The Withdrawal Project

A friend of this site wrote us and asked, LI, what is this Withdrawal Project?

So, here is what I have been thinking. I need to talk to an animator for the graphics, talk to an actor or actress - preferably not a white male, but a voice and presence that has the multi-culty appeal - and then do a script that would basically take us through Iraq - here's how we got here, here's what is happening, here's how we can get out. I'm best scripting this and spotting what would need to be done. I can imagine power pointish episodes like: dancing around the hole, or, not enough soldiers is always going to be not enough soldiers, which would briefly revisit the early plans, point out that the undermanning back then was not a mistake of the warplanners but grew out of an essential assumption of the war – that the U.S. could host a long range war without making any sacrifices – and that the undermanning has lasted up until this day, and is never going to be fixed. (To fix it would mean throwing in manpower that we don’t have, at a cost we won’t accept, for a time period that is extended past the breaking point, especially as this diversion of resources really will leave the U.S. vulnerable in o so many other ways). The presentation would find ways to emphasize the size of Iraq and the littleness of the American presence. The episodes, as per Gore’s power point presentation, would be graph and comparison heavy. I’m pretty sure one can now embed vid clips in a presentation – and they are abundant.

Half of the presentation would be scenarios, starting with
what was just vetoed, going into having zero American soldiers in Iraq
by January of 2009.

If this happened, the point would be to get people to do withdrawal
projects on their own, in their own communities. It would be filmed, ideally, but the main thing is to put it on, have people come out to see a presentation. Get on their feet. Not look at this at home, or send another donation to another organization – which is just a way of being lazy. It would be open source, some group wanting to give a Withdrawal party could simply use the materials and add others. It be
nice, if this actually worked, to contact Iraqis, to have withdrawal parties in both countries. As the materials circulate, of course, people add to or change them.

This just occured to me while I was jogging the other day. At the moment, I’m living on saltines and hoping for payday from this big project – but the lovely ready will give me some free time, and maybe I can put up a notice, see if I can get some bites. I like the idea of Withdrawal parties, of it being open sourced. Fantasizing, if this really did get to prototype stage then I'd send off, perhaps, a few begging letters. Jane Fonda is perhaps a person I'd target for donation. I don’t know, I imagine there is some Hollywood liberal willing to put in 2-5 thousand dollars to see if this would work. Withdrawal parties springing up in the spring of 2008 would certainly be nice. So far, the political forms have all been – pay attention to me. And the Bush response, much like its junta beginnings, has been not to play that game. So the very form of the demonstration has been an impediment to action. This form is simply – let’s pay attention. It would operate on different tracks and trails, like rave culture. And if done right, it will attract attention in itself.

That's it. Simple, but perhaps I should do this. What do you think?

ps - I've talked to a few people about what I should do - where I should look for a power point expert, or if power point is what I am even looking for. It still looks like I will be going to the RTF department next week and putting up some notices. Tomorrow I will post ( I think) about an un_Iraq related topic. Those of you who are my regular readers, though - I beg you, take this seriously and lend me your thoughts. I am serious. Though it may sound wildly improbable, this country really is waiting for something like Withdrawal parties. The failure of the politics that would have kept this country from getting into the war, or kept the occupation short, or have questioned, by the end of May 2003, the outlines of the occupation program - which was there for anybody to read - has been a failure that keeps on giving. Every six months another failure, every election a failure, every successful election a failure. The policy elite has triumphed in this country over everything except reality - reality has smashed all of their schemes to bits. But far from poisoning the words in their mouths, they still lie like barbie and ken dolls with lie recorders in them. Read the Washington Post - a fascinating adventure in deconstructive detection work - any day in the week and you can track the lies and the further lies to cover the older, worn out ones. And - contravening the sticks and stones law about words - these words have broken bones, heads, a culture, a state. These lies have ripped up families, have produced the social breakdown leading to the present Thugocracy in both Iraq and D.C., and stick to us all, day and night, like curses. It's a night battle, and it has to be joined simply by getting out of your fucking seat and joining it. Like the hokey pokey - that's what it's all about!

Always leave a trail

Other important qualities in the urban guerrilla are the following: to be a good walker, to be able to stand up against fatigue, hunger, rain or heat. To know how to hide, and how to be vigilant. To conquer the art of dissembling. Never to fear danger. To behave the same by day as by night. Not to act impetuously. To have unlimited patience. To remain calm and cool in the worst of conditions and situations. Never to leave a track or trail. Not to get discouraged. – Carlos Marighella

So much for the sixties.

Never to leave a track or a trail – to be the mystery man, Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, the hero of a Dylan ballad – was the politically charged thing at one time. Go with the Weather. Go with the RAF. Go down the rabbit hole.

Times and strategies and fantasies change. LI has, for those of you who’ve read some of these here posts, an obsession with trails and tracks. Instead of the guerilla’s disappearing footsteps, our model is Little Red Riding Hood’s path of needles – the whorish path, the path on which the going forward and the going backward are radically different experiences. As a political act, however, LI thinks it is important to leave a track or trail, rather than the opposite. To be so open and so trackable that there can be no doubt about it – for political magic, today, should take place where there are no shifting shadows and no disappearing Clint Eastwood figures – in spite of the fact that the motto of this site - that the U.S. should have a big picnic, elect a midget mayor, and be painted red - does come from High Plains Drifter.

So I’ve been thinking about Withdrawal. As a show. As a power point program. Much like Al Gore’s Global Warming show.

I’ve been trying to finish this rather big editing job. At the end of the job is a big reward – at least, by LI’s standards (I had a conversation with my editor at the Austin Statesman, who gingerly asked me if I had any plans for the future, in which I told him that I might have money for the next two months when this is through. And he calmly told me that normal people, uh, would think that not knowing if they will have any money two months from now an indicator that THEY WERE FUCKING LOSING IT.) With the bit of free time I might have, I’m thinking that I might put up a notice at the U.T. campus, looking for people to put together some such presentation and film it. The traditional forms of protest are dead. The demonstration has become a ritual for ersatz politics – go out, march, be ignored. So it goes. At the moment, that forum just doesn’t work, at least in the Anglosphere. But there are other forums. This is a make your own tv era. I am appalled at the emptiness at the center of the Iraq war ‘debate’ – withdrawal. There seems to be a complete lack of any sense of what it means, how to do it, how to do it completely, etc., etc. “Withdrawal” as a power point show would fill in the blanks. It wouldn’t be hard to do – or rather, it wouldn’t be hard to research. The material is superabundant. LI wouldn’t, of course, be the speaker – the project wouldn’t work without someone who could do that job well, an actor or – better – an actress (I’d dearly like to lower the testosterone on this issue) so I’ve been thinking of U.T.’s theater department or radio and film.

This may be a passing fancy. I don’t know.

What Bush has in common with other carnivora

The New Bathory and Fitko


The image of the bloodbath – usually of virgins or of children – seems to be an extension of a folk medical idea about the rejuvenating properties of blood. Supposedly, the emperor Constantine was afflicted with leprosy and was about to try a course of blood baths to cure it – with the blood coming from stray children – when he had a vision that God would cure him if he converted to Christianity - and that seemed like a better deal to Constantine. The most famous blood bath in history was taken by Elizabeth (Erzsebet) Bathory, a Hungarian countess. Sabine Baring-Gold introduced the story into English in the Book of Were-Wolves, in the chapter on natural causes of lycanthropy. Baring Gold begins with a thesis that was of his Victorian time and place, with the overtones from Darwin:

“Startling though the assertion may be, it is a matter of fact, that man, naturally, in common with other carnivora, is actuated by an impulse to kill, and by a love of destroying life.

It is positively true that there are many to whom the sight of suffering causes genuine pleasure, and in whom the passion to kill or torture is as strong as any other passion. Witness the number of boys who assemble around a sheep or pig when it is about to be killed, and who watch the struggle of the dying brute with hearts beating fast with pleasure, and eyes sparkling with delight. Often have I seen an eager crowd of children assembled around the slaughterhouses of French towns, absorbed in the expiring agonies of the sheep and cattle, and hushed into silence as they watched the flow of blood.”

