Remora

Wo Es war, soll Ich werden -- Freud,


Charles Krauthammer attends, so we are told, at all the high tables in D.C., and is one of the muskateers of The Project for the New American Century, which plays a role in today's politics similar to the role played by Committee on the Present Danger http://www.publiceye.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-42.htm played in the good old days of Ronald Reagan.

Krauthammer presently plays the Id to the Bush court. While Paul Wolfowitz has been forced to straight-jacket his thoughts into the super-ego of officialdom, Krauthammer is free to express the desires that really roil the inner circle. This is important. Where the Id is, with the Bushes, the super-ego will surely follow, and trail in its wake the whole set of opinion makers, rationalizing madly. It's Freudian law applied to the Hof. Just look at tax policy. In 2000, only the wildest ideologues of plutocracy would have come out solidly against the Income Tax and in favor of sales taxes to finance the state. Slowly, though, it has dawned on even the NY Times business page that this is precisely Bush's strategy, as was remarked in this article on Bush's bizarre pension tax plan:


"Many analysts say the retirement proposals mesh with what appears to be Mr. Bush's long-term goal of removing most taxes on investment income and toward a system that essentially taxes only consumption."

So -- the rule should be, pay attention when the Id speaks. And thus spake Krauthammer in his latest. First, in typical Id style, he cannot believe -- he cannot believe at length, he cannot believe from his head to his boots -- that all of these, these obstacles have been thrown in the way of our desire. The pack desire. The desire that has sharpened his teeth. Well, it all has to come out somehow. And -- by the merest coincidence -- it comes out first in the form of rather mocking the fact that the U.S., at this crucial juncture, is being asked to take black nations seriously. The incredulity infects his writing. He trembles. Angola, Guinea, the Congo -- places that, eventually, we will have to recivilize with might and main, and here we are, bending over for them.

"The entire exercise is ridiculous, but for unfathomable reasons it matters to many, both at home and around the world, that the United States should have the permission of Guinea to risk the lives of American soldiers to rid the world -- and the long-suffering Iraqi people -- of a particularly vicious and dangerous tyrant."

To get permission of a black nation like Guinea -- does this upset the master-slave order of the world (the imperialist epoch now looked back upon so nostalgically) or what? And it can even become habit forming. We know how quickly the bully can deliquesce into the masochist. We know where that leads. It leads to perversity, and perversity leads to France. For who, really, is the problem here? Who stands between our virility and its consummation? A dozen times France. France, as Krauthammer says, which "pretends to great power status." A fake, then -- and, as all fakes to desire, a fetish, a deviation into sexual energies that we really don't want to go into in this post. Family reading, you know.

So, the Id, the loud mouth at the end of every canal and the beginning of every orifice, it wants to know -- how will we hurt this deviant? Krauthammer comes up with the appropriate answer:

"First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council -- with India and Japan as new permanent members -- to dilute France's disproportionate and anachronistic influence.

Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us."

To exterminate them -- it is an old wet dream of the Ids. Bullied, he lies in bed, and dreams of torturing his enemies. Older, his aggressions somewhat under control, he merely verbalizes. Althought the thought of France "in line" -- LI believes that this is an image out of the Id's subconscious repertoire. You line up the prisoners to be executed. You line up the soldiers that you will order into battle. Lines are at once the preferred sexual position of power and the geometry of death in which power annihilates itself, and all within its graps. Scorched earth, death marches. That line, France at the end of it, humiliated as we were humiliated, bowing to Guinea.

Alas, meanwhile the super-ego is trying to tiptoe around those oil contracts. After all, the superego keeps telling everyone, this isn't a blood for oil transaction -- this is about democracy! Yet the question of the spoils rather begs the question of democracy. As in, isn't a force that dictates who the spoils belong to exercizing -- to put it at its most delicate, to put a Blair-ite fuzz on it -- a rather non-representative force? Because, of course, the great crusade for democracy -- a crusade in so many ways -- is confronted, at the outset, with the paradox that the people it democratizes might just operate in radically un-American ways. The people might not be sufficiently appreciative of the American libido, and we just don't like that. We cherish our Id.

Regrettably, this will require postponing democracy until political maturity can be expected among the Iraqi peoples such that they, too, can cherish the American Id. It sits on top of us all.