Saturday, March 27, 2010

Health care reform

The recent passage of American health care reform, which has emboldened Democrats and infuriated Republicans (alternate camps don't seem to feel anything), is not revolutionary--falling short, as it does, of the public option--though it has set in motion a tremendous force which will not be realized until bolder, less compromising legislation is passed. This future legislation is, of course, universal health care, a utopian dream towards which we are either blissfully or recklessly drifting, according to whom you ask.

Many, presumably driven by post-Red Scare paranoia, fear the new bill will culminate in some form of socialism (though I sooner expect it will culminate in more half-baked definitions of socialism). Other naysayers bristle at what they believe is an overt government takeover, a state of intolerable federal intrusion into states rights, private enterprise, and private lives. They feel particularly zealous about "reclaiming" their country, as though it were hijacked. More subtle critics worry about the government's increasing deficit, its solvency, the expansion of the welfare state, and the future quality of health care under the new bill.

Just as the financial viability of this bill relies on variables, so must our long-term vision remain visionary, not conclusive. We can at least conceive that more people will live longer as a result of this legislation. Among the existential possibilities of a longer life without the anxiety over affordable health care is the opportunity for individual and political empowerment. As the most democratic social reform in recent decades, the bill has the power to level inequalities while curtailing the concentration of money and authority into few hands. In political theater, it may recast the dominant parties as, in the case of Democrats, legitimate agents of progressive change, and in the case of Republicans, poor swimmers in the new political tide. All of this, however, remains uncertain, so long as demagogues from each side continue to shun bypartisanship, and the reality of the dream remains dream-like.

Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Tom Stoppard's Jumpers

Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers (1972) is as absurd and delightful as modern plays get, barring some of Beckett. It is also as satirical. In Jumpers, academic philosophy is the prime target, represented in miniature by logical positivism, a school of philosophy that tried, through the development of an ideal language, to get to the bottom of reality. The play, wonderfully enough, has no basis in reality, for it is constantly crowded out by acrobatic scholars, high jinks, an inner play, and an assortment of two-dimensional characters — by all of which it masterfully proves its point. In exposing and ridiculing the absurdities of logical positivism, Stoppard shows how academic philosophy in general, often obsessively preoccupied with the nature of reality, tends to be blind to it.

The play’s main narrative — a detective story revolving around a murder — is never actually resolved. Instead, it is continually deferred by the insistent questioning of human action, values, and beliefs. The act of murder itself is subject to epistemological interrogation: How do we know it is wrong? How do we know it isn’t something else, like an expression of the “antisocial”? In this dystopian world, where the tenets of logical positivism constitute a normative world-view, Stoppard deftly shows its implications on human experience and perception. Indeed, the true reductio ad absurdum is the triumph of irony, for in the process of determining reality with linguistic precision (“gymnastics”), one strays further and further away from it. In the court of philosophers, something as obviously wrong and deviant as murder may never be prosecuted, because it is never “adequately” defined.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Cogito's debut

Voila! my first blog!

O Muse, who didst hearken to mine ancient forebears, the scribes and chroniclers of ages past, who in their respective Arcadias (or Hades', as the case may be), do vaguely recall their own first inscriptions on papyrus, parchment, or vellum--stand with me now!

Dear readers, the entry of one more blog, I trust, will likely not tip the scale, but with every little dispatch, may discharge reverberations through the edifice of virtual discourse. That edifice will not be toppled, nor is that our wish, for every intelligent blog--when it is not the mere rambling of a brimming consciousness--is an aid to human thought, perception, and action, to which this blog aspires to be an exemplary model.

A young scribbler nevertheless begs your pardon in advance for the absurdities that he will inevitably entertain. One cannot speak about contemporary art, culture, or general existence without occassionally veering into the irrational.

Fortunately, even the irrational can be elegantly articulated.