Here’s Elizabeth’s story:

“Michael Wagener[1] relates a horrible story which occurred in Hungary, suppressing the name of the person, as it was that of a still powerful family in the country. It illustrates what I have been saying, and shows how trifling a matter may develope the passion in its most hideous proportions.
"Elizabeth ------ was wont to dress well in order to please her husband, and she spent half the day over her toilet. On one occasion, a lady's-maid saw something wrong in her head-dress, and as a recompence for observing it, received such a severe box on the ears that the blood gushed from her nose, and spirted on to her mistress's face. When the blood drops were washed off her face, her skin appeared much more beautiful--whiter and more transparent on the spots where the blood had been.
"Elizabeth formed the resolution to bathe her face and her whole body in human blood so as to enhance her beauty. Two old women and a certain Fitzko assisted her in her undertaking. This monster used to kill the luckless victim, and the old women caught the blood, in which Elizabeth was wont to bathe at the hour of four in the morning. After the bath she appeared more beautiful than before.
"She continued this habit after the death of her husband (1604) in the hopes of gaining new suitors. The unhappy girls who were allured to the castle, under the plea that they were to be taken into service there, were locked up in a cellar. Here they were beaten till their bodies were swollen. Elizabeth not unfrequently tortured the victims herself; often she changed their clothes which dripped with blood, and then renewed her cruelties. The swollen bodies were then cut up with razors.
"Occasionally she had the girls burned, and then cut up, but the great majority were beaten to death.
"At last her cruelty became so great, that she would stick needles into those who sat with her in a carriage, especially if they were of her own sex. One of her servant-girls she stripped naked, smeared her with honey, and so drove her out of the house.

The Countess

"When she was ill, and could not indulge her cruelty, she bit a person who came near her sick bed as though she were a wild beast.
"She caused, in all, the death of 650 girls, some in Tscheita, on the neutral ground, where she had a cellar constructed for the purpose; others in different localities; for murder and bloodshed became with her a necessity.
"When at last the parents of the lost children could no longer be cajoled, the castle was seized, and the traces of the murders were discovered. Her accomplices were executed, and she was imprisoned for life." [1. Beitrage zur philosophischen Anthropologie, Wien, 1796.]”

The term bloodbath has come up a lot, lately, usually used by the apologists of the Iraq war to warn about the dire consequences of American withdrawal. Here’s some examples:

“President Bush warned Thursday that pulling out of Iraq too soon would trigger a bloodbath akin to that of the Cambodian killing fields of the 1970s…

"I want to remind you that after Vietnam, after we left, millions of people lost their life," Bush said here when an audience member asked about comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. "The Khmer Rouge, for example, in Cambodia. And my concern is there would be a parallel. . . . The same thing would happen. There would be the slaughter of a lot of innocent life. The difference, of course, is that this time around, the enemy wouldn't just be content to stay in the Middle East; they'd follow us here." – Washington Post, 20 April 2007”

“Once we leave Iraq, America's enemies will still reside in the Mideast; and they will be stronger if we leave behind a failed government and bloodbath in Iraq. The Wall Street Journal editorial page 6 April 2007”

Commentary’s ever bizarre Arthur Herman: “If they [the anti-war Dems] succeed in their ultimate goal of forcing a withdrawal, they will take their place in another "long line," joining the shameful company of those who compelled the French to leave Algeria in disgrace and to stand by as the victorious FLN conducted a hideous bloodbath, and of those who compelled America to leave Vietnam under similar circumstances and to similar effect.” 1 April 2007.”

That it is shameful to stand by while a blood bath is pretty much the message. It is a compassionate message that should reach every human heart. The only exception, of course, is if the bloodbath is caused by American carnivora. Then the only thing to do is – dicker about the numbers. As we know, the bloodbath in Iraq has been mapped by research published in the Lancet magazine last year. To refresh your memories, this is from last month’s New Statesman – commenting on a story that revealed that the British Government was advised that the Lancet’s methodology was good:

“Now, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that British government experts backed the methodology used by the scientists responsible for the study. If the Lancet estimate is correct, it means 2.5 per cent of the Iraqi population--an average of more than 500 people a day--have been killed since the invasion. Of these, 601,000 died in violent acts--the majority involving gunfire.”

The New Statesman quotes an unnamed government figure: "We do not accept the figures quoted in the Lancet survey as accurate", but [he] goes on to say: "The survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished, it is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones." The documents advise ministers to use figures from the Iraqi health ministry, which estimates the number of deaths at less than 10 per cent of the Lancet's figure.”

And in fact, the shameless bystanding as the present bloodbath goes on, in proportions tht would sate even Elizabeth Bathory, is encouraged and engaged in by, of course, the warmongers themselves and their intelligent-as-a-garbage-fly president. Here’s the whole reply of the British Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett to the Lancet study:

"Every death in Iraq is a tragedy for those affected. The Government of Iraq represents all communities and is committed to tackling sectarian violence. We are supporting this effort and will continue to do so. The numbers that the Lancet has extrapolated are a substantial leap from other figures. What is important is that we bring an end to the violence and death in Iraq."

That takes care of that. Time for crumpets and a nice cup of Iraqi infant blood for Ms. Beckett.

Instead of the Lancet study pointed to the need for a radical change in policy in Iraq, it was taken as a provocation to – arguments about methodology. The National Post ran a story about the Lancet study last year which studied the methodology of it – the only response to the study that occurred at all.

“A spokesman for Tony Blair retorted that the excess civilian death figure reported in The Lancet is "not one we believe to be anywhere near accurate." George W. Bush declared the study's "methodology is pretty well discredited." In this newspaper, David Frum wrote a column on October 14 dismissing the Lancet study in similar terms.
Why the disagreement over the number of civilian deaths? There are basically two ways of counting the war dead -- active and passive.
In the active method, which was used for the Lancet study, researchers fan out and sample random clusters of homes, interviewing occupants about deaths in the family. This kind of demographic survey is not unusual -- hundreds of such studies are done each decade, tracking the epidemiology of all manner of diseases. In the case of the Johns Hopkins and Iraqi teams, they interviewed 12,801 people in 47 clusters. Doing this, they found 82 deaths pre-invasion, and 547 post-invasion -- a huge increase, with most of the increase in deaths occurring among young men, as is typical in civil wars.
The researchers extrapolated from their sample, as pollsters do, to all of Iraq. They also verified the respondents' claims of deaths, where possible, with death certificates. They thereby concluded that the post-war excess civilian deaths are 655,000. Since asking about the dead in a war zone is trickier than, say, quizzing voters in downtown Toronto about their voting intentions, the researchers concede the margin of error to their study is higher than usual, ranging from 392,979 at the low end to 942,636 at the high end.”

Morality runs infinitely into accounting when, of course, the bloodbath is rising up over the top of the tub and it is the U.S. merrily splashing around inside the tub. What have the Americans done? They've caused those deaths, indirectly (by providing no security) and directly (by bombing the shit out of cities, razing Fallujah, inciting sectarianism and openly training death squads) for a nice, rejuvenating red pool.

Bringing us to the last quote of this quotehappy post:

“Neither the fact of the war nor its intensity will likely abate upon the
disengagement of U.S. forces because Iraq’s Sunnis will continue to fear the ultimate
consequences of the reversal of fortune that they perceive the Shia as seeking to
complete. The real question is how much worse the bloodshed can get. A credible—
although many might say optimistic—forecast is that the lack of organizational capacity, broad communal consent, and heavy weapons on either side militates against a drastic increase in the already appalling casualty rate. Crucially, the largely Sunni areas are of little interest to the Shia as objects of desire or conquest. And without artillery, armor, and attack aircraft, Shia forces will be far less capable of reducing Sunni majority cities, such as Falluja, to rubble, in the way that Serbs dealt with Croatian or Muslim urban areas in the former Yugoslavia. Ethnic cleansing in mixed areas will continue to advance, the large flow of refugees and internally displaced will continue to mount, massive bombings and death squads will continue to claim many lives, but crucial conditions for nationwide genocidal violence are as yet absent. This probabilistic judgment is hardly a cause for rejoicing: It only suggests that a bloody stalemate between similarly equipped adversaries is somewhat more likely than the annihilation or expulsion of Iraq’s Sunni population. Nevertheless, the consequences of such escalation are so extreme that the United States should begin working now with the UN, NATO, coalition members, and neighboring states on plans for a rapid multilateral intervention in the event that genocidal warfare breaks out after the withdrawal of U.S. forces.” – Stephen Simon, After the Surge.

The Washington Post will now present this brief advertisement from the Saudi Embassy. Readers are advised to turn off their brains.

The Washington Post article about the abaya in Saudi Arabia gives us a wonderful example of the pap and propaganda that the MSM pumps into the system. From the headline forward, this is an article in that heartening vein beloved by the American media of an American ally “reforming”. The rules are: the ally is undeniably corrupt. The ally’s government is undeniably tyrannical. The ally’s society is undeniably riven with corruption and dysfunction. Substitute Chang Kai-Shek’s “Free” China or South Vietnam into the equation, or a multitude of other countries, historically. In this case, the ally – Saudi Arabia – is a bit more embarrassing than most, since eleven of their citizens attacked the U.S. lately. This is a definite faux pas, but luckily we were able to attack a bystander country that had nothing to do with it, so all is forgiven.

Recently, Tony Blair made the rounds of the Gulf countries and Egypt, all of which are ruled by autocratics, none of which have working parliaments, not to speak of bills of rights, free presses and the lot – and he addressed them as a Democratic coalition, urging them to take on tyrannical Iran. It is rather like mistaking a hyena for a goldfish to call Saudi Arabia democratic, but the nonsense spewed out by our rulers everyday does have the purpose of creating such a thick layer of cognitive dissonance that discussion of the reality of American foreign policy, including those of its adjuncts, like the U.K., are impossible to hold.

