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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Great Believer8/25/2006 12:57:33On vacation I've been jumping into Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Lyndon Johnson, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. I am particularly enthralled with her 1991 foreword about her last years with Johnson as he was a fading old defeated man and she was a 25-year old graduate student who he kept close to his side. That and the chapter on the Great Society, Johnson's fantastic artifice of (dare I say) political theolo-utopianism. The key to the whole book, and by its argument his character, is the weaving interrelation between power and ideals, greed and generosity, ambition and hope. It is a border territory, really, between good and evil, one that Goodwin thankfully is unwilling to clarify the way we might like. In the man, as she captures him, they are one in the same. There isn't one without the other. Great Things are brought to the table only because of Johnson's reckless ambition. The meeting point may be described as an instance of belief. The intensity of his own belief strengthened his formidable persuasive powers. It did not seem to matter that in his enthusiasm he sometimes confused the dream with present realities, that he sometimes presented as facts events that had not yet occurred, changes of condition that were still only intentions, the boundaries between fact and fiction, between the present and the future, no longer held. Johnson is a great prophet of the science fiction consciousness in modernity, where the only proper description of the present requires an account of the future, for its true meaning is located there. He is an important case study in the nature of belief, a belief of praxis rather than the belief in certain abstract propositions, a belief that can remake the whole world or cause it to implode. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
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