Nidal Hasan: Psycho
Jared Loughner: Ideologue
Rhetoric
Melanie Phillips on Israeli TV
Israel’s military and technology are world class but its official efforts to defend itself rhetorically against its enemies range from nonexistent to maddeningly inept. This interview of Melanie Phillips by an establishment journalist provides a good overview of the problem. That the case has to be made at all shows how deep the rot is. (Caroline Glick is also generally good on this topic.)
(Thanks to AA for sending the link to the interview.)
Untangling two words
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]
I’d like to take one small data-point and bring it into sharp focus with what lit critics would call a close reading of a two-word phrase from one of Loughner’s videos.
Maybe it’s because in French conscience means both what we’d call conscience and consciousness in English, when I read the weirdly stilted prose of Jared Loughner with its curious insistence on syllogism, the phrase “conscience dreaming” suggested “conscious dreaming” to me — and I wondered whether Loughner wasn’t perhaps thinking of the activity called “lucid dreaming” in which one knows while dreaming that one is dreaming, and begins to “direct” the dream in much the same way in which a film-maker directs a film.
The first quote in this DoubleQuote is from one of Loughner’s videos — the second, which confirms my hypothesis, quotes a friend of his.
I am not suggesting that “lucid dreaming” is responsible for Loughner’s actions — I’m not sure that anything or anyone is, including Loughner himself.
My point is that here as elsewhere, figuring out what the allusions in an unfamiliar rhetoric mean is an important step in understanding the mental processes that produce it.
Lucid dreaming is one clue in the tangled mess that was Loughner’s state of mind that day…
Rhetoric?
Pending a much longer post I’m working on about violent rhetoric and violence in public life — lined up behind a book review I must finish — here’s a DoubleQuote which neatly encapsulates the weirdness of the parallels between different versions of religious hatred:
Sad, sad, sad.
Signs of the times
[ cross-posted from Zenpundit ]