With this in mind, let’s look at the Washington Post article. First, of course, there is the headline: “For Cloaked Saudi Women, Color Is the New Black”. Already we have that American favorite, the mixture of fashion trend and politics. To get to the mythical substrate we should, as Barthes once did, look at the structure in terms of what can and cannot be substituted, and what the substitutes would be. The best substitute here would, of course, be Iranian. If the title read, “For Cloaked Iranian Women, Color Is the New Black”, we know that the tone would be: rejection by the great mass of the good Iranian people of the terrible oppression of the mad mullahs. A problem would be, of course, that the clothing code required by the Saudis is, of course, much much more oppressive than the Iranian dress code. Here’s a little film clip of a documentary about Saudi women:

Here’s a little film clip of pics of Iranian women. You will notice that the dress code is widely various. Now, this isn’t an argument that the lesser dress code isn’t oppressive, but that the Iranian code is much less oppressive than that effected by our ‘democratic’ ally, Saudi Arabia. In fact, there is another documentary out there I haven’t seen concerning six women who signed up to run for the presidency in Iran in 2001. It is at this site. That you can actually run for the presidency in Iran, unlike Egypt or Saudi Arabia, has to be overlooked as the U.S. battles for democracy in the Middle East.

These grafs set the tone of the story of the new, swingin’ Saudi Arabia:

“Saudi women have long been known in the West for their all-enveloping black attire, widely considered a mark of their oppression. But Sharif and Fageeh are among a growing number of women and girls here who are rethinking and reinventing the abaya to more closely reflect their personalities and religious beliefs.
The change is most striking in Jiddah, the kingdom's most cosmopolitan city, where many young women now wear their head scarves around their shoulders and leave their abayas open to reveal pants and T-shirts. Medical students here often forgo the abaya altogether, frequenting malls and coffee shops in brightly colored head scarves and white knee-length lab coats over jeans.
Abayas with patches of fluorescent color, floral patterns, animal prints, embroidery and even zodiac signs have started to show up in other cities as well, prompting clerics to criticize the trend and reiterate that abayas were meant to deflect attention, not attract it.”

The “growing numbers” is a popular form of journalism numerology. It alludes to the quantifiable, always the brand for fact, tm, without really being exactly quantification. In other words, there is a trend, but the trend is in the eye of the beholder.

Now, if the substitution of Teheran for Jiddah was made, then we know that the structure here, would respond by fronting the third paragraph. “The change is most striking in Teheran, where clerics have been criticizing and threatening to put in place measures to curb these newfound freedoms…” But not in the kinda free swinging city of Jiddah. In fact, the Post goes out on the limb and tells us:

“Until several years ago, members of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the enforcement arm of the Wahhabi establishment, patrolled streets and malls with sticks, making sure that women were properly veiled, that men and women who were not related did not mingle and that stores closed during prayer times. But the committee's influence has waned since the Sept. 11 attacks, and its bearded members are rarely seen in Jiddah these days”.

Is that impressive or what? And is it – true or what? The Promotion of Vice patrols are rarely seen on the streets of Jiddah these days? Well, it is interesting that this comes on the same day as this news item:

“RIYADH, 28 May 2007 — The president of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Ghaith, said yesterday that several suspects from the Riyadh commission were being questioned by authorities regarding the alleged beating to death of a Saudi citizen last Wednesday. “The Commission for Investigation and Public Prosecution as well as the Governorate of Riyadh are still investigating the matter,” Al-Ghaith said. He did not give the number of suspects from the virtue commission who are being interrogated. Several newspapers have reported that as many as eight are being investigated.

The Governorate of Riyadh issued a press statement yesterday about the alleged murder. It said that it had received information from the commission that the deceased, Sulaiman Al-Huraisi, was selling alcohol from his apartment. The statement also said that authorization had been given to the local police and the commission to raid the house according to regulations.”

But that is Riyadh, kinda not so swinging. Which is why this story, with its Riyadh location, can also be ignored:

“RIYADH, 28 May 2007 — Maj. Gen. Ali Al-Harithy, the director general of prisons, said yesterday that prisoners in the Kingdom were not tortured or beaten on a large scale, and that beatings were “individual cases,” which should not be generalized.
Al-Harithy was referring to a report released last week by the National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) in Saudi Arabia. “Regulations, directives and the constitution state clearly that there should not be any violations against prisoners. ... There are, however, individual mistakes, but that rarely happens. And if it does happen, then prisoner rights are fulfilled by punishing offenders,” he said.

In its first report on human rights in Saudi Arabia, the NSHR said some people remain in prison even after they have completed their term. It said in some cases inmates were beaten or tortured for confessions and sometimes they missed appeal court hearings because prison authorities forgot to remind them.

Al-Harithy criticized visits by foreign human rights groups to the Kingdom, which recently included prison visits by Human Rights Watch. “We do not need foreign organizations to come here and teach our sons and daughters human rights. We are obliged to protect human rights by ourselves without anyone coming from outside and implying that we have to care about human rights in ‘the land of humanity’,” he said.”

So untrendy! And here is an interview with Sheikh Ibrahim Al-Ghaith, the head of the Vice Commission, who gives us insight into the liberal, free, swingin’ Saudi Arabia with answers to questions like this:

“Q: What is your position on families going out together?

A: We always request restaurants and recreation area managers that they have separate areas for men and women, or separate areas for women and their children and other separate areas for men alone. Or that a place be designed where a family, women members and male members who are mahrams (brothers, sons, uncles) can sit alone. As for different families sitting together with mixed men and women, who are non-mahrams, then this is the basis of corruption.

Q: What is the commission doing to catch sorcerers in Saudi cities. And what is their fate after they are caught? Could you tell us how many of them were caught this year and their locations? And what about the magic spells that are thrown into the Red Sea? How are these spells broken?
A: The commission plays a large role in capturing people who practice sorcery or delusions since these are vices which affect the faith of Muslims and cause harm to both nationals and expatriates. The commission has assigned centers in every city and town to be on the lookout for these men. As for their fate, they are arrested and then transferred to concerned authorities. The commission also has a role in breaking magic spells, which are found in the sea. We cooperate with divers in this aspect. After the spells are found, they are then broken using recitations of the Holy Qur’an. We do not use magic to break magic spells, as this is against the teachings of Islam as mentioned by the Supreme Ulema. But we use the Qur’an as did the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).”

Luckily, questions and answers like that will never clutter up the Post, which would check with the Saudi Embassy just to make sure that such things never really are at issue in trendy, democratic, reformist Saudi Arabia - now with better privatizations than ever before! It has better things to do. Like urging the tough line on Iran, the center of deadly, deadly UN-democracy in the Middle East. We just can’t tolerate that. America is, after all, a benign hegemon.

the class war in Iraq and in the U.S.

LI’s old far flung correspondent, T. in NYC, called us to buck us up about our new direction on this blog – our turn to the vehement language and shocking images of German dada.

Well, the venom is temporarily out of our system. I won’t put any cracked open mouths and eyeless, bloody faces up to illustrate these here paragraphs. I’ve thought – rather than just rattled and put my fangs out – a lot about the current state of moral and mortal play in America since the Democratic cave in.

One of the things that is most striking about this war – and striking about post-Cold War kultcha in general – is the lack of any reference to class. When Marx analyzed the civil war in France, after the French defeat in 1870, he naturally turned to class analysis. Somehow, this handy and hardy tool has become obsolete. Googling for some reference to class analysis of the situation in Iraq, I found zip.

So let me take it out of my ass here.

I could make a joke, and say that the sectarianism really is a big problem in the Iraq war – sectarianism in the U.S. of A.., that is. But that would be inexact. More coldly, the class segmented structure of Iraq has been shattered by the war, and that shattering has been the prerequisite to sectarianism. It is an odd American colonial venture, precisely for that reason. American foreign policy has consistently sought out its natural constituency – the management and upper class - in other countries for at least the past one hundred twenty years. The shift from supporting ‘republicans’ was going on even in the late eighteenth century – hence, Tom Paine’s disgust with George Washington over the French Revolution. However, it wasn’t until the domestic U.S. scene had assumed the plutocratic cast we are familiar with, under McKinley, that this was reflected fully in U.S. foreign policy. And even then, there were big exceptions. Wilson’s foreign policy is always defined by WWI, but as important, during the Wilson years, was the reaction of the Americans to the revolution in Mexico. That reaction was internally conflicted by the struggle between the progressive side and the plutocratic side. Add, of course, the idiosyncracy of Wilson’s own Puritanism – he truly disapproved of the personal lives of certain Mexican generals – and so the struggle went forward, and in a way forged the patterns that then became apparent on a world wide scale after 1918. The progressive side was looted for its rhetoric, while the plutocratic side was exploited for its internationalism – for plutocrats are, among other things, the truest internationalists. And the Wilsonian Puritanism always provided a wild card – for instance, the outsized influence exerted on the U.S. china policy by Christian missionaries.

