BtB is struggling to reach our tenth blogiversary in April. The news is so overwhelmingly depressing and stressful that it seems to serve little purpose for me to regurgitate it on a regular basis. I don't want to whine in print, but I have a bad case of The Obama Effect:
Anomie in common parlance is thought to mean something like "at loose ends". The Oxford English Dictionary lists a range of definitions, beginning with a disregard of divine law, through the 19th and 20th century sociological terms meaning an absence of accepted social standards or values. Most sociologists associate the term with Durkheim, who used the concept to speak of the ways in which an individual's actions are matched, or integrated, with a system of social norms and practices … Durkheim also formally posited anomie as a mismatch, not simply as the absence of norms. Thus, a society with too much rigidity and little individual discretion could also produce a kind of anomie, a mismatch between individual circumstances and larger social mores. Thus, fatalistic suicide arises when a person is too rule-governed, when there is … no free horizon of expectation.
Before I watched the leftie news on PBS (where they interviewed an Al Jazeera reporter on the state of life in Iraq), I saw Bret Baier's Special Report and was so saddened to see what happened in Baghdad today, on the tenth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom's beginnings. Dozens were killed and hundreds wounded in multiple attacks ... at the hands of our arch enemy, al-Qaeda. Under the Bush administration, one of the worst, most sadistic regimes in the world was toppled by the courage and expertise of our American warriors. We basically won the war... but we botched the peace once Obama took office, and in doing so we left behind the biggest and most expensive embassy in the world, where Obama now plans to cut diplomatic staff "by as much as half." We could have had some influence on events there and even something of an ally in Iraq, but those opportunities were squandered, the war nearly wasted, and the chance to surround Iran... gone to dust.
Speaking of allies, there's a new CNN poll out, showing just how deviant the Democrats have become: only 33% consider Israel an ally of the U.S. (compared to 63% of Republicans). I hate to think who they DO consider an ally!
Israel makes me feel better. As much danger as they face there, there is no anomie - that "normlessness" of a "morally deregulated" society that I read about in anthropology textbooks, but really only learned about in these last four years.
Too, Israelis enjoy an extent of freedom now largely dormant in the U.S. (Does anyone think the Tea Party patriots who protested the 'stimulus' are not upset by a $16 trillion national debt?). Where else but in the streets is freedom best expressed?
Some 5,000 Israelis demonstrated outside President Shimon Peres's official residence Tuesday, calling upon him to use his influence to persuade US President Barack Obama to commute the life sentence of Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard.
Pollard's wife Esther delivered an online petition backed by 200,000 Israelis to Peres Tuesday. She was accompanied by Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky, a former prisoner of Zion in Russia.
At the rally, she said that 200,000 Israelis were the equivalent of 50 million Americans, as a portion of the population....
Meanwhile, students of Ariel University protested their exclusion from attending Obama's Israel speech (apparently because their school is in the disputed territory called The Shomron) -- in front of the U.S. Consulate in JerusalemISRAEL:
At least there's a normal ... somewhere in this crazy world.
Posted by: Elan | Wednesday, 20 March 2013 at 10:41 AM