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Thursday, March 9, 2006

No Sensing Rummy

Posted by on March 9 at 11:32 AM

This was the answer that the Sectary of Defense (Donald H. Rumsfeld) offered a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee (Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va) when asked to “explain the U.S. military’s plan to respond in the event that Iraq’s sectarian violence grows into a full-fledged civil war”:

“The plan is to prevent a civil war, and to the extent one were to occur, to have the - from a security standpoint - have the Iraqi security forces deal with it, to the extent they are able to.”

Earlier this morning, just as the sun was rising and filling my window with the blue of dawn, I read this passage in Alfred Whitehead’s wonderful (or numinous) Process and Reality:

“This word ‘feeling’ is a mere technical term; but it has been chosen to suggest that functioning through which the concrescent actuality appropriates the datum so as to make it its own. A feeling appropriates elements of the universe, which themselves are other than the subject, and absorbs these elements into the real internal constitution of its subject by synthesizing them in the unity of an emotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity. Feelings are ‘vectors’; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here. We thus say that an actual occasion is a concrescence effected by a process of feelings.”

I completely get Whitehead’s meaning. As for Rummy, what the fuck is he on (about)?