In Iraq, however, everything quickly reversed itself. Rove was right to admire McKinley – Bush’s administration is the most plutocratic since McKinley’s – but on foreign policy, there is nothing McKinley like about the Iraq adventure. The merger of the Christian faction and the plutocratic faction created a contradiction that couldn’t sustain itself in Iraq, since the Christian side had no interpretive grid through which to understand Iraqi society. Consequently, the U.S. fucked up in its outreach to its natural constituency. Instead of getting the middle and upper class on its side – and one has only to read the Iraqi bloggers, the ones who write in English, who are mostly from that strata, to see how much they truly longed for the U.S., how much trust they had in America – the U.S. unleashed all the forces that scared them to death. In essence, the U.S. underwrote the expropriation of the upper class in Iraq without even knowing it. Contra those who think that every mistake that the U.S. makes is part of some devilish, conspiratorial plan, this unleashing of forces is precisely the kind of thing that upsets the plutocratic vision of Iraq. To see this, look at the place where the class structure remains intact, in Northern Iraq: characteristically, there, the plutocratic, ruling sector is adamant about privatizing oil resources. But this is a program that could only be carried out by a confident, ruling upper class. It couldn’t be carried out at all by the U.S.’s supposed ‘allies’ in the rest of Iraq. Such is the incompetence of the Bush administration that it even fucked up its relationship with its ‘base’. This isn’t a small thing. While the U.S. will no doubt, one of these days, get some version of its oil law through, I very much doubt that law will endure. Meanwhile, the professional class and their capital leave Iraq every day.

What about the U.S.? One of the things that discredits class analysis is its use as an inflexible tool. Class doesn’t determine everything. We know a lot more about how strata endure, how they self-identify, how they communicate now than we did in Carlos Marx’s time.

There was a striking Gallup Poll that came out a couple of week’s ago, which categorized support or opposition to the war according to age and sex. Unfortunately, they did not include either race or income as an indicator. http://www.galluppoll.com/content/?ci=27562 The poll showed that support for the war is strongest in the male group, from 18-49. It is merely to speculate – but I would guess that within that group, race matters – more white support than black – and income matters – more upper income support than lower income. Who knows, there might be a peckerwood factor here, but that is the general pattern in American wars. What is striking about that is that in the upper ranks of the supposed opposition party, the Democrats, we find an overabundance of the white male group, aged 18-49. It is this group that is most convinced that the war is somehow still popular. It is this group, on the Dem sides, that still holds a fearful respect for Bush. And that makes sense. This group talks to itself. It goes to lunch with itself. It watches tv made by itself. It sees itself on the political shows. It reads newspapers written by itself. It is living in the bubble of its own exhalations. Thus, even when members of it come out and shit, and speak up against the war, they consider themselves to be doing something daring.

As you go up from 49, however, you find that opposition grows and support shrinks even among the male segment. This is where the real American strategy is being fought out. On the one hand, the plutocrats have seen, for a year at least, that Iraq is not only a foul mess, but that it is fouling up a lot of potential money in the Middle East. It is going to be much harder to privatize enterprises in the Gulf states – a bonanza awaiting a lot of private firms – if the war is going on. Privatization is a soft soap job anyway – a population, being robbed of its resource, has to be in a tranquil state where it will swallow the minimum number of lies necessary to affect the heist. The spillover from Iraq is very bad for that business. On the other hand, it is even worse for business for America to be weak. To track the real economy – that mix of the material and positional one – you have to have a sense not just for dollars and cents, but for the symbolic systems that support dollars and sense. And most important for that system is the illusion of America’s strength.

Thus, there is a push and pull that blurs the plutocratic line on Iraq. The Democrats, who have made compromise itself into a universal solvent and policy to meet all ills, reflect that push and pull. The withdrawal from Iraq is not going to be built within the Democratic party at the present time, but… there is no antiwar movement to build it outside of that party, either.

About which, I will have more in a future post.

Michael Gordon, war pig* reporter for the Times - another day, another lie

Michael Gordon, the man who tried to float clueless propaganda from the Bush administration about Iranian supplied weapons in Iraq, is back again with another clueless propaganda story from the Bush administration – this one is about the ardent desire of the Iraqis for the Americans to occupy their country.

It is a necessary piece. As he notes in like the 17th graf, the Iraqi parliament recently voted for the U.S. to set a timetable for leaving. This is unfortunate, as Gordon only seems to find Iraqi politicians who want the U.S. to stay, or do the bloodbath is coming shuffle. Apparently, instead of the 100 bodies a day, the Baghdad norm, it will really get serious!

Michael Gordon will always be remembered for the brilliant reporting on the Aluminum tubes. Here is the beginning of that story:

“WASHINGTON, Sept. 7, 2002 -- More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq's nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.
The attempted purchases are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms. President Hussein has met repeatedly in recent months with Iraq's top nuclear scientists and, according to American intelligence, praised their efforts as part of his campaign against the West.

Iraqi defectors who once worked for the nuclear weapons establishment have told American officials that acquiring nuclear arms is again a top Iraqi priority. American intelligence agencies are also monitoring construction at nuclear sites.”

Over the years, Gordon has shown himself to be a seasoned professional you can trust. If he says it is raining, the sun is shining. If he says nice day, you know it is hurricane weather outside. Being a complete patsy, a war pig, a liar, an accomplice in the murder of thousands, a joke of a reporter, a man who wouldn’t know a fact if it bit him in the ass, a man with his head so far up Cheney’s ass that doctor’s worry about the first case of prostate to nose infection – he is the type of Timesman of whom we can only say, let the buyer beware.

*apologies to IT for the porcism.

dance dance dance listen to the radio

Heroism running on empty - Kurt Tucholsky

The Leipzig trial for high treason has unveiled the mental situation of the German military for those who did not know it.

We don’t take the trial very seriously. The official court has long disappointed the trust of all observers with its political judgments – what is inscribed in its judgments is resentment and politics, which are served up as a form of justicery.

That communists would never be treated like these three officers doesn’t surprise us. “I have”, said one of the government attornies, “not wanted to offend the accused, and I would regret it if they had been offended (gekraenkt habe). Well, that’s all righty then….



The important and implication heavy thing is not the attitudes of the court, but instead, the the pattern of military thought, which is less known.

It is grim.

That voluntary soldiers are voluntary opponents of pacifism ought not to astonish us, and is understandable. That has always been the case. Although it is rarely thought about - as it would be if the fire department, for example, struggled against those who wanted to put out flames… but these soldiers have never felt like firemen, who are called in the moment of danger, but have always seen themselves as their own end.
Although I won’t speak to those majors and lieutenants, who can’t be persuaded because they can’t read, and if they could read, could not understand, and if they could understand what they read, would apply it falsely – I will speak to people who wish to battle un-intelligence with intelligence.



Every man creates in his mind a world, in which he stands in the center, according to his abilities. Few confess this. Let’s begin with ourselves.

Pacifists who are good horsemen are exceptions. In every pacifistic tendency is – next to the best ethical intentions – the rejection of a world in which the preaching pacifist does not play a leading role. It is already much, if he could stand with respect in this warrior’s world. This dainty aunt-y feature is unmistakable in pacifism; where it works itself out sentimentally, is where it is hardest to defend. For that is not the sense and content of pacifism. The military opponent fights with us: with slanders, as for example in this trial; with insults, that are uninteresting, and … with a trace of justice. They struggle mostly, however, against the worst and lowest level of pacifism, against its caricature, against the cry baby in it.
Otherwise such a fight is a question of intellectual force, and really not only of the brachial type, as it is thoroughly impressed upon us today. The peaceloving person, who doesn’t want to squander his best forces on the battle field, builds himself a world, in which he has some value. He is easily inclined to place this world ethically higher than all the others.
It is weakness and lies to close one’s eyes to the fact that these elements have to be cleanly expelled. I hold it for wholly just and natural.
The pacifist is correct, even so, in his fight against war, because he is denying it the power to manage the lives of other people. I have no vegetarian feelings in any way: there may be situations, in which spilling blood is no injustice. But one must hold upright, as a fundamental demand, that nobody have the right, to rule over the life of his fellow men in order to elevate himself. But that’s exactly what soldier’s do.
“Yesterday morning, police recruits sank their shovels into a shallow grave alongside a highway and turned up the bodies of 29 unidentified men, bound, blindfolded and recently shot.
Hours later, the bodies of 15 more men, their faces splattered with mud, their necks cut with wire, were found piled in the back of a pickup truck.
On Monday, it was the same. More than 40 bodies were picked up from the streets of Baghdad, many having a single bullet wound in the head.
No one seems to know how, for example, a pickup truck full of dead men could turn up at a busy intersection in Baghdad, where there is a strict curfew at night and ceaseless checkpoints during the day. – NYT, March 15, 2006

