Here's an interesting article from the Los Angeles Times, called "Postmodern Fog Has Begun to Lift." Those of us who have been opposed to Postmodernism all along will be glad to hear it.
Until now, however, professors of English literature have been largely impossible to move from the Postmodern bandwagon. What has caused this sudden rethinking of the notion of Objective Truth?
[T]he master strategists in the White House, though they claim to stand by traditional values, are very much in the camp of postmodernism. In the New York Times Magazine last October, for example, a "senior advisor" to President Bush told Ron Suskind that journalists and scholars belong to "what we call the reality-based community," devoted to "the judicious study of discernible reality." They have no larger vision, no sense of the openings created by American dominance. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."If President Bush is to be credited with liberating English departments from Postmodernism, it's been a successful administration indeed.
He might have added that there are many ways to simulate reality: staying on message, for instance, impervious to correction and endlessly reiterating it while saturating the media environment. Ideologues, whether they're politicians or intellectuals, dismiss any appeal to disinterested motives or objective conditions. They see reality itself, including the electorate, as thoroughly malleable.
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