The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal)

April 06, 2008

Democracy has been getting knocks the past few years for being associated, notionally at least, with the bad crowd of other excuses given by the U.S. for invading Iraq: introducing democracy there was one of the bullet points of the war's champions before the invasion and it still gets predictable mention in all the justifying talk about Iraq to this day. In this sort of talk democracy itself has withered over the years to mean just the vessel for carrying global capitalism from place to place in a profitable and orderly way; implictly the war's champions believe democracy could be born in Iraq in shock and awe, democracy on their terms, born out of the public rape of an invasion, as handily as any other way. Foolish thought, that, as it turns out, betting on the rosy outcome of a rape.

With all my caveats aout the stuff, I like the raw unfiltered democracy better than I like the current brand, the one that the comic opera Coalition Provisional Authority tried to bring along to Baghdad, whose lads and lasses sat around in the Green Zone for endless days devising a stock market for Iraq because, well, that's what modern democracies have, right?

There are places with no hint of that sort of democracy, like Somalia, which is unhinged from the regular machineries of global capitalism in it own distinctive way, as are North Korea and Southern Italy and a host of other regions around the world where the regularities of global capitalism break down in the anomlies of overrirding local conditions: pirates, answering to no authority but their own (as is their ancient custom), hijacked a huge French cruise ship in the eastern Indian Ocean and brought it into port in Somalia today. The sort of democracy that serves global capitalism is historically opposed to piracy on the grounds of both profitability and order, doesn't countenance the stuff in the least and never has, but there's not a whole lot of recourse for the complainant here; those pirates got away to Somalia.

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For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

The words themselves, however, in the precise carnival train order in which they appear, and such original images which may from time to time be displayed here, excepting of course for those attributed materials the provenance of which, as duly noted, originate elsewhere, are owned by and are the property of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," or me, and are subject to the terms of Creative Commons License 2.5 , by which license (in the unlikely event that such words and original images appearing here are taken up and displayed elsewhere) clear attribution must be attached to those words or images indicating their ownership, to wit: the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), "peter ramus," but not me.