The establishment of expressed opinions in the Leipzig trial was more than miserable. One doesn’t have to cite any documents. Ours indeed smells of where the opinions come from. Their views stem completely out of this feeling. It isn’t that they need to be bad because of this. But they are empty and disgusting. For:




If one taps hard enough on the young lieutenant and the suspiciously older officers, one will always find that they think of Germany, their fellow citizens and the collected world as a place for military exercises, for maneuvers, and look at it all as a future battlefield, on which they can unfold what they call their best talents. There we can say ecce homo – there and only there. It is for significant for this heroism, that by many is doubtless believed to be authentic and masculine, that it never asks after the goal of the soldier’s work. The fight is fought; if it is once begun, it must be gone through – but to what end the whole goes, for what reason, for who, to whose use: this is something they don’t question. In Heinz Pols novel Either-or, there is a marvelous passage: “ He wanted to see just once what he was struggling against.” That’s it. The struggle is primary – only afterward is it rationalized.
This leads easily to wanting to fight in general, and thus: to evoke hostilities and to make enemies, with whom man can be a soldier. The soldier needs an enemy. Otherwise he would be nothing.
Thus, if these officers win influence on the politics of the country – and they have achieved more than is commonly assumed – than we are near the point that they, for the sake of activating their handwork, will provoke fighting even where one could avoid it.
What the young men have said before the tribunal does not deserve any contradiction: where there is sheer nothingness, the polemicist loses his rights. It was the typical resentment of the soldier’s attitude, a casino speech, that anybody who has been through a war could repeat in his sleep. It was and is the rejection of the intellectual world, the world of peace in general, because it is too boring for men of this mold to live in. One can’t ask an actor to approve of a social order in which the theater is banned and expelled. The actor wants to act. The soldier wants to make war.

Now, the military man didn’t fall from heaven. He is nothing than a kind of person found throughout the human race, who is in germany, through history and tradition, simply overbred, because a certain type of German is wired to go beserk.

In the soldier is – observing this with complete value neutrality – force; youth, a spirit that wants to be applied; a surplus energy, that wants to spill out; a desire for riot; joy in obedience and joy in being obeyed; joy in working in the fresh air; joy in colors and in equipment – all of this and more. All of which is scrambled up, in modern soldiers, with the type of office-capable organisor, men who want to command and let others work. And with technicians, who just enjoy modern machinery, which he commands with his type of orders… for these people, it is unimportant if, in striking England, Germany is right, that doesn’t move them at all. What moves them is commanding a division and using a tank. Sports.

In this activity there is a lot of what is good and legitimate. But instead of exploiting such forces, they are regressing the modern social order. In the capitalistic office-industry, young men who are so constituted cannot begin to make anything of themselves and their particular strengths, and now they are making themselves what they need.

For the military with all its trimmings is not only a need of the society in general, but it is primarily a need of a particular part of society.
Thus, like the half-intellectual, who “not knowing, what he should do”, enters in the administrative world or in industry and builds a “niche for himself’ that didn’t exist before, one, which needs the man who holds it in order to exist at all: similarly , the soldier creates in every country: a, the necessary spiritual preconditions for his existence in the form of enemies, dangers, and a nationalism intensified to an insane level, and b., a mechanism, in which he reigns supreme, and works, and unfolds his special powers – in which he can, in other words, simply be. These institutions congealed out of powerful men inclined towards violence are the armies; these instruments are used, misused and needed by whatever reigning order is current: for the suppression of the class enemy, thus the worker, for the diversion of the society to external threats and so on. The soldier doesn’t see this for the most part. He just is.

This heroism runs on empty. It is heroism in and for itself – and so it isn’t heroism at all. The vague concept of the ‘fatherland’ is a mythical formula; there is nothing that these men defend against as much as a conceptual analysis of their pseudo-religious formulas, and they know well why. It would be the end. The blank nullity of it would be revealed to the light of day.
It is not that the fundamental forces in play here are reducible to: joy in destruction; the joy of little men parading before little women; that is not the fact to be negated. Negation is aimed fully at the way these powers, running forever on their own emptiness, are put in place and misused.
We must fundamentally distinguish this military pattern of thought from that that the young nationalists preach. They are busily lending to a previous basic feeling a new and spiritual form – but not out of respect for the spirit, of which they mostly have not a breath, but in order to erect their main man on this ground. How much uncertainty is therein! What Ernst Junger did, while becoming in the meantime a clever war reporter, assiduously, obsessively and hop hop, is spiritually thin, undernourished and much more from yesterday than it is from tomorrow, as it pretends to be. Always it is significantly more lyrical than the cold fundamental perspective of the eternal officer class, who are nothing but that. Jünger aims for a mysticism whose clouds can be dispelled by a wave of the hand; behind them grins the blank nothingness, the stubborn view that fighting is something affirmable in itself. Young people in today’s so called “Bunde” associations are not much different. One must be suspicious – against the right and the left – every someone meets the attack on a given view with the cry, ‘blasphemy’! Because it means something is rotten within.
On both levels, in the military as in the nationalist associations, rules the same running on empty heroism. They are distinct from one another and even divided; possibly, one day they will join together – but by this junction they will mutually keep an eye on each other and never let a moment pass in which one can betray the other … the young nationalists being, for the military, much too literary, for as is known to all the world, he who reads a book is a bookworm…

But in these circumstances the eternal military man will create what he needs. An ‘air defense’, a ‘water defense’, a ‘train defense’, and whatever a man needs when he doesn’t know how to do anything intelligent. These and their like are aids to the unfolding of his nature.

But it is a little much to ask all society to pay for the excitation of the internal secretions of a small group of men. Certainly, on all sides the payer is being bombarded with demands for: maneuvers, war reports of all types, uniforms, music, photo ops with cannons … somewhat overbilled, it seems to me.

But it is all empty, completely empty. And it steps up with the complete aplomb of the muscleman, who is, on first impression, always at an advantage over the brainy man. His opponent doesn’t have much time. And as for your average householder… great god. They are touched by the like of General von Seeckt because he has the cleverness not to open his mouth – there are not only inscrutable geniuses, there are other kinds, too. And a book of some reputation seeking general is a curiosity: if the man were not a staff officer, nobody would care about his views and his empty essays.

Mars is blind and has no head. He just has a helmet.

And you are reflected in this helmet. How, after all, did 1914 go so far? How was that possible? It was made possible by refined and pointed preliminary labor: through a day by day drum fussilade of war preparation, through the market cries of running on empty heroism.

Ignaz Wrobel
Die Weltbühne, 04.11.1930, Nr. 45, S. 684.

"war suits me like a dip in a medicinal bath"

In pursuit of our futile anti-war shrieking and babbling, LI is going to translate a famous article of Tucholsky’s entitled the “Der Leerlauf eines Heroismus” – “One Heroism’s hollow trajectory” – but before we do it in the next post, a little background is necessary. Luckily, Time Magazine put up an article, “Handsome Adolf”, all about the treason trial in Leipzig that ‘uncovered the mental situation of the military for those who didn’t know it,” as Tucholsky puts it.

Here’s the salient first grafs, displaying Time’s truly annoying journalistic style – this is the kind of writing that Robert Coover parodied in The Public Burning:

“Not in Berlin, not even in Prussia, but in Saxony, in Leipzig sits the German Supreme Court: das Reichsgericht. Justice is done beneath a mighty dome topped by a big bronze statue of Truth. Through tall casement windows Saxon sunbeams glint upon carved oak. In such a setting presiding Judge Baumgarten (except when fiddling with one of his ears) is a sight awesome as Olympian Jove. Boldly to face the justice down, to use the Supreme Court dome as a demagog's thumping tub, to hurl from dem Reichsgericht a defy which reverberated throughout Europe, such was the feat last week of Adolf Hitler, No. I Brown Shirt Fascist (TIME, Aug. 25).
Ostensibly the proceedings were a trial for High Treason. Three young German army officers (Lieutenants Richard Scheringer, Hans Ludin, Friedrich Wendt) were charged with inciting their men to join a Fascist putsch should it be proclaimed. Without quite admitting their guilt the young officers waxed hotly truculent. "I would obey an order to shoot down Communists," shouted Lieutenant Scheringer, "but I would disobey a command to fire on men of my own persuasion!"
Exactly what was this "persuasion"? Evading damaging admissions, the Lieutenants said in effect that their views are those of Brown Shirt Hitler, leader of the National Socialist [Fascist] party whose sensational gains in the last election make it second strongest in Germany (TIME, Sept. 22). If such views be treason, argued the defense, then make the most of it!
Smart, the defense determined to do exactly this, subpenaed Herr Hitler as a witness, got ready to offer him the opportunity to use the witness stand as a soapbox.
Housewives & Blue Eyes. "Hitler Kommt!" cried 2,000 excited Saxons massed inside and outside the supreme courthouse. Many were women—for thrifty German housewives particularly dislike paying reparations, have swallowed eagerly the brash Fascist promises to repudiate the Young Plan. As Herr Hitler's motorcar swirled up the women pelted him with flowers. As this medium sized man with a small blond mustache but hard, blue, twinkling eyes stepped out, soprano voices cried "Ach, der schöne Adolf!" (Ah, handsome Adolf!). But so vast, dim, labyrinthine is the supreme courthouse that Witness Hitler, studiously quiet at first, stepped into the chamber and was actually on the stand before the courtroom galleries saw him.

