Limited, Inc.

Angola (part 2) I know the names of those responsible for the slaughter� I know the names of those responsible for the slaughters� I know the names of the summit that manipulated� I know the names of those who ran� I know the names of the powerful group who� I know the names of those who, between on mass and the next, made provision and guaranteed political protection� I know the names of the important and serious figures behind who are behind the ridiculous figures who� I know the names of the important and serious figures behind the tragic kids who� I know all these names and all the acts (the slaughters, the attacks on institutions) they have been guilty of� - Pier Paolo Pasolini This passage, from one of Pasolini's hallucinatory articles in the early seventies � the articles that possibly led to him being lured to a beach and murdered � is quoted in Peter Robb's excellent Midnight in Sicily, to which we have previously referred in our post on Sciascia. Pasol

Remora Kenneth Minogue is a conservative economist of some sort at the London School of Economics. Limited Inc knows him solely as the author of a screamingly funny article in the New Criterion about the fall of Western Civilization. The jew, this time, isn't at the root of it all -- yes, times have changed, and now right wingers are proclaiming themselves the most philo of philosemites. No, at the root it turns out is the radical feminist. Taking leaps and making rhetorical pirouttes rather in the style of one of the Chansons de Maldoror (which so enthralled the surrealists), Minogue concocted, in this essay , one of those fanciful dreamscapes that makes the Scaife foundation crowd cream in their Bill Blass slacks. He overviews the enemies of the west from Islam to Stalin, and then -- drumroll please -- he finds the nasty fifth column in the kitchen: "In the course of the 1960s, a new tribe was established that also sought to overthrow the Western citadel from within

Remora A scandal identi-kit. It works like this. The detective parks his car across the street from the warehouse, he gets out his camera, he takes pictures of men carrying briefcases meeting and exchanging them. The detective follows cars, he takes pictures of meetings in parks and under bridges. We've seen this, right? The pictures, the movie, the implied plot. So here are a few pictures. One would show Jacques Chirac meeting with George Bush on December 18, 2000 in Washington, DC at the French Embassy. One would show a former US supported "Freedom fighter," Jonas Savimbo, with seven bullets in him, holding onto a gun. One would show Eduardo Dos Santos, the president of Angola and former hardline Marxist foe of Savimbo, being feted at a White House dinner shortly after Savimbo's assassination. And one would show an arms dealer named Pierre Falcone (whose wife Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia, is Laura Bush's friend) getting together $20,.000 to contri

Remora Depth charges We received, over the weekend, a heartening email from M. She responded to the criticism that LI is shallow and vapid -- the criticism we'd conveyed in a previous post, transmitted to us by the friend of a friend -- with the beautiful phrase, "you exceed the average depth by a very large measure." That's a difficult compliment to live up to. Limited Inc has the distinct feeling, lately, that we are crawling on our belly. That we are approaching some terrible financial and social abyss in this prone and stupid position. That verbal facility is a death curse. That our desperation, stupidity, and a forked tongue are doing us in. That it is no accident that, reading Baudelaire's Journals, we keep getting that Ecce Homo feeling -- except that the man who is ecce is the man writing this sentence, a man who's shot his wad, the spent cracker, the layed off fool. But trying to keep up our end, trying frankly to feel deep again, we se