Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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Some one needs to remind these folks that, believe it or not, young people sometimes get it right when they sense a great and gathering stench over the land and that while a detailed study of one’s “pragmatic possibilities” is generally advisable, it is seldom what allows people to change the course of history or even the course of their own lives.

Boris Yeltsin was a drunk and a grafter, but his gut-level decision to climb on top of a tank 18 years ago today, changed the course of history. Had David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel been at his side surely they would have advised against it.

Whether liberal America wants to admit or not, George Bush Jr. modified the core assumptions of American foreign and domestic policy more than any President since Franklin Roosevelt. The results, from our ho-hum embrace of having every word we write online or speak into the telephone examined by the NSA, to the official doctrine of pre-emptive war (the same thing we found so horrifying and unacceptable when Hitler used it to invade the Sudetenland) and everything in between, are there for all to see.