"Heads Shall Roll!" Asked if he were planning revolution, Herr Hitler answered composedly:

"Nein, we are merely preparing an intellectual eruption of the German people by peaceful means."

When this drew from the gallery a roar of "Germany Awake!" (Fascist slogan), Judge Baumgarten glared at the assemblage, rumbled, "Silence, this is not a theatre!" but soon Herr Hitler in smashing demagog style was carrying all before him.”

Oh, and always being ready to oblige the pro-war side's masturbatory fantasies, we are putting up a photo from Karl Friederich’s Krieg dem Kriege, which Tucholsky helped to distribute. It is full of fun photographs. War, what is it good for – making prosperous white males hard. This one is accompanied by a saying of Hindenberg's: War suits me like a dip in a medicinal bath.

My kisses to the Dem leadership. XOX, motherfuckers.

captain sword

One of the first explicit antiwar poems – by which I mean it was subtitled an antiwar poem – is Leigh Hunt’s Captain Sword and Captain Pen.

Here’s a bit from the battle:

Down go bodies, snap burst eyes;
Trod on the ground are tender cries:
Brains are dash’d against plashing ears;
Hah! no time has battle for tears;
Cursing helps better – crusing, that goes
Slipping through friends’ blood, athirst for foes’.
What have soldiers with tears to do?
We, who this mad-house must now go through,
This twenty-fold Bedlam, let loose with knives –
To murder, and stab, and grow liquid with lives –
Gasping, staring, treading red mud,
Till the drunkenness’ self makes us stead of blood
[ O! shrink not thou, reader! Thy part’s in it, too;
Has not thye praise made the thing they go through,
Shocking to read of, but noble to do?]”

It is a long poem. In the remarks on war in prose that prefaced it, Hunt puts this sensible judgment, against which there is no appeal, in his first paragraph:

“The object of this poem is to show the horrors of war, the false ideas of power produced in the minds of its leaders, and, by inference, the unfitness of those leaders for the government of the world.”

Hunt's preface goes on to speak of hte "ladies handkerchief' that is put over the horrors of war, decently veiling it from civilian eyes. He is against it. So is LI. This is what the Congress voted to fund.



Take a deep breath, people, and remember though: this is part of the Democratic party's overall strategy. As Michael Tomasky, a hero to so many of us for his insight into framing the issues, put it in his article about seemingly giving President Bush what he wanted in the funding bill: Cave-in, or smart politics?

That's the only question that counts. We won. We secretly kept Bush from calling us weak. And is he ever pissed! We are amazing, really. A big pat on the back. Now, on to electing Hillary in 2008.

Dear Baal: please take this framer back to hell's workshop and bring us a new one. This one is broken.

Because LI has the sickness unto death this morning, we have been looking around the liberal blogs, trying to find some outrage about the Democratic Party’s embrace of the surge. Or trying to find some bland spinning, something tasty - oh, you know the taste - old jism and pesticide - that consultant's breath perfume, that body odor that's built right into the suit, the hardened partisan hireling suit with the matching enviro-boots - good for climbing up to the confabs to really really really think about America's problems with some of Hilary's closest friends! O, you know the type of text I'm talking about, all down from the mountain and shit. Looking for a niche. Looking for a steal. Since, like the Underground Man, we think nothing is more refreshing than a tooth ache, we scoured the net. Really! Because we wanted to quality produce. But we never expected to hit fool’s gold like this piece by a Jeffrey Feldman – a … wait for it… expert on… o wait for it … “framing”. Framin’ dem dere issues, my masters. Too make us feel all rich souled in these here prosperous states. Although sick unto death, the terrorist RAF star seemingly emerging where our own little throbbing LI heart used to be, we are generous enough to link here, for our UFOB squirrel hunting friends – for if this ain’t target practice, I don’t know what concentric rings around a bullseye are for! Bring out the dart gun, boys! and a wooden stake, garlic, and a bible.

Oh please, Baal, take back your prophets and give us less disgusting ones!


PS- being in the gift giving mood - thinking of what to send your favorite Democratic congressman? How about this nice music video? xox, motherfuckers.

No to Funding Bush's war - No in thunder, No in lightning, No in the hurricano

LI has taken a wait and see attitude towards Pelosi and the Dems. The first couple of months looked promising. Pelosi seemed pretty unbothered by the storm about going to Syria, and though she did nothing there but convey the usual pap, symbols are important. We loved the emphasis on decriminalizing union activity. But the last few weeks, and now this – surrendering to a president who has nothing, who is down to his few last pet peeves– makes me wonder if we are in some eternal return of the Pit and the Pendulum. Did they really not know, do they really not know, how to rally this country? Legislators, it is true, are constitutionally more prone to inside deals and endless process than to the kind of ceremonial politik necessary to stand in the face of the Crowned Garbage Fly and his unutterably Lovecraftian sidekick, Dick Cheney, and spit – but the time had come to spit. A big gob, with tobacco juice mixed in with the snot, right between the eyes of that mass murderer. Unfortunately it was not to be – although the misfortune isn’t really mine. I’m merely going to go crazy, I’m going to suffer from the American bulimia, the desire to gorge on this country, its gross stupidities, its failing infrastructure, its insane masses, so I can upchuck on it all the better. All of which is meaningless. No, the sorrow and the pity is for the people over there in Mesopotamia who we are robbing, beating, killing, turning one against the other. What is meaningful is that the Dems have given Bush his mercenary license. They didn’t even challenge him to make this part of the real budget, for Christ sake.

But the habits of D.C. are grooved into the politicos that move and have their being there – and after all, the place is flourishing. The war has been so good, there seems to be endless sweetmeats to pass around, and what will the consultants say? What will the motherfucking consultants say?

This was among the easiest plays in history. Did the Dems really pass the timelimits budget without a sense of what to do next? Has the palsied shadow of Pentagon planning a la Wolfowitz fallen upon their councils? Are they that fucked up? Apparently. Apparently they really thought that a Republican saviour would emerge – in a party that has narrowcast itself into a home place for anti-brown pinheads and peckerhead weekend and weakheaded warriors who consider Iraq an elaborate game of paintball, with good news every day, insofar as the killed on the killing field are mostly of the ever lynchable type they, their lynchhappy, Jimcrowing ancestors and the yahoo murderers of Indian nations before them, have always delighted in making bleed, cry, and die – that from this pustulous mass of zombies there was going to shake lose some bipartisan posse of Good GOP and Moderate Dem (the good housekeeping seal from Fox on his ass) that would rescue American ‘honor’. Sorry fuckers – Jacob Javits is dead, and you can roll over and tell Henry Kissinger the news. You are dealing with the dumbest of the Dixie dumb, the senators from Plains states where the growth industry is all in home produced meth – and even these fearsome freaks, these bible thumpers and child abusers on the far edges of barbarism know deep in their burger filled, gurgling guts that Iraq is lost. The Dems are still suffering the aftereffects of having imbibing stern Washington Post editorials week after week preaching the Truman Democrat, lets cut up and eat girlscouts to show we are tough line. Poor things, scared that they will be ‘soft’ on National security – instead of softheaded. Softheaded, however, is not going to be their option for long.

Well, the tension is exacerbating between the disgust of the majority and the greed and powerlust of the elite. In this contest, all the wise money is on the elite. But I’m betting on some outside rider, some storm within the mass. LI sometimes gets caught up in the politics of party and side, but mostly we do try to avoid that, because it is pointless. These are empty vessels, and if they are driven by demons at the moment, the way to change them is to patiently curse them, every day, curse, malign, laugh at, mock, wave your peepee at, stick your tongue out at, piss on, shit on, elbow, disdain, satirize, analyze, and delight in the utter downfall of when it comes, as it will come. Reality is a hard taskmaster.

PS

Genossen, hört auf, euch hinter den
Massen zu verschanzen! Hört auf, die
Frage des Widerstandes auf die Massen
abzuwälzen! Hört auf, eure Angst vor der
maßlosen Gewalttätigkeit des Systems als
Vermittlungsproblem zu rationalisieren!
Hört auf, eure Ratlosigkeit als Belesenheit
auszugeben, eure Hilflosigkeit als
den großen Durchblick! – RAF Communique, May 31, 1972

Ulrike, je pense a vous

viagra: don't leave home without it

They’ve finally found a purpose for viagra. So far, viagra seems to have been devised solely to coddle the American male watercooler belief that 50 is really just a breath away from 15 – for proof, look at the GOP presidential lineup. Eventually, they will be embalming us with boners intact. This is definitely no country for old men...

