These People, Explained

At Matthew Yglesias' site, commenter Tomf explains why the administration can't be said to have "blown it" in its dealings with Russia and Georgia:

No one blew it. Playing the Great Game (and often losing) is far superior to not playing. Enabling, stoking, inflating, and simply declaring national security crises is deeply gratifying for nationalist-imperialist-authoritarian politicians and their large and influential intellectual and industrial clique. It legitimizes the national security state. It makes “Very Serious People” indulge in their “Very Seriousness”.

Emotionally, it distracts from the aching search for love and wholeness that is the human condition. Most of us do that with entertainment, sex, a good job (if we’re lucky), alcohol and drugs (if we’re not) but imagine accomplishing the distraction while inflating your own egoistic self-importance!

A new cold war, a Global War on Terror, the Red menace: its all partially-manufactured antidemocratic legitimation for keeping the population artificially dependent on a metaphorical father figure in Washington. And its all deliciously fulfilling for the Village elite.

Here's R.W. Apple writing in the New York Times on August 20, 1990, shortly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait:

The obituaries were a bit premature.

There is still one superpower in the world, and it is the United States. More than any other country in the world, its interests, its exposure and its reach are global, as the events of the last two weeks have demonstrated so vividly.

Washington is not the backwater that it seemed to some when the action was all in the streets of Prague or at the Berlin wall....there is a rush of excitement in the air here. In news bureaus and Pentagon offices, dining rooms and lobbyists' hangouts, the fever is back - the heavy speculation, the avid gossip, the gung-ho, here's-where-it's-happening spirit, that marks the city when it grapples with great events.

''These days, conversations are huddled,'' said Stan Bromley, the manager of the Four Seasons Hotel, where King Hussein of Jordan stayed. ''People are leaning closer together. It's serious business.''

And here's Woody Allen explaining recently why he likes to work so much:

"It's a way of coping with the world. You know, in the same way that somebody copes with it by being a stamp collector or a sports addict or a titan of industry or an alcoholic or something. My way of coping with the horrors of existence is to put my nose to the grindstone and work and not look up."

—Jonathan Schwarz