Dope

LI has been crawling out from under our rock and re-connecting with the ten chapters of a crime novel we wrote a couple of years ago. Our inspiration, at the time, was Leonardo Sciascia, the great Italian writer. If you haven't read any of Sciascia's toothpick slim, extremely disorienting novels, let's just say they are not by any means your usual entertainment.

Crime, for Sciascia, is the surface unfolding of an event that, correctly interpreted, can represent the matrix of hidden power relationships. Sciascia's investigators require a hermeneutics of governance as the necessary supplement to the labor of deduction. Now, since the former is a rare thing, his investigators have a tendency to fail. In Sciascia's world, the criminal doesn't explain the crime, even if you catch him: the criminal is a merely the last instance of a chain that extends down, down in the dark. Sciascia's detectives are undone through their naive trust in the detective's unalterable standard, the correspondance theory of truth. That trust makes them vulnerable to the powers that might or might not have condoned the crime, and that might or might not see the advantage in the catching of its perpetrators. The detective, in other words, sees the crime as a problem to be solved, while the powers that be (legitimate and illegitimate) see it as a solution to be manipulated -- a warning, a riddence of an obstacle, a reward, and always, no matter on what side, as a small way of spreading the nihilistic rumor that the dominant power -- the bureaucracy, the Mafia, the party, the church, the cliches of the media - is, eventually, irresistible.

Sciascia, I suppose it goes without saying, was Sicilian. If you come across his small, excoriating book on the Moro affair -- an excellent example of a Sciascian crime that actually happened -- grab it and read it. Aldo Moro was kidnapped and executed by the Red Brigades, but according to Sciascia, that is only one face of the crime. The other face of this crime was the opportunity, given to Moro's many enemies, to dispose of the man. So both in the suddenly relentless attitude of the state (which, in the Moro case, presented itself as incapable of dealing with criminals -- a noticeable change from the posture of the Christian Democrats when it came to dealing with, say, the Mafia, and a change even from previous dealings with the Red Brigades) and the disjunction of that attitude from the actual police work (which was comically inept even by Italian standards), we have a social phenomenon in which the approach to it that is framed by the idea of finding who did it obscures the more socially charged question of who benefited from it.

For a completely clueless account of the Moro case, by the way, there's an essay by Richard Drake in the New Criterion that is a classic expression of what you might call the logical positivism of the detective. The notion is, briefly, that all crimes are atomic instances that do not add up to a higher level of crime. The conventional conspiracy theorist believes that it is from the higher level of crime that the atomic instances derive. And the Sciascian theory is that atomic instances of crime create a higher level of criminal opportunity from which to retrospectively make use of crime. Uses are many, but from the Sciascian p.o.v., the interesting thing is how the investigation of crime, which is after all monopolized by the state, is pulled into the system of crime. This is the truth encoded in the detective genre, with its free agents -- its detectives -- operating outside the police monopoly; although only Sciascia, as far as I know, takes the Sherlock Holmes genre a step further by turning the detective's mistrust onto the very act of detecting.

Which gets us -- by a leap -- to Marxypoo, as he was known to his friends.

Now that Marx has been freed from his ism, we are able to understand his virtues without falling under the spell of his vices. Well, okay, maybe we aren't - the troubling ism is still out there, even with the economic theory shot full of holes and debunked from Vladivostock to Budapest -- but we should be. In any case, one of his virtues, which prefigured a whole style of journalism we are now familiar with from such writers as Joan Didion, or Norman Mailer, was the inquisitor's gaze he cast upon the common document, the everyday news story, the faits divers. He had what you might call the longitudinal vision -- the ability to collate distant facts, or forgotten incidences, and apply them with devastating effect to the story at hand. His third chapter on the Civil War in France is an excellent example of what I mean. Here he is, uncovering, beneath the most resplendent virtues, the most egregious deviants.:


"Shortly after the conclusion of the armistice, M. Milliere, one of the representatives of Paris to the National Assembly, now shot by express orders of Jules Favre, published a series of authentic legal documents in proof that Jules Favre, living in concubinage with the wife of a drunken resident at Algiers, had, by a most daring concoction of forgeries, spread over many years, contrived to grasp, in the name of the children of his adultery, a large succession, which made him a rich man, and that, in a lawsuit undertaken by the legitimate heirs, he only escaped exposure by the connivance of the Bonapartist tribunals. As these dry legal documents were not to be got rid of by any amount of rhetorical horse-power, Jules Favre, for the first time in his life, held his tongue, quietly awaiting the outbreak of the civil war, in order, then, frantically to denounce the people of Paris as a band of escaped convicts in utter revolt against family, religion, order, and property. This same forger had hardly got into power, after September 4, when he sympathetically let loose upon society Pic and Taillefer, convicted, even under the empire, of forgery in the scandalous affair of "Etendard". One of these men, taillefer, having dared to return to Paris under the Commune, was at once reinstated in prison; and then Jules Favre exclaimed, from the tribune of the National Assembly, that Paris was setting free all her jailbirds!"

Mr. K.M. then goes on to probe the less reputable side of other ticket-of-leave men, as he describes them, as they saved France from the dangers of the Paris Commune. Marx, as we know, was absolutely wrong about the proletariat -- it turned out they were not history's favorite class, especially when they were represented by the class that claimed they were history's favored class. But Marx might have been right about the Lumpenproletariat. Their upward social mobility, tracked ironically in the 10th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and probed more gravely in the above mentioned piece, showed more than Marx knew. The ticket of leave man's century was about to dawn. The amazing thing about Stalin and Hitler is that these men, and the men around them, were all, recognizably, petty criminals: blackmailers, rapists, thieves. I mean literally: Stalin was an armed robber, Hitler was a petty blackmailer, and such as Beria were, without exageration, rapists. We were reminded of Marx's words by an article in the NYT today concerning one of Limited Inc's favorite topics, CEO compensation packages. With the foresight that characterizes today's ticket-of-leave man, many CEO's negotiate a package in which dismissal or (heavens!) the withdrawl of remuneration is not to be effected by such petty events as, say, conviction for felony:


"There may be only one type of job in which somebody can commit a felony and, after being fired as a result, still receive a severance package worth many years of salary. The job is chief executive of a large corporation."

Journalist David Leonhardt does not, of course, infuse his story with the vinegar that was Marx's stock in trade, but he does have some interesting antecdotes:

"Some contracts have gone so far as to restrict the kind of felony convictions that permit companies to deny executives a severance payment. At Fortune Brands, the maker of Jim Beam bourbon, Master Lock and other consumer products, for example, a felony must result in personal enrichment for Norman H. Wesley, the chief executive, at the expense of the company.At J. C. Penney, a felony conviction would cost Allen I. Questrom his severance only if it involved "theft or moral turpitude." And before LG&E Energy, based in Louisville, Ky., was acquired by a British power company in 2000, it exempted its chief from good-cause dismissal for any felonies "arising from an environmental violation."

"More broadly, executives have asked companies to remove contract clauses that could deny them severance payments, also known as golden parachutes, if they fail to perform their duties. In a sign of how much influence executives have gained over their own compensation, many companies have complied, inserting clauses that restrict dismissible offenses to deliberate misbehavior. "The scope of what constitutes cause has gotten narrower over the last 10 years," said Robert J. Stucker, a lawyer in Chicago who has represented Leo F. Mullin of Delta Air Lines, Robert L. Nardelli of Home Depot and other chief executives during contract negotiations."

Ah -- doesn't it make you want to celebrate the foresight of the Captain of Industry? In the old days, they hightailed it out of town after looting the till -- now they put the right to loot the till in the contract.
And they say there is no progress....