Paul Krugman

Krugman vents on Republican politicking over the federal budget, the way that Republicans pose as fiscal conservatives while robbing from the poor to give to the rich.

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The Natural World

Roaring Asiatic lion (by Tambako the Jaguar)

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Camus

We have seen how some artists in the early part of the twentieth-century took a rather nasty turn, celebrating nihilistic violence, in Dadaism for instance. The death of God seemed to bring out in some people our baser instincts. In Camus's biography, we also see a reaction against this inclination of some artists, in this case, the surrealists. Andre Breton, a leading surrealist, captured the spirit of the movement with this characterization, "The simplest surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd". In line with our sympathies today, Camus was only chilled by such ideas, and he believed that such tendencies fueled the mass organized violence of the era, as seen with the communists and the Nazis.

Camus's leftist credibility, however, was further strained in the process, with his reputation already suffering for not following the communist line along with his fellow French intellectuals as led by Sartre. Camus was a little challenged in maintaining his bona fides as a political radical, and that he was not just another bourgeois apologist, stating at one point in his defense, "If there were something to conserve in our society, I would not see any dishonor in being a conservative. Unhappily, that is not the case." Apparently, he was able to see that the communists were not heading toward a happy Utopia, despite all the ugly flaws of capitalism in the West that might drive one to seek an alternative course.

[Source: Ronald Aronson, "Camus and Sartre"]