Wednesday, January 09, 2002

Remora

Readers should note Le Monde's beautiful, and somewhat fallacious, essay by Albert Manguel about the end of Argentina. All countries, he claim, rest on the shared fiction that they exist. A philosopher might call them intensional objects, meaning those entities which presuppose the agreement of subjects that they are as long as the subjects agree they are. This is a little different than what we mean by saying that mountains, or rivers, or trees are. Intensional things are as long as there are subjects for whom they are. These things are like dreams are. So nations, as fictions, extrude themselves crudely in anthems and slogans, in ads and editorials, in law courts and prisons. The nation is the Song of itself, the supreme act of subjectivity; it negotiates the distance between Descartes cogito ergo sum and Louis XIV's l'etat, c'est moi -- the state thinks itself into being in the heads of its citizens.

The question is, can this daydream of reason exist after the daydreamers have committed every vicious act in its name? We know that in one sense it can, and in one sense it can't. Germany survived Hitler -- but only because the Germans convinced themselves, at first, that Hitler never existed. That is, he existed in spite of the Germans. Generations have passed, and this fiction has been discarded, but only because it can be, in the same way that Hollywood can now show Indians as the noble warriors from whom a continent was wrested. Hollywood isn't crazy -- nobody is planning on giving the continent back. That nation, in those heads, ceased. From this point of view, history is a game of deniability. Those who are ostensibly proudest of the actions of our forefathers have no intention of indemnifying the sons and daughters of the slaves of our forefathers -- this is to take the daydream a little too far.

Here's what Manguel says about Argentina:

Il existe une tournure d'esprit que nous avons (� tort) qualifi�e de machiav�lique, celle qui porte � croire que l'on peut tout se permettre dans le but de s'agrandir, y compris d'enfreindre la loi. Les tyrans grecs, les c�sars romains, les papes et empereurs la poss�daient ; elle a d�clench� des guerres, justifi� des atrocit�s, caus� des souffrances indicibles ; en fin de compte, elle a toujours provoqu� l'effondrement des soci�t�s dans lesquelles elle s'�tait enracin�e. En Argentine, elle s'est manifest�e d�s l'aube de la R�publique, avec le meurtre du jeune r�volutionnaire Mariano Moreno. Elle est devenue officielle au XIXe si�cle sous la tyrannie de Juan Manuel de Rosas, acceptable au temps des oligarques et des propri�taires terriens au d�but du XXe, populaire sous Per�n. Enfin, sous la dictature militaire, elle a min� la soci�t� sous tous ses angles, ignor� toute l�galit�, fait de la torture et du meurtre les instruments quotidiens du gouvernement, infect� le langage et la pens�e.

Limited Inc.'s translation: "There exists a humor that we have (falsely) qualified as machievellian, which tends to assure us that we can permit ourselves anything in the process of growing great, including violating the law. The greek tyrants, the roman cesaers, the popes and emperors possessed this turn of mind; it started wars, justified atrocities, caused unspeakable suffering; and in the end, it has always provoked the collapse of those societies in which it has rooted. In Argentina, at the very dawn of the Republic it manifested itself in the murder of the young revolutionary, Mariano Moreno. It became official in the 19th century, under the tyranny of Juan Manuel de Rosas, acceptable in the time of the oligarchs and the landholders of the beginning of the 20th centruy, popular under Peron. In the end, under the military dictatorship, it totally undermined society, ignoring all equality, making of torutre and murder the quotidien instruments of government, infecting the language and the thought."

Well, Limited Inc is inevitably reminded of our own condemn�s. We received a letter from one of our far flung correspondants today. She enclosed a Salon article about a scholar at a Florida University in Tampa who has been fired for having spoken out against Israel on the Bill O'Reilly show. Fla.'s guv, the ludicrous Bush brother, Jeb, applauded. The man in question, Sami Al-Arian, turns out to hav had the rich, rancid experience of Uncle Sam's hot breath on his neck before: the FBI arrested his brother-in-law,
"a soft-spoken scholar named Mazen Al-Najjar, for unspecified terrorist associations. Al-Najjar -- the brother of Al-Arian's wife, Nahla -- had arrived at Tampa in 1981 and earned a doctorate at USF. Al-Najjar was arrested under then new antiterrorism laws allowing suspects to be held on the basis of secret evidence, without the precise charge being revealed in court. For the next three and a half years, Al-Najjar would remain in Bradenton prison without anyone -- not his lawyers, not even the judge --
ever seeing the purported evidence against him."

Can such things be? Limited Inc understands that mix of fear and smugness that reduces the canned suburban masses to silence, or to short term self-interest, or to right-wing myth. Still, Limited Inc would urge some effort, some strength of will here. The military in Argentina took hold in conditions of similar black magic. You think it can't happen here? Wake up, honey. It's all happening..

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