Foucault, Morality, Odds and Ends

I read Peter Oborne's Rise of Political Lying, which was a quick easy read but which disappointed me to the extent that his examples were all drawn from British politics. However, it did confirm that what I had noticed in the US and Canada was also happening there, and that the types of political lying (omission, what I call best-foot-forward, misuse of information and statistics, misrepresentation) were also common to the three. The same can be said of John Lloyd's What the Media Are Doing to our Politics, except that I was even more disappointed because I was hoping to see what was going in the US and Canada to be analyzed, i.e. a media bias in favour of a candidate which cannot be fought. I've ordered up Press Effect, from the Annenberg Foundation, and I hope that will be closer to what I am interested in. I read with great delight Shklar's Ordinary Vices, which discusses the wrongdoings of everyday life, not just the great big historical wrongs. The chapter on cruelty was the one that interested me the most, because it said that to be cruel, one must be hypocritical or deceive oneself. Well, I understood much cruelty in my own experience, the pettiness, the narrowness of mind, and it was usually accompanied witI also read Truth and Truthfulness by Bernard Williams.h self-deception. My level of self-deception is relatively low, so I am particularly clear on that.

I also read Peter Guralnick's Searching for Robert Johnson, about his investigation an influential but not well-known blues player from the American South. I read Christian Jouhaud's Pouvoirs de la litterature, about the interplay of politics and literature in Ancien Regime France. Then I fell into a trio of Michel Foucault's books, which I decided to read. I read L'Ordre du Discours, about the increasing significance of the author, among other things; Sept propos sur le septieme ange, and most important so far La pensee du dehors. I identify with all sorts of outsiders, and I think his argument in favor of the significance of those outsiders to any culture is very important and very effective.