But it turns out viagra is really about helping ... jetsetting rodents! I knew it!

“It's a safe bet that most people who take sildenafil — better known under its commercial name, Viagra — aren't looking for a good night's rest. But it turns out that the 'little blue pill' commonly used to treat erectile dysfunction is also good for relieving some forms of jetlag. Well, at least in hamsters.

Diego Golombek and his colleagues at the National University of Quilmes in Buenos Aires, Argentina, injected hamsters with sildenafil and then pushed the animals' light/dark schedule ahead by six hours, roughly the equivalent of putting them on a plane from New York to Paris. Hamsters who'd had a dose of sildenafil adjusted their busy wheel-running schedules to the new light regime 50% faster, the team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.”

The upshot is - does this effect also work with human jetsetters?
The thought of all those trans-Atlantic passengers gulping their viagra before they embark leads to... scary thoughts, to say the least.

Happiness vs. sagacity: 1

In the seventeenth century, the rehabilitation of Epicurus became a kind of code behind which was assembled the program of the enlightenment – which, as I have remarked in a post last week, can be looked at, using Fred Hirsch’s terms, as the accompaniment to the loosening of the positional economy as old feudal ties and customs waned. Interestingly, one of the loosened ties had to do with the role of women. Mostly this loosening was about women in the periphery around either the court or the aristocratic salons.

For LI, Epicurus marks an important moment in that covert struggle, that dialectic, between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of sagacity. Here seemed to be a counter-sage to the ascetic Socrates, just as Socrates seemed to counter Jesus for the humanists. The game is to find an emblem to trump an emblem.

Gassendi was the major sponsor of the new Epicurus in the 17th century. He was also the godfather of the line that challenged the Cartesians from what I suppose you could call the philosophical left. But one shouldn’t be too programmatic about these things – while the neo-Epicurians were devising materialist explanations of the world, they were also in sharp disagreement with, for instance, Descartes notion of the anima-machine. Antoinette Deshoulieres, as John Conley points out in his chapter on her in The Suspicion of Virtue: Women philosophers in Neo-classical France, was celebrated for her affection for animals, derived from Lucretius. Bayle, in his dictionary, ‘lauded her naturalist subordination of the human species to nonrational animals: “One of the most lucid and of the most brilliant minds of the seventeenth century preferred the condition of sheep to that of humans.”

In my next post, I want to say some biographical things about Deshoulieres and maybe translate her imitation of Lucretius (it isn’t long – she called it a galimatias).

and another thing we won't get to...

LI is on a grueling editing schedule this week, so we can’t unroll the usual red carpet of delusional associations and retarded insights we do so like to give our readers. We are going to try to write a couple of posts about the sage and the divide between the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of sagacity, zeroing in on the seventeen century libertines, the rehabilitation of Epicurus, and that woman lost to French poetry and philosophy, Madame Deshoulieres, a seventeenth century French poet who translated Lucretius, ran a salon for neo-Epicurians, and fell back into the arms of the church as she was dying of breast cancer. And have you heard of Deshoulieres, reader of mine? I hadn’t until a couple of days ago, researching these posts. The lady was buried, and I suspect she was buried because she was a lady. She was still known to the 18th century philosophes, however. In her day, she was aggrieved by being ignored, and wrote this poem “To M. Bouhours on his book entitled The art of expert thinking (de bien penser): on works of the mind”:

“Dans une liste triomphante
De célèbres auteurs que votre livre chante
Je ne vois point mon nom placé.
A moi, n’est-il pas vrai? vous n’avez point pensé.
Mais aussi dans le même role
Vous avez oublié Pascal,
Qui pourtant ne pensoit pas mal.
Un tel compagnon me console.”

Such a poem, I hope, is consoling to the Werepoet.
…
In other news, we have received two emails regarding The Savage Detectives. Our friend K. told us that she actually kept people away because she just wanted time to read it. And from our far flung correspondent, Mr. T., who met the enchanting translator herself, Natasha Wimmer at our never to be forgotten LI party, has been reading it with equal delight, and told us this:

“So, last night S. and his lovely girlfriend R. came over for dinner. At a point, I asked S. to join me on a smoking excursion and as we descended the stairs I mentioned over my shoulder that I also wanted to tell him about a book. He asked: "Is this about The Savage Detectives?" Holy shit, said me, yes it is I said.

There is something in the air, in this time, I am there and I glad to be so.”

the sage enters, wearing a scholar's mask...

“I knew in my time one of many arts, a Grecian, a Latinist, a mathematician, a philosopher, a physician, a man master of them all, and sixty years of age, who, laying by all the rest, perplexed and tormented himself for above twenty years in the study of grammar, fully reckoning himself a prince if he might but live so long till he could certainly determine how the eight parts of speech were to be distinguished, which none of the Greeks or Latins had yet fully
cleared: as if it were a matter to be decided by the sword if a man made an adverb of a conjunction.” – Erasmus, In praise of folly.

LI has always wanted to be that man – a man who took the smallest matters of wordplay as a duelist takes a challenge to his honor. Literature at swordpoint. Not that LI can really manipulate a sword, but we do have a ready steady tongue.

At the same time, we realize that the grammarian who throws himself into the vast matter of the eight parts of speech, the man who searches for the key to the mythologies, the woman who uncovers the false analogies strewn among the no longer read economists of the 19th century, the whole bag and baggage of the scholarly mindset seems pretty absurd. Folly speaks in Erasmus from a point of view that is very close to common sense. The commonest sense, in fact.

David Nuttall, the literary scholar who died this January, wrote a book, Dead from the Waist Down, about the emblematic transformation of the scholar, from the humanistic heretic of the seventeenth century to the dry as dust pedant of the nineteenth century. He uses Isaac Casaubon as a touchstone – first, the real Casaubon from the seventeenth century, then the fictional Casaubon, the scholar as a Fisher King who lacks even a knack for minnow catching in Middlemarch, then Casaubon’s biographer, a nineteenth century scholar named Pattison who George Eliot might have known, whose wife (o those suffering wives of the Victorian sages! married in perpetuity to a toothache!) certainly saw herself reflected in Dorothea.

All of which is of interest to me in my multiply interrupted, omni-directional quest to understand the gradual fading of the sage as a possible mask, to use Yeats’ term. More later.

The exacta - For North

Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go!

The exacta: 1. Street Sense 2. Curlin 3. King of the Roxy

The last named didn’t race at the Derby, and I know, I know that Hard Spun will be out there, biting Street Sense’s flank. Deep in my gut, I have deep doubts about my horsey’s chance of winning this time. On the other hand, he’s a balanced horse. I like his views about getting out of Iraq now, nationalizing health care, and the hydrogen fuel cell. Street Sense is also all about Jackson Pollack, his favorite painter, and mine.

Curlin is a strong horse. Everybody knows he’s a strong horse. He does one hundred push ups every night before he goes to bed. If somebody is going to beat my horsey, it will be Curlin. It might be a KO. Curlin not so secretly wants to be a boxer, having once said, "fuck racin'! I can float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." He has also stolen milk money from other horseys in the stables. Bad pony!

Finally, King of the Roxy. Since all eyes are gonna be on the Derby horseys, King of the Roxy is getting’ no kind of look in. Unfair! He’s fast, and he’s got nothing to lose.

Finally: song for this race is Patti Smith’s Horses, of course:

Do you know how to pony?

abusing president backbone

An old friend and foil of LI wrote us an email the other day, asking how we were doing and whether we were still lobbing insults at the president.

The question made us hang our head in shame. In fact, a quick survey of LI backpages lately will show an astonishing paucity of commentary about that human equivalent of the green garbage fly, the POTUS. President Backbone. Or, as he was known to the prophet Isaiah, a drunken man who staggereth in his own vomit.

We might as well confess: we’ve reached the limit with the old pissingpost.

The burden of the torchsinger’s song needn’t be some magnificent object, nor does it need to arouse the deepest sentiments. A song I learned as a lad and could still sing for you on a long car trip, as my friend D. can testify, commemorates a bad day at the races for some slack rounder who didn’t bet on Old Stewball, but took the odds on favorites, the gray mare and the bay. Now, this isn’t the kind of news that should lend its impress to the collective memory of all mankind, but – conveyed by Peter Paul and Mary and then distributed a thousandfold by humdrum strummers in every weekend pizza joint in suburban Atlanta, when they weren’t building a staircase to heaven, Old Stewball has refused to be dislodged from my braincells, and will probably still be ghosting me when, in some public charity ward, I’m trying to figure out where my penis is so I can piss out of it or at least know my I still have my valuables about me.

