Partial Readings: Occupation Hazards
Partial Readings: Occupation Hazards
Partial Readings: Occupation Hazards
Occupation Hazards
In a fresh look at the Boston Massacre, Richard Archer searches for the tie between foreign occupation and political violence: “?[It] is easy to understand the resentment, anger, and even overt violence of the local residents living under the authority of a military force. In 1770, Bostonians were those unhappy residents. But an occupying force in a strange land, asked to police a suspicious and resentful population can themselves become enraged. Faced with enough indignities and violence, they too can become the agents of mayhem.”
The Prosecution’s Case
Mark Mazower assesses Perry Anderson’s The New Old World, an ?insightful, combative and invigorating? book on a topic of ?mortal dullness?: the European Union. While Mazower finds the book ?necessary and timely,? he wonders if his obscure prose ?makes him a better prosecutor than judge…Anderson is good at puncturing [the EU?s] self-serving myths. But the explanation of its staying power must be sought elsewhere.?
Young Financiers
Upon meeting yet another elite-college graduate bound for Wall Street, George Packer laments the fate of those who finds ?no better use for their intelligence and degrees than a job that has become less socially useful than prostitution.? ?Why do we need a financial sector whose share of gross domestic product has doubled over the past several decades? Is it healthy for financial services and investment…to consume the talents and advantages of astounding percentages of our élite graduates??
Postmodern Flashbacks
Benjamin Kunkel reviews Fredric Jameson: “The best of Jameson?s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you?d always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror.”
Life in the Constitutional Stone Age
In an expansion of his February New York Review article, Ronald Dworkin puts the Supreme Court’s Citizens United vs. FEC ruling on trial: “The Supreme Court’s conservative phalanx has demonstrated once again its power and will to reverse America’s drive to greater equality and more genuine democracy. It threatens a step-by-step return to a constitutional stone age of right-wing ideology….We most hope that Obama nominates a progressive replacement who not only is young enough to endure the bad days ahead but has enough intellectual firepower to help construct a rival and more attractive vision of what our Constitution really means.”
