A Brief History of Time

It’s been a while. I had some regression with my health. And then an Presidential election happened in the US with some ostenisble import. Those two circumstances led to me to revisiting some (para-)political times of the past as we seem to be speedrunning history we have been through before. That remembrance took me down a few odd paths and I got sucked into a lot of reading, listening, and viewing.

I might comment a little about those times in the future, but I want to write a little about Christmas over the next few days. We will see if I make it!

Some of what I have been considering during this time.

Reading:

This is a masterful work which everyone should read if they care about American politics. Wendy attempts to write a dissertation to answer why (if?) Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Along the way she gets lost, just like Timothy did, and finds herself in a world more Pynchon than postdoc. The text might be titled the Aberration of the Real, but in the end it's the intrusion of the Real. It's the moment of the intrusion of the Real where Wendy and Timothy take a turn. I wonder if we would agree where this occurs?

Reading the The Book of the New Sun with my wife. Reading Wolfe means reading everything: Borges, Vance, The Bible, the Battle of the Monitor and Merrimack, Proust, Kafka, Dante, Virgil, everything. Gene's grand narrative is entirely appropriate to this season of the year. TBotNS is Advent and Christmastide writ large.

Revisiting Agamben's dialog with Schmitt and Foucault that interrogates the grounding of the modern state within the state of the political exception. Unlimited statist expanse occurs under the suspension of the political order. Political life is obliterated by the management of mere biological life. Very thought provoking as we see the state sprawl in power and concern with totalitarian measures governing vaccination status, gender status, ethnic status, etc. of the deracinated individual qua individual.

A wonderful introduction to St. Maximus the Confessor as Jordan focuses on the primordial theme in Maximus via Origen: what does it mean to take seriously that Christ is the end of all of things? This has been a fundamental question I have concerned myself for a long time. It is always a pleasure to find those who have thought deeply on what could be the claim of Christianity with such clarity and insight as Jordan. Highly recommended. Jordan also seems to be about as good and delightful a man as you'd like to learn from.

We've had so little of Maximus in English, especially well written English; Jordan is working to fix that.

The United States is the most nakedly aggressive nation ever to exist on planet Earth. Lightly reading this, since I don't need any convincing from Scott that the War on the Terror was a fraud. We are the global sponsors of terrorism par excellence. But as I said above I have been revisiting times not so long ago that we seem happy to repeat again. Scott writes in the same manner as Chomsky's political reporting. Just fact, after fact, after fact, after fact, after fact, after fact. The thesis ends up being as clear as the sky is blue. We are the terrorists. We fund them. We train them. We place them in political power. Until they go off script. It's a recipe nearly as old as this country itself.

Scott's work can be handy for those who can't seem to see that the sky is blue. Those who can enjoy a festive holiday party as our partner in terrorism, Israel, commits genocide with our full support. Godless murderers.

He's recently released a massive text on the US war against Russia in Ukraine.