Why I Was Not Complicit

The "Why I Was Not Complicit" genre, with a full shelf of books from the Trump administration by now all saying "I was different from the rest of them -- I was the adult in the room" got a little more crowded in recent days with Mike Esper's offering. Esper was Trump's Secretary of Defense beginning in July 2019, when his predecessor, Jim Mattis, resigned. Let us just name the genre WIWNC, for short. (Maybe pronounce it win-see.)

I'm not sure whether Mattis has himself written a book in the WIWNC style. But he has been the subject of one. An admiring book by Guy Snodgrass (apparently his real name) appeared soon after Mattis' resignation, called Holding the Line.

Anyway, today's subject is the Esper book. It offers a lot of behind-the-curtain gossip about the administration.

With regard to the protestors who were in the streets after George Floyd was murdered, Esper writes that Trump wondered why the military couldn't just shoot them.

"Can't you just shoot them. Just shoot them in the legs or something," was Trump's query. Esper says the tone was "almost technical, curious as to how that would actually be done, not whether members of the military shooting American civilians in a mostly peaceful demonstration was the right thing to do."

But for all his protestations about how he stood up to the President and protected something akin to the principle of civilian domestic law enforcement, it was Esper who gave the order to fly 1,600 active-duty Army soldiers from Fort Bragg in one direction and from Fort Drum in another, into the Washington, DC area. those troops would have been available to the POTUS if he had decided to invoke the Insurrection Act.

As a general rule, if former Secretary Whomever feels the need to write a WIWNC book, Whomever was likely complicit.

Comments

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog