Etranger” behind the wheel and still lead the Nascar pack.
Frenchie contemptuously informs “cowboy” Bobby that America merely gave the world George Bush, Cheerios and the ThighMaster while France invented democracy, existentialism and the ménage à trois.
The other guy kindling to Camus is none other than the aforementioned George Bush, who read “The Stranger” in English on his Crawford vacation and, Tony Snow told me, “liked it.” Name-dropping existentialists is good for picking up girls, as Woody Allen's schlemiels found, or getting through the clove-cigarette fog of Humanities 101. But it does seem odd that W., who once mocked NBC's David Gregory as “intercontinental” for posing a question in French to the French president in France, would choose Camus over Grisham.
Camus is not beach reading or brush reading. How on earth did this book make it into the hands of our proudly anti-intellectual president?
“I don't know how ‘L'Etranger' made it onto his list,” Mr. Snow said. “I must confess, I read ‘L'Etranger' 25 years ago.” The rest of W.'s reading list was presidentially correct: two books on Lincoln and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story,” by David Oshinsky. (Not a word by Merleau-Ponty.)
Debunking the theory that W. had a sports section or Mad magazine's “Spy vs. Spy” tucked inside the 1946 classic of angst, Mr. Snow noted that he and the president had “a brief conversation on the origins of French existentialism, Camus and Sartre.” Pressed for more details by an astonished columnist having trouble envisioning Waco as the Left Bank, the press secretary laughed. “Confidential conversation,” he said, extending the administration's lack of transparency to literature.
He brushed off suggestions that the supremely unself-reflective W. was going through a Carteresque malaise-in-the-gorge moment: “He doesn't feel like an existentialist trapped in Algeria during the unpleasantness.”
It takes a while to adjust to the idea of W., who has created chaos trying to impose moral order on the globe, perusing Camus, who wrote about the eternal frustration of moral order in human affairs. What does W., the archenemy of absurdity as a view of life, kindle to in C., the apostle of absurdity as a view of life? What can W., the born-again monogamist, spark to in C., the amorous atheist? In some ways, Mr. Bush is supremely not a Camus man. Camus hated the blindness caused by ideology, and Mr. Bush wallows in it. Camus celebrated lucidity while the president keeps seeing only what he wants to see.
Mr. Bush's life has been premised on his confidence that he will always be insulated from the consequences and the cruelties of existence, unlike Meursault. W. or his people always work to change fate, whether it's an election or the Middle East.
If you think about it long enough, though, it begins to make a sort of wacky sense.
“The Stranger” is about the emotionally detached Meursault, who makes a lot of bad decisions and pre-emptively kills an Arab in the sand. Get it? Camus's protagonist moves through an opaque, obscure and violent world that is indifferent to his beliefs and desires. Get it?
If there was ever a moment when this president could regard the unanti |
"The modern conservative...is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
--John Kenneth Galbraith
If dogs run free
Then what must be,
Must be...
And that is all
--Bob Dylan
The neo-cons have gotten welfare for themselves down to a fine art.
--me
"The meek shall inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights."
--J. Paul Getty
"The great thing about Art isn't what it give us, but what we become through it."
--Oscar Wilde
"We have Art in order not to die of life."
--Albert Camus
"I cling like a miser to the freedom I lose when surrounded by an abundance of things."
--Albert Camus
"Experience is the name so many people give to their mistakes."
--Oscar Wilde |
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