Yet here I am with one of the great subjects. A rich and semi-educated Republic. A population reveling equally in short term memory loss and its dream of f/x military action, with Doby surroundsound. A man whose sum total of talents would gain him only sporadic employment as a second rate golf pro at country clubs in midsized Southern cities, who descends, fortunately enough for him, from one of those families wealthy in exact proportion to their worthlessness. A suspect, not to say sinister elevation; a lack of interest by our crowned golf pro in leadership so incredible that he simply waves away warnings of an attack that does come because they interrupt his cypress trimming and sleep – besides which, they challenge him to do something, and he has never and will never know fuckall about doing anything; a senseless, vain, cruel war, in which gradually every member of the said yo yo Republic becomes complicit – all of these are surely themes for a satiric epic, an unending Dunciad. Yet LI has eaten the ashy fruit of this for six years, and we have finally had enough. What new insults, shocks, jeremiads can one haul out of the cellar? Isaiah only had to do with uncircumsized armies worshipping Baal in the place of the Lord. He never had to confront the deadly horror of modern mediocrity riding in its nasty little triumph (o, the moralizing of the well fed!) over the necks of taste, sense, sensibility, reason, truth, and the hardwon virtues of the little humanity we might have gained to get us through various bilious nights of the soul – if that is we can’t find sleeping tablets.

So LI has broken the covenant of perpetual abuse which we once pledged to our readers. Cursing and shrieking bores the fuck out of us.

The witch of Endor is dead.

The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and
fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish.

The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof;
because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance,
broken the everlasting covenant.

Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that
dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the
earth are burned, and few men left.

Wolfie goes down

Headline in the NYT: Wolfowitz to Leave the World Bank

Come out/Come out
Whereever you are!

holy and unholy fools in the streets

- Sophie Calle, Les dormeurs

Okay. To summarize our last post, Fred Hirsch proposed that, enfolded within the material economy, there is a positional economy, one derived from and dependent on social hierarchy. This is a broader notion than Ann Krueger’s rent-seeking, which was also being floated by the neo-classicals in the 70s, but you can see how they dovetail with one another. While Krueger thinks the extraction of rents is ‘non-productive’, Hirsch is saying, in effect, that Krueger is using the criteria of the material economy to analyze the positional economy, and that won’t do. In fact, there are positional goods and services, and one of the key drivers of the material economy since the dawn of capitalism has been positional competition.

Well, LI could spell out the current political implications of Hirsch’s notion – but we’d prefer to apply Hirsch’s notion to the little thread of history that LI has made its little theme over the past six months. If you take the positional economy as the lens through which you view the history of the early modern era, Foucault’s L’age classique, one possible interpretation leaps to mind – or to a mind ready to catch the larger leapers. In the early modern era, the great bourgeois project was to liberate the positional market, as it were. Much of the work of the enlightened philosophers was to that end. At the same time, by one of those fateful pieces of dialectical luck, their identity as philosophers was undermined by their success at this task. In other words, the philosopher as a type was tied to a certain kind of positional market – a highly rigid one. Far into the 18th century, the philosopher as a type really had a strong influence on the real philosopher, be he Locke or Condorcet. This figure was a sage. As a sage, he was bound to the ascetic ethos that developed a sort of hole in the rigid positional economy – proposed a way out of it. Renounced it. And here’s where the dialectical luck comes in – the culminating point for the liberation of the positional market was encoded in Jefferson’s phrase, the pursuit of happiness. Now, as it happens, the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of wisdom had been rivals – well, since Socrates was a pup. As the pursuit of happiness came to dominate the tenor of the positional market, the space in which the sage could exist was squeezed shut. The sage, in that space, took up a relation to the buffoon – his figural other, partner, foe – as well as to a way of thinking of the spacing of human life (how one should age) and practices consonant thereto.

So yeah, ha ha – we’ve come back to sages and buffoons. You didn’t think I was letting them go, did you?
More on this in a later post.

a gloss on the political hocus pocus of our time

Back in the 70s – the era that suckled LI, and that provides the whole framework for Bolano’s great novel, which all should read, The Savage Detectives, and all should talk about, bringing an end of all talking about 300 and Spiderman, enough enough enough! – an economist named Fred Hirsch wrote a tract reflecting the time and the mores entitled The Social Limits of Growth. And then, of course, they came from nowhere – or from Pentagonia – the Reaganauts, and for the past thirty years the only discourse about Growth is how we are blessed its many wonders to behold. Meanwhile, we laid claim to another piece of the atmosphere to store our car exhaust and coal exhaust shit, destroyed the Aral Sea, depleted the Ogallala Acquifer, and etc., etc.

This week, LI is going to say some things about Hirsch’s idea of positional goods. It is an idea that has its ancestry in institutional economics and Veblen, but Hirsch was a post-World War II economist, a quantifier, and he wanted a more specific way to talk about a certain kind of social good and service.

Hirsch distinguishes between between the Material Economy and the Positional economy in order to describe the post WWII economic order in the developed world. The material economy is that one familiar to neo-classicals and Marxists. it is deined “as output amenable to continued increase in productivity per unit of labor input: it is Harrod’s democratic wealth. The material economy embraces production of physical goods as well as such services as are receptive to mechanization or technological innovation without deterioration in quality as it appears to the consumer.” On the other hand, you have Harrod’s “oligarchic wealth”: it “relates to all aspects of goods, services, work positions and other social relationships that are either (1) scarce in some absolute or sically imposed sense or (2) subject to congestion or crowding through extensive use.” The question posed by Hirsch is: “What happens when the material pie grows while the positional economy remains confined to a fixed state?”

In a sense, this problem is all around us now, the effect of the growth plus increase in inequality that describes the Reaganomic era. Hirsch had the foresight to see that the economy in the developed world was tending towards positional competition. On the one hand, unless there was robust economic growth, there would be increasing privation. On the other hand, the concomitant to growth would be increasing inequality, which would re-define the terms of affluence. To give one of a number of examples: take a social good such as education. On the one hand, for a democratic, capitalist society to continue, it must invest in human capital – it must educate. On the other hand, positional competition imposes on that education its logic – in order to be rewarded within the educational system, it isn’t enough that a person actually be educated, but it is also important that others be less certified – that others be excluded from certain institutions of education and the like, what Hirsch calls a “competition by people for place, rather than competition for performance.” Hirsch discusses a number of sectors – real estate, education, jobs – and then makes a fine, although dense, summary:

‘… material growth intensifies what may be termed positional competition. By positional competition is meant competition that is fundamentally for a higher place within some explicit or implicit hierarchy and that thereby yields gains for some only by dint of losses for others. Positional competiton, in the language of game theory, is a zero-sum game: what winners win, losers lose. The contrast is with competition that improves performance or enjoyment all round, so that winners gain more than losers lose, and all may come out winners – the positive sum game.”

And – an important point – positional competition is about scarcity: "… competition in the positional sector serves as a general filtering device through which excessive demand has to be matched to available supply. This aspect – which I seek to isolate by the term positional competition – at best yields no net benefit and usually involves additional resource costs, so that positional competiton itself is liable to be a negative sum game. Competition in the positional sector, however, may still yield net benefits if its contributions to individual efficiency and allocation of resources outweigh additions to resource costs and misallocation. But this cannot be judged from the conventional measures of economic output, since these measures gloss over the negative or deadweight elements of positional competition.”

Well… yeah. That last sentence is a gloss on the political hocus pocus of our time, friends and fiends. About which we will have more to say in another post.

Jerry Fallwell goes to heaven

In other news - Jerry Fallwell did make it to heaven. He was admitted as part of an affirmative action program for the delusional. "We try to encourage diversity among our heavenly hosts," according to Peter, a spokesman for Heaven. "Oftentimes people have the most astonishing preconceptions about our admission system. Jehovah is going to be unveiling an advertising campaign this fall to reinvigorate interest in the Heaven brand. Heaven: it's not just for losers! There's a whole generation out there who think, well, I'm scorin' dope, I'm fucking anything that moves, and I voted for gay marriage. I'm bound to go to hell. Au contraire! If people only knew: our older alum were whacked out on anything from morning glory seeds to starvation in the desert - that's a real high! - and as for sex, well, we've assimilated cultic prostitutes, self castrators and everybody in between! In fact, we are trying to combat the idea that Jehovah is particularly interested in human genitals. As he said only the other day at dinner: "when I designed those things, tell you Jehovah's honest truth, I was not thinking about where they went or what you could do with them. This is a little bogus, but I've had some wine, I'll confess: I was thinking of something else entirely. I was thinking, damn, I should not have signed off on the wisdom tooth design."

According to the Pearly Gates Express, Fallwell was mostly pleased with everything. To get around with the wings, of course, he is going to have lose a few of those earthly pounds. "The diet of rice and seaweed will tone him up nicely," according to Gautama, one of Heaven's premier dieticians. However, Fallwell was reported to have been "astonished" to meet the son of God and discover that the son of God is...



Tinky Winky!