Limited, Inc.

LI arrived in Mexico City yesterday, after the horror of waking up at five - an hour when I am particularly averse to surrendering to the alarm clock´s diktat, as my erotic dream managers are just putting up the outerworks - the sauna, the classroom, the office, or perhaps my Grandparent´s dinnertable - for the exciting main attraction. Which I hope involves me - I do so hate dreaming about other people having sex. Anyway, at a certain point between 5 and 6, when the cab picked me up, I did or did not turn on the stove, to warm my apartment. I´ve had alarmed flashes of the stove being on, and even got a friend to go by the place so I can get the number of the management company and call them to check. This might simply be myself wallowing in my fundamental funk. But burning out the stove´s heater would be no joke. Anyway, I get a taxi, after going through the usual languages - English, my version of spanish, and gibberish - to explain the layout of Polanco, which you would think would

- The anonymous genius of the fairy tale is the genius of history as well, with that same penchant for the fatally ambiguous symbol, where, as though in a besieged city in an endless backlands war, love and death exchange sniper fire with each other among bombed out buildings and constantly shifting zones of engagement. This city could be the New Jerusalem. It could be Stalingrad. It could be the Republic of Mainz, where Georg Forster assumed a revolutionary role in 1792, as his household expanded to include his wife Therese's lover, Huber, and the ever present Caroline Boehmer. It was in December of 1792 that Therese took the kids and her lover and left. Forster went to Paris, as a delegate. - One has to be sensitive enough, then, to the way the fairy tale sticks in the historic fact to understand the depth of certain symbols. -For instance: on November 19, 1831, Prosper Enfantin, responding to the uproar in Saint Simonian circle that had greeted his proposals for free love, res

We are, of course, watching the action being taken on the Blackwater massacre . We expect the trial to end with a non-guilty verdict. The Justice Department wants to lose this one. Now the question is: why is Andrew Moonen, the Blackwater guard who shot and killed a bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president “while drunk last Christmas Eve”, to quote the Washington Post article of Oct. 7, 2007, is still at large. And why Margaret Scoby, who was acting ambassador to Iraq in December, 2006, and facilitated Moonen’s return to the States within 35 hours with no charges against him, is not being investigated, at least, as accessory to murder. I believe the answer to that is: it would be hard to find a jury anywhere who wouldn’t convinct Moonen. As the point of these prosecutions is to appear to do something while continuing the whitewash of Blackwater and, more significantly, the utterly corrupt relationship between Blackwater and the State department, the latter of which has been on record,

LI has so far concentrated on Therese Heyne’s side of the Heyne-Forster-Meyer triangle. However, I've wanted to harken to Swedenborg's entrance, so embarrassing to those who like their intellectual history straight. Although not a perfect parallel, you could make a case that, just as Spinoza is the hidden enlightenment eminence, so,too, Swedenborg and Mesmer are hidden eminences in that covert history of the passions in the nineteenth century, an underground rumble among the network of enlightenment philosophes, and the prophet of free love afterwards, with with Henry James, Sr., becoming his chief expositor in the U.S. And if that certain mixture of the spiritual and the sex drive embarrasses your true enlightened public much more than open mechanistic libertinism ever did – there is another track leading into free love, a rational track. It is at this point that the wide world enters Gottingen with tortured look of Georg Foster's face, that survivor of scurvy. Georg

We have had decades in which to learn of the perils of planning. Everyone, from the radical Weberian to the repentant Marxist to the gleeful Milton Friedman-ite agrees that you can’t have central planning. And so we haven’t. And now we need some. Badly. The car company bailout is an excellent example of where we need, and are not going to get, central planning. Instead of seeing this in the real context of our transportation system – the massive government investment in roads, the petro-chemical system, and the manufacture of automobiles being all aspects of one system – we are discussing a massive bailout on the smallest scale. In essence, what is needed is to think in terms of steps towards a much better future with the automobile. LI is no fan of car culture – we’ve owned three cars in our entire life, and we don’t own one now. We bike or walk or bus. And nobody who bikes every day has any respect for cars – they are a constant danger. Ask the dik-dik about the lion. But there is no

Wahl ist Qual – Choice is pain. Before I go on tracing the intricate maze danced (to the lascivious promptings of a lute) by Georg Forster and Sophie Huber, born Heyne, as they went through the attempt, in the Revolutionary epoch of the eighties, to find liberty in marriage and love in liberty, I want to take the long view. Free love is a phrase that is well and truly dead – dead of mockery, dead of the emotional exploitation of which it became the instrument, deniability raising the old ghost of guilt in the service of nubile bodies forever lined up at the porn shoot. Yet it had a long, long career, and it is still not so dead that the phoenix of some kind of program joining sex, liberty and utopia cannot leap from the ashes of lovers, factual and fictional, who took the principle of free love with deadly earnestness. As I’ve noted, my three ideal types of alienation – the reactionary, the liberal and the radical – all in one way or another turned from happiness to